Housework and a book review or two are not effective substitutes for sixteen hours of classes a week.

Mary McCarthy, letter to Frani Blough, in Mary McCarthy, Novels and Stories 1942–1963, edited by Thomas Mallon

Reading was such a wonderful thing that to have made a life around the experience was almost criminal it was so fortunate.

Elizabeth Hardwick, in Maggie Doherty, “Elizabeth Hardwick’s Master Class on Literature and Life”

Imagine an Andrea [Dworkin] who had, somehow, set it all aside, all the violence and assaults on her dignity: an Andrea who had simply got on, as Dworkin had planned to do as a young girl, with the business of writing poetry, of making something beautiful. This is an Andrea, I think we can say, who would have failed to rise to her moment. But she would have also been, in some ways, freer.

Amia Srinivasan, “Andrea Dworkin’s Conviction”