"Just as the slave master required the slaves to imitate the image he had of them, so women, who live in a relatively powerless position, politically and economically, feel obliged by a kind of implicit force to live up to culture's image of what is female."

"I think we actually punish children out of their relationship with their bodies... we categorically separate mind and body and emotion and intellect."

"I am not so different in my history of abandonment from anyone else after all. We have all been split away from the earth, each other, ourselves."

"What is buried in the past of one generation falls to the next to claim."

"A story is told as much by silence as by speech."

"Before a secret is told, one can often feel the weight of it in the atmosphere."

"Philosophy means nothing unless it is connected to birth, death, and the continuance of life. Anytime you are going to build a society that works, you have to begin from nature and the body."

"In one sense I feel that my book is a one-woman argument against determinism."