“Women were different, no doubt about it. Men broke so much more quickly. Grief didn't break women. Instead it wore them down, it hollowed them out very slowly.”

“Men feel that women somehow drag them down, and women feel that way about men. It's possible they are right.”

“Black women write differently from white women. This is the most marked difference of all those combinations of black and white, male and female. It's not so much that women write differently from men, but that black women write differently from white women. Black men don't write very differently from white men.”

“Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.”

“In the old times, women did not get their lives written, though I don't doubt many of them were much better worth writing than the men's.”

“Why are women… so much more interesting to men than men are to women?”

“Women will work out their destinies — much better, too, than men can ever do for them. All the mischief to women has come because men undertook to shape the destiny of women.”

“Women have a much better time than men in this world; there are far more things forbidden to them.”

“Women are so much in love with compliments that rather than want them, they will compliment one another, yet mean no more by it than the men do.”

“As far as I knew white women were never lonely, except in books. White men adored them, Black men desired them and Black women worked for them.”