"Artists strive to free this true and spontaneous self in their work. Creativity, meditation are ways of freeing an inner voice."

"Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else."

"Feminism...is not 'women as victims' but women refusing to be victims."

"I was never against marriage per se. Before feminism, I didn't think you had any choice. In fact, for a long time I always assumed I would get married. I just didn't see any marriages I wanted to emulate, so I kept putting it off."

"Sometimes I think the only real division into two is between people who divide everything into two and those who don't."

"Most women's magazines simply try to mold women into bigger and better consumers."

"I think if women are visible in the media, truly visible, in an empowered role, it empowers us to be more visible in any area of our lives."

"I could leave-because I could return. I could return-because I knew adventure lay just beyond an open door. Instead of either/or, I discovered a whole world of and."

"All my years campaigning have given me one clear message: Voting isn't the most we can do, but it is the least. To have a democracy, you have to want one. Still, I realize this fully only by looking back."

"Wherever I go, bookstores are still the closest thing to a town square."

"There are really not many jobs that actually acquire a penis or a vagina, and all other occupations should be open to everyone."

"The idea that women are 'our own worst enemies' forces us to admit that we don't have the power to be, even if we wanted too."

"We've begun to raise daughters more like sons... but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters."

"When people ask me why I still have hope and energy after all these years, I always say: Because I travel."

"Someone asked me why women don't gamble as much as men do and I gave the commonsensical reply that we don't have as much money. That was a true and incomplete answer. In fact women's total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage."

"I sometimes wonder if I am crisscrossing my father's ghostly paths and we are entering same towns or roadside diners or the black ribbons of highways that gleam in the night rain. As if we were images in a time-lapse photograph."

"No man can call himself liberal, or radical, or even a conservative advocate of fair play, if his work depends in any way on the unpaid or underpaid labor of women at home, or in the office."

"Everyone has a home but me."

"Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning."

"Each way of being is more valued in the presence of the other. This balance between making camp and following the seasons is both very ancient and very new. We all need both."

"Work is valued by the social value of the worker."

"The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn."

"It is more rewarding to watch money change the world than watch it accumulate."

"The authority of any governing institution must stop at its citizen's skin."

"Women are always better liked if we sacrifice ourselves for something bigger - and something bigger always means including men, even though something bigger for men doesn't usually mean including women."

"An older man who seems to be the leader of the Jesus Tshirt group says that the Bible forbids abortion in its commandment "Thou shall not kill.But being in the Bible Belt, people really know their Bible, and an older woman cites Exodus 21:22"23, a passage that says a man who causes a pregnant woman to miscarry must pay a fine but is not charged with murder, not unless the woman herself dies.Thus the Bible is making clear, that a dependent life is not the same as an independent life."

"Dying seems less sad than having lived too little."

"Altogether, if I had to pick one place to hang out anywhere, from New York to Cape Town and Australia to Hong Kong, a bookstore would be it."

"As always, self-esteem had created an ability to be generous."

"If women have young children, they are one man away from welfare."

"I'm not advocating a competition for who has it toughest. The caste systems of sex and race are interdependent and can only be uprooted together. It's time to take equal pride in breaking all the barriers."

"It's important for someone who could play the game - and win - to say: 'the game isn't worth shit."

"As feminism has changed academia by enlarging what is taught, academia has sometimes changed feminism."

"America is an enormous frosted cupcake in the middle of millions of starving people."

"I was angry because young men in politics were treated like rising stars and young women were treated like - well - young women. {...}I was angry about the human talent that was lost just because it was born into a female body, and the mediocrity that was rewarded because it was born into a male one."

"Her searches after knowledge were arbitrary and without context. It was as if she were shining a small flashlight of curiosity into the dark room of the world."

"The act of acting morally is behaving as if everything we do matters."

"I myself cried when I got angry, then became unable to explain why I was angry in the first place. Later I would discover this was endemic among female human beings. Anger is supposed to be "unfeminine", so we suppress it-until it overflows."

"Self-esteem isn't everything, it's just that there's nothing without it."

"Inside, each of us has a purple motorcycle."

"In fact, caucus, a word derived from the Algonquin languages, better reflected the layers of talking circles and the goal of consensus that were at the heart of governance."

"The art of life is not controlling what happens to us, but using what happens to us."

"I will no longer be referred to as Miss Steinem of Ms. magazine."

"In the same way that individual women are often underestimated, a movement of women is also understimated, but the truth is that, if people realize someone is willing to talk about these deep and daily concerns, they show up."

"Laughter is the only free emotion - the only one that can't be compelled. We can be made to fear. We can even be made to believe we're in love because, if we're kept dependent and isolated for long enough, we bond in order to survive. But laughter explodes like an aha! It comes when the punch line changes everything that has gone before, when two opposites collide and make a third and when we suddenly see a new reality...laughter is an orgasm of the mind."

"For me writing is the only thing that passes the three tests of metier: (1) when I'm doing it I don't feel that I should be doing something else instead (2.) it produces a sense of accomplishment and once in a while pride and (3) it's frightening."

"Long before all these divisions were opened between home and the road, betweens a woman's place and a man's world, humans followed the crops, the seasons, traveling with their families, our companions, animals, our tents. We built campfires and moved from place to place. This way of traveling is still in our cellular memory. Living things have evolved as travelers, Even migrating birds know that nature doesn't demand a choice between nesting and flight."

"Obviously, there is much similarity among the challenges of transgender people and all women - from health care to harassment to discrimination in the workplace."

"Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke. That's their natural and first weapon. She will need her sisterhood."

"Law and justice are not always the same."