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I was just looking at the jukebox. Just playing records. She said, You want to play with me? I said, Sure. How much? She says, Five bucks, two dollars for the room. Was it nice, Jack? All women are nice.

On the theory of the soul’s mortality, the inferiority of women’s capacity is easily accounted for: Their domestic life requires no higher faculties either of mind or body. This circumstance vanishes and becomes absolutely insignificant, on the religious theory: The one sex has an equal task to perform as the other: Their powers of reason and resolution ought also to have been equal, and both of them infinitely greater than at present.

Maybe I couldn’t make it. Maybe I don’t have a pretty smile, good teeth, nice tits, long legs, a cheeky arse, a sexy voice. Maybe I don’t know how to handle men and increase my market value, so that the rewards due to the feminine will accrue to me. Then again, maybe I’m sick of the masquerade. I’m sick of pretending eternal youth. I’m sick of belying my own intelligence, my own will, my own sex. I’m sick of peering at the world through false eyelashes, so everything I see is mixed with a shadow of bought hairs; I’m sick of weighting my head with a dead mane, unable to move my neck freely, terrified of rain, of wind, of dancing too vigorously in case I sweat into my lacquered curls. I’m sick of the Powder Room. I’m sick of pretending that some fatuous male’s self-important pronouncements are the objects of my undivided attention, I’m sick of going to films and plays when someone else wants to, and sick of having no opinions of my own about either. I’m sick of being a transvestite. I refuse to be a female impersonator. I am a woman, not a castrate.

O woman, perfect woman! what distraction Was meant to mankind when thou wast made a devil!

Every so often, I turn on the television and see one of the movement leaders being asked some idiot question like, “Isn’t the women’s movement in favor of all women abandoning their children and going off to work?” ... the leader usually replies that the movement isn’t in favor of all women doing anything right; what the movement is about, she says, is options. She is right, of course. At its best, that is exactly what the movement is about. But it just doesn’t work out that way. Because the hardest thing for us to accept is the right to those options. I hear myself saying these words: what this movement is about is options. I say it to my friends who are frustrated, or housebound, or guilty, or child-laden, and what I am really thinking is, if you really got it together, the option you would choose is mine.

Very often when I am introduced to women, I think, What is she really like behind the disguise which she wears? And very often I discover that she is pleasant enough, and probably would expand and glow if she received enough affection.

The old, subjective, stagnant, indolent and wretched life for woman has gone. She has as many resources as men, as many activities beckon her on. As large possibilities swell and inspire her heart.

Confusion has seized us, and all things go wrong, The women have leaped from their spheres, And, instead of fixed stars, shoot as comets along, And are setting the world by the ears!

What a woman says to her lover should be written on air or swift water.

The cello is like a beautiful woman who has not grown older, but younger with time, more slender, more supple, more graceful.

These women behind the store windows? Dreams, sir, dreams at bargain prices, a trip to the Indies! These people perfume themselves with spices. You enter, they close the curtains, and the trip begins. The gods descend on the nude bodies and the islands drift, demented, with the tousled hair of palm trees in the breeze.