“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.”

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

“I suggest to my students that they write under a pseudonym for a week. That allows young men to write as women, and women as men. It allows them a lot of freedom they don't have ordinarily.”

“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 like women who write, even though they don't say so. A writer is a foreign country.”

“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.”

“Darwin believed that women were not as competent as men, and less intelligent than men, but they were better than a dog.”

“How much better it is to see men live exactly than to hear them argue with subtlety!”

“I could almost smell her fear… Why did it bother me so much? Because she and I were the only women here, and we had to be better than the men. Braver, quicker, whatever. It was a rule for playing with the big boys.”

“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.”