Quotes from Molly Haskell

One of the attributes of love . . . is to bring harmony and order out of chaos.

The thought that we are enduring the unendurable is one of the things that keeps us going.

...(Charles) Reich discredits reason because it has been used to justify the war in Vietnam, which is like deciding that because your mother has cooked you a few bad meals you must never eat again.

As so often happens in marriage, roles that had begun almost playfully, to give line and shape to our lives, had hardened like suits of armor and taken us prisoner.

Being alone and liking it is, for a woman, an act of treachery, an infidelity far more threatening than adultery.

I would trade many an art-film classic for the final exchange between Redford and Streisand in front of the Plaza.

For a woman there is nothing more erotic than being understood.

But one of the attributes of love, like art, is to bring harmony and order out of chaos, to introduce meaning and affect where before there was none, to give rhythmic variations, highs and lows to a landscape that was previously flat

For a woman, there is nothing more erotic than being understood.

Women couldn't identify with her and didn't support her.

Depending on your point of view, Ashley (or Leslie Howard) was sensitive, poetic, and enigmatic-- or wan and a wimp. Rhett/Clark Gable was sexy, virile, and funny or just crude and unmannerly. The outcome was a crucial barometer of taste that would reveal a great deal, possibly too much, about a girl's temperament and predilections.

It was a split [between the way I was saw myself…and the way I was expected to behave] that brought up to date the age-old dualism between body and soul, virgin and whore. (Haskell xiii)

We are a rotating cast of aspects of self that are shown to one person, or in one setting, and hidden in another. Memorial services are often jarring in this regard: friends and relatives eulogize the deceased in such conflicting terms they might be talking of different people.

So my generation fell into the trap, internalizing the either/or as we thought of ourselves as 'hot' or 'cold' and falling victim, once again, to the terms by which our sex had been conveniently divided for so many years. To the degree that sex was the equivalent of the self, surrender to sex was to lose oneself, whereas abstinence would insure its safeguarding, if not its salvation (viv).