And middle-class women, although taught to value established forms, are in the same position as the working class: neither can use established forms to express what the forms were never intended to express (and may very well operate to conceal).

When the memory of one's predecessors is buried, the assumption persists that there were none and each generation of women believes itself to be faced with the burden of doing everything for the first time. And if no one ever did it beforewhy do we think we can succeed now?

There are plenty of images of women in science fiction. There are hardly any women.

... chastity is not given once and for all like a wedding ring that is put on never to be taken off, but is a garden which each day must be weeded, watered, and trimmed anew, or soon there will be only brambles and wilderness.

Ignorance is not bad faith. But persistence in ignorance is.

I didn’t and don’t want to be a ‘feminine’ version or a diluted version or a special version or a subsidiary version or an ancillary version, or an adapted version of the heroes I admire. I want to be the heroes themselves.

I'm not a girl. I'm a genius.

Sit a man on his ass with nothing to do but eat and the first thing that goes is his mind. It never fails.

I once asked a young dissertation writer whether her suddenly grayed hair was due to ill health or personal tragedy she answered: “It was the footnotes”.

[T]here is one and only one way to possess that in which we are defective, therefore that which we need, therefore that which we want. Become it.

You can't imbibe someone's success by f*cking them.

Long before I became a feminist in any explicit way, I had turned from writing love stories about women in which women were losers, and adventure stories about men in which the men were winners, to writing adventure stories about a woman in which the woman won. It was one of the hardest things I ever did in my life.

To act in a way both sexist and racist, to maintain one's class privilege, it is only necessary to act in the customary, ordinary, usual, even polite manner.

Privileged groups, like everyone else, want to think well of themselves and to believe that they are acting generously and justly.

As my mother once said: The boys throw stones at the frog in jest. But the frogs die in earnest.

Real artists, it seems to me, are those who don't repeat themselves.

Minority art, vernacular art, is marginal art. Only on the margins does growth occur.