“When would he learn that women never stayed where you put them?”

“In brief, when women batter, men’s first priority is to support the women and help them change; when men batter, women’s first priority is to escape the men and put them in prison.”

“I decided I would put off the novel until I had gone to Europe and had a lover, and that I would never learn a word of shorthand. If I never learned shorthand I would never have to use it.”

“Put an Englishman into the garden of Eden, and he would find fault with the whole blasted concern; put a Yankee in, and he would see where he could alter it to advantage; put an Irishman in, and he would want to boss the thing; put a Dutchman in, and he would proceed to plant it.”

“How the learned fool would wonder
Were he now to see his blunder,
When he put his reason under
The control of worldly Pride.”

“It comes, I suppose,” I said thoughtfully, speaking to the air, “of spending too much time alone indoors, and forgetting that living things don’t always stay where you put them.”

“And yet, in these old women it was as if, through the various tragedies of Mexican history, pity, the impulse to approach, and terror, the impulse to escape (as one had learned at college), having replaced it, had finally been reconciled by prudence, the conviction it is better to stay where you are.”

“You can't have everything… where would you put it?”

“Women never bought Freud's idea of penis envy: who would want a shotgun when you can have an automatic?”

“In school we learn that mistakes are bad, and we are punished for making them. Yet, if you look at the way humans are designed to learn, we learn by making mistakes. We learn to walk by falling down. If we never fell down, we would never walk.”