Kindle Notes & Highlights
Where the gifted among women (and men) have remained mute, or have never attained full capacity, it is because of circumstances, inner or outer, which oppose the needs of creation.
women are traditionally trained to place others’ needs first, to feel these needs as their own (the “infinite capacity”); their sphere, their satisfaction to be in making it possible for others to use their abilities.
The vices of slaves:* dissembling, flattering, manipulating, appeasing.
The habits of a lifetime when everything else had to come before writing are not easily broken, even when circumstances now often make it possible for writing to be first; habits of years—response to others, distractibility, responsibility for daily matters—stay with you, mark you, become you. The cost of “discontinuity” (that pattern still imposed on women) is such a weight of things unsaid, an accumulation of material so great, that everything starts up something else in me; what should take weeks, takes me sometimes months to write; what should take months, takes years.
