""Allegory is to real life what algebra is to arithmetic. And both are true.""
— Guy N. Pocock M.A.

""But the past determines who we are, and it has led to this sartling future.""
— Kristine Kathryn Rusch (The Best of Science Fiction and Fantasy: Permafrost and Skin Deep)

"We kill, kill, kill. Flesh, spirit, whatever gets in our way. It's like our whole purpose is to extinguish life. And for those who live, there's memory, like a curse. We're such a mixture of frailty and cruelty."
— Douglas Clegg

"Speech is the body part of thinking, the voice of the mind. Writing is the blood and mind mixing to speak through the fingers, through the hands."
— Lenora Champagne

"The advantage of being married a long time was that one could argue without the necessity of the other's actual, physical presence."
— William Browning Spencer

"One bad thing can often be rectified or overlooked, but several of them can sometimes coalesce into a compound disaster that sprouts tentacles and develops a self-directed will of its own, the kind of thing my dear old dad used to call a cluster fudge bar."
— Eleanor Druse (The Journals of Eleanor Druse: My Investigation of the Kingdom Hospital Incident)

"Political success in Athens seemed to depend on having a party, and there seemed now to be no party with whom an honorable man could connect himself. "
— Irwin Edman

"Then the lover, who is true and no counterfeit, must of necessity be loved by his love."
— Plato

"Piety, then, is that which is dear to the gods, and impiety is that which is not dear to them."
— Plato (Plato 1: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus)

"let the speaker speak truly and the judge decide justly."
— Plato (Plato 1: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus)

"...convinced that in trying to please all, he had pleased none, and had lost his ass into the bargain."
— Aesops

"...a genuine work of art, can never be false, nor can it be discredited through the lapse of time, for it does not present an opinion but the thing itself."
— Schopenhauer

"the brut first knows death when it dies, but man draws consciously nearer to it every hour that he lives; and this makes his life at times a questionable good even to him who has not recognised this character of constant anaihilation in the whole of life."
— Schopenhauer

"The principle of contradiction establishes merely the agreement of concepts, but does not itself produce concepts."
— Schopenhauer

"Life is full of troubles and vexations, that one must either rise above it by means of corrected thoughts, or leave it."
— Schopenhauer

"...it is only the hope of what is claimed that begets and nurishes the wish;"
— Schopenhauer

"Thus also every keen pleasure is an error and an illusion, for no attained wish can give lasting satisfaction."
— Schopenhauer

"I've just been around too much death today not to wonder why we find it appropriate to organize our festivities in and around the tombs of all these ancient cultures."
— Linda Fairstein (The Bone Vault)

"a revolutionary in every bedroom cannot fail to shake up the status quo. And if it is your wife that is revolting, you can't just split to the suburbs. Feminism, when it truly achieves it's goals, will crack through the most basic structures of our society."
— Shulamith Firestone (The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution)

"To be worshiped is not freedom."
— Shulamith Firestone (The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution)

"The best way to raise a child is to LAY OFF!"
— Shulamith Firestone (The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution)

"It is only the failure of my plots I fear."
— Shulamith Firestone (The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution)

"Love has never been understood, though it may have been fully experienced, and that experience communicated."
— Shulamith Firestone (The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution)

"Women and love are underpinnings. Examine them and you threaten the very structure of culture."
— Shulamith Firestone (The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution)

"(Male) culture was (and is) parasitical, feeding on the emotional strength of women without reciprocity."
— Shulamith Firestone (The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution)

"...love is essentially a much simpler phenomenon--it becomes complicated, corrupted or obstructed by an unequal balance of power."
— Shulamith Firestone (The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution)

"Thus her whole identity hangs in the balance of her love life. She is allowed to love herself only if a man finds her worthy of love."
— Shulamith Firestone (The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution)

"But in psychoanalysis there are no unimportant thoughts; there are only thoughts that pretend to be unimportant in order to not be told."
— Shulamith Firestone (The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution)

"Believe me, if all wives whose husbands had affairs left them, we would only have divorced women in this country."
— Shulamith Firestone (The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution)

"For the real issue under all the fights about other women is the man is unable to commit himself."
— Shulamith Firestone (The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution)

"...he will go to his grave feeling cheated, never realizing that there isn't much difference between one woman and the other, that it is the loving that creates the difference."
— Shulamith Firestone (The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution)

"He has let her in not because he genuinely loved her, but only because she played so well into his preconceived fantasies."
— Shulamith Firestone (The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution)

"A fair and generous woman is (at best) respected, but seldom loved."
— Shulamith Firestone (The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution)

"'Emancipated' women found out that the honesty, generosity, and camaraderie of men was a lie. "
— Shulamith Firestone (The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution)

"All men are selfish, brutal and inconsiderate--and I wish I could find one."
— Shulamith Firestone (The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution)

"If women are differentiated only by superficial physical attributes, men appear more individual and irreplaceable than they really are."
— Shulamith Firestone (The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution)

"The demands of Sex Privatization contradict the demands of the Beauty Ideal, causing the severe feminine neurosis about personal appearance."
— Shulamith Firestone (The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution)

"The pervasion of image has so deeply altered our very relationships to ourselves that even men have become objects--if never erotic objects."
— Shulamith Firestone (The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution)

"Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex)

"Whichever it is, he does not question it, not understanding that his own behavior has been or could be a determining influence."
— Shulamith Firestone (The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution)

"It is only after we have integrated the dark side of the moon into our world view that we can begin to talk seriously of universal culture."
— Shulamith Firestone (The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution)

"...new theories and new movements do not develop in a vacuum, they arise to spearhead the necessary social solutions to new problems resulting from contradictions in the environment."
— Shulamith Firestone (The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution)

"...childbirth is at best necessary and tolerable. It is not fun.
(Like shitting a pumpkin, a friend of mine told me when I inquired about the Great-Experience-You-Are-Missing.)"
— Shulamith Firestone (The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution)

"A mother who undergoes a nine-month pregnancy is likely to feel that the product of all that pain and discomfort 'belongs' to her."
— Shulamith Firestone (The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution)

"Their point of resemblance to each other and their difference from so many American women, lay in the fact that they were all happy to exist in a man's world--they preserved their individuality through men and not by opposition to them."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night)

"Unlike lovers they possessed no past; unlike man and wife, they possessed no future; yet up to in this morning Nicole had liked Abe better than anyone except Dick--and he had been heavy, belly-frightened, with love for her for years."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night)

"but they were frightened at his survivant will, once a will to live, now become a will to die."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night)

"'...people living alone get used to loneliness.'"
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night)

"Her beauty climbed the rolling slope, it came into the room, rustling ghost-like through the curtains..."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night)

"Women are necessarily capable of almost anything in their struggle for survival and can scarcely be convicted of such man made crimes as 'cruelty'."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night)