Nothing is ever simple. What do you do when you discover you like parts of the role you're trying to escape?
Marilyn French
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, their codes.
Marilyn French
Marriage accustomed one to the good things, so one came to take them for granted, but 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. And something happened sexually in marriage --the swearing to forsake all others, despite its slight observance, had a profound effect. Some people felt trapped by it, impelled to assert what they called freedom. Some accepted it like a rein, and in the effort to avoid pain in the form of hopeless desire, cut off occasions of desire, avoided having long talks at parties with attractive members of the opposite sex. In time, all feeling for the opposite sex was cut off, and intercourse limited to the barest politesses. But something happened to you when you did that, a kind of death seeped up from the genitals to the rest of the body, till it showed in the eyes, the gestures, in a certain lifelessness.
Marilyn French
To nourish and raise children against odds is in any time, any place, more valuable than to fix bolts in cars or design nuclear weapons.
Marilyn French
''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.
Marilyn French
It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.