Excerpts From...

"...the illogic of fact has made the history of beautiful women coextensive with the history of miserable, depressed women."

"These days the only female role more entrancing than the darkly, distraughtly bad is the small town sweetheart who drips sugar and saccharine for all the world to see but is in fact full of lust and evil (which are one and the same in woman) and malice and bad thoughts in her secret, sinful Jungian shadow life."

"...the world does not have room for women with big, strong personalities - it simply will not tolerate their existence past a certain point, so they just kind of have to behave periodically - if they're smart."

"But it is strange that all the qualities that are supposed to make a woman desirable also make her a target of disquiet and distrust."

"...it seems that male fear of world's free-wheeling, devastating, difficult and complicated women is actually obviating a hell of a good time."

"Most guys do not want to get involved with a girl on fire - the ones who do seem only to want to add fuel to the flames, but very few seem interested in finding a bucket of water."

"Feminism, and art that has a feminist agenda, serves to remind us of all the things we could be, all the shackles we can shed from our lives if we wish. It reminds us that we can be anything we want to be this time around."

"People romanticize insanity because they believe it is the thing behind the art; in fact, it is the thing in front of the art, the roadblock and police barrier and phantom tollbooth that you are pushing against."

"Linda Evangelista said she doesn't get out of bed for less than $15,000 a day. Somewhere on earth there are women who don't get INTO bed for less than $15,000 a night. And I guess the rest of us have learned to settle."

"What is anyone going to say to the many of us out there who have been confronted by some version of a man's violent temper and have found ourselves excited, pulled in, taken in, turned on? How can we deny the draw, the obsessive grab of images and pain, whose force has no equal and goes unopposed in a society that has denied us the ecstasy of a god, of a religious explosion of delight, so that happiness has come to seem ho-hum and only our pain - our deep, bloody, undeniable pain - gives us the sense that we can feel at all?"

"...raise [their] daughters as if it's possible that they will grow up to be President of the United States or CEO of Microsoft or the doctor who finds a cure for AIDS or the economist who discovers a way to end the inversely proportionate relationship between unemployment and inflation. Raise your daughters to laugh at any man who even THINKS about throwing a punch, and raise them to be people with Filofaxes full of activities that are too fun and important and fascinating to be disturbed by a blow to the right eye. Raise your daughters to always think that any unpleasant situation - be it with a man or a manager or any of the expendable and fruitless annoyances that ruin our lives - just isn't worth it. Nobody NEEDS this, I don't want it, I'm outta here, there are better things to do, anyone who disagrees can fuck off and die."