There is no love without suffering.

I married someone 30 years older than me, a doctor, a playboy who had a terrible Don Juan reputation.

I'm a feminist, a 21st-century feminist - which means choice and freedom. One has the right to be both glamorous and ethically structured.

There is no love of life without despair of life.

He was ruining it. Five minutes before, he’d looked at her with desire and she’d thought finally. Finally, someone saw her. Finally, someone wanted her and she would know what it was like to be a woman. She would know what it felt like to have another person’s hands on her. But now he looked at her with misplaced compassion. As if she were so desperate to get laid she had missed something. As if there was some man waiting in the wings. There wasn’t. This was it, her final chance for pleasure and with every question, with every word, he ruined it.

Love consists not in feeling great things but in having great detachment and in suffering for the Beloved.