MARILYN FRENCH

Nothing is ever simple. What do you do when you discover you like parts of the role you're trying to escape?

Men's need to dominate women may be based in their own sense of marginality or emptiness; we do not know its root, and men are making no effort to discover it.

Fear is a question. What are you afraid of and why? Our fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if we explore them.

To nourish children and raise them against odds is in any time, any place, is more valuable than to fix bolts in cars or design nuclear weapons.

Anyone determined to find another person or group inferior can always find whole lists of grounds that demonstrate inferiority because we are all inferior to the ideals of humanness we have erected.

Men stumble over pebbles, never over mountains.

Well, love is insanity. The ancient Greeks knew that. It is the taking over of a rational and lucid mind by delusion and self-destruction. You lose yourself, you have no power over yourself, you can't even think straight.

When they kept you out it was because you were black; when they let you in, it is because you are black. That's progress?

Oh, God, why don't I remember that a little chaos is good for the soul?

Not many men have both good fortune and good sense.

Men seem unable to feel equal to women: they must be superior or they are inferior.

My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine - everybody drinks water.

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

'I hate discussions of feminism that end up with who does the dishes,' she said. So do I. But at the end, there are always the damned dishes.

Whatever they may be in public life, whatever their relations with men, in their relations with women, all men are rapists, and that’s all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws and their codes.

Women are afraid in a world in which almost half the population bears the guise of the predator, in which no factor - age, dress, or color - distinguishes a man who will harm a woman from one who will not.

It's strange how men feel they have the right to criticize a woman's appearance to her face.

For men to focus on controlling women's reproduction to solve a society's problems seems nothing short of mad or, at best, superstitious. But men's superstition or insanity has real and dire consequences for the women who are its object. And states, too, home in on women's bodies, perhaps to create the illusion that men are in control of uncontrollable forces. Indeed, almost all governments try to control women's bodies and regulate their appearance in some way.

The view of life as a struggle for power generates a language in which life has no significance and only power matters.

She drowned in words that could not teach her how to swim.

All patriarchists exalt the home and family as sacred, demanding it remain inviolate from prying eyes. Men want privacy for their violations of women... All women learn in childhood that women as a sex are men's prey.

Marriage accustomed one to the good things, so one came to take them for granted, but it magnified the bad things, so they came to feel as painful as a grain in one's eye. An open window, a forgotten quart of milk, a TV set left blaring, socks on the bathroom floor could become occasions for incredible rage.

When a baby first looks at you...when it laughs that deep, unselfconscious gurgle; or when it cries and you pick it up and it clings sobbing to you...then you are-happy is not the precise word-filled.

Habit is a good thing for the human race. ... You have to spend so much energy just getting through the day when you have no habits that you don't have any left for productive labor.