When a man modifies or adorns a woman's name, or dispatches an endearment into her vicinity, he is attempting at once to alter and deny her, to dilute the privacy of the category she has inherited and to require that she respond as someone quite less than herself.

I would like to outsmart the role that is destined for me. But I can't. I have failed to destroy my category.

You named your sword Fire? Fire? What kind of a boring name is that? You might as well name your sword 'Blazing Blade' and be done with it. Fire indeed. Humph. Wouldn't you rather have a sword called Sheepbiter or Chrysanthemum Cleaver or something else with imagination?

It's possible to name everything and to destroy the world.

For all their compliments do verses pay? They mayn't, yet these same poems make me gay

One day President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once 'The Unnecessary War'.