Elizabeth Janeway

"Growing up human is uniquely a matter of social relations rather than biology. What we learn from connections within the family takes the place of instincts that program the behavior of animals; which raises the question, how good are these connections?"

"In this nadir of poetic repute, when the only verse that most people read from one years end to the next is what appears on greeting cards, it is well for us to stop and consider our poets...It is ourselves that we are hurting by our stupidity and ignorance of poetry, much more than the poets. Poets are the leaven in the lump of civilization. But our sodden and lumpish society prefers to lie unleavened and unchanged by the ferment of poetry."

"If theres nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come, there is nothing more ubiquitously pervasive than an idea whose time wont go."

"I can remember...the surprise of animals, not only the pretty mare...but animals in and out, cats and dogs and a milk goat and chickens and guinea hens, all taken for granted, as if man was intended to live on terms of friendly intercourse with the rest of creation instead of huddling in isolation on the fourteenth floor of an apartment house in a city where animals occurred behind bars in the zoo."

"[Power is] the ability not to have to please."

"Sex cannot be contained within a definition of physical pleasure, it cannot be understood as merely itself for it has stood for too long as a symbol of profound connection between human beings."

"Philosophically, incest asks a fundamental question of our shifting mores: not simply what is normal and what is deviant, but whether such a thing as deviance exists at all in human relationships if they seem satisfactory to those who share them."

"The Goddamn human race deserves itself, and as far as Im concerned it can have it."

"I admire people who are suited to the contemplative life, but I am not one of them. They can sit inside themselves like honey in a jar and just be. Its wonderful to have someone like that around, you always feel you can count on them. You can go away and come back, you can change your mind and your hairdo and your politics, and when you get through doing all these upsetting things, you look around and there they are, just the way they were, just being."

"Like their personal lives, womens history is fragmented, interrupted; a shadow history of human beings whose existence has been shaped by the efforts and the demands of others."

"I am not sure how many "sins" I would recognize in the world. Some would surely be defused by changed circumstances. But I can imagine none that is more irredeemably siinful than the betrayal, the exploitation, of the young by those who should care for them."