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One sank into the ancient sin of anomie when challenges failed.
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The compulsion to find a lover and husband in a single person has doomed more women to misery than any other illusion.
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The married are those who have taken the terrible risk of intimacy and, having taken it, know life without intimacy to be impossible.
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Ours is a long marriage, and we have found solitude together.
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Most full lives are filled with empty gestures.
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Why do long marriages occasionally endow their inhabitants with a rare kind of equilibrium otherwise almost unknown in human relations? My guess is that the value of the moment has at last overshadowed the long history of resentments, betrayals, and boredom.
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It's hard to be happy, and safe, and applauded in a miserable world.
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One cannot make up stories; one can only retell in new ways the stories one has already heard.
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Women, I believe, search for fellow beings who have faced similar struggles, conveyed them in ways a reader can transform into her own life, confirmed desires the reader had hardly acknowledge-desires that now seem possible. Women catch courage from the women whose lives and writings they read, and women call the bearer of that courage friend.