Quotes from Julie Phillips

I like some men a lot, but from the start, before I knew anything, it was always girls and women who lit me up.

I can't help what people think sounds male or female.

women could never be in the space program, since in zero G a woman's breasts would bounce and keep the men from concentrating.

This was just too improbable, a man who didn't think he deserved a prize.

I never sexually 'let down' much with people—male or female. Perhaps because to me, as an only and over-loved child, I associated caresses with the threat of possession. And my yearning for love with vulnerability.

One day as I am holding baby and feeding her, I realize that this is exactly the state of mind and heart that so many male writers from Thomas Mann to James Joyce describe with yearning—the mystery of an epiphany, the sense of oceanic oneness, the great yes

the wholeness. There is also the sense of a self merged and at least temporarily erased—it is deathlike. . . . Perhaps we owe some of our most moving literature to men who didn't understand that they wanted to be women nursing babies. (Louise Erdrich)

If you're a woman writer, sometime, somewhere, you will be asked, Do you think of yourself as a writer first, or as a woman first? Look out. Whoever asks this hates and fears both writing and women. (Margaret Atwood)

The newsletter's editor, Ted Cogswell, illustrated an issue with pictures of naked women—intended, he said, as a joke. Suzy Charnas informed him that this kind of "joke" was aggression disguised as humor.

We are strangers; we write as individual captive Martians.

A big, complicated, fast marriage like ours is just like those big fast delicate motors—it's 25% of the time in the shop.

the day when male writers can speak for women is speeding by. Fast.

the experience of motherhood loses nearly everything in its translation to the outside world. In motherhood a woman exchanges her public significance for a range of private meanings, and like sounds outside a certain range they can be very difficult for other people to identify.

Babies demand your entire self, but it is a funny kind of self. It is a mixture of the "all" a factory worker gives to the conveyor belt and the "all" a lover offers to the one he adores. It involves, on both counts, a fair degree of self-abnegation. This is why people who mind children suffer from despair; it happens all of a sudden—they realise, all of a sudden, that they still exist.

Anyone who shoots a real gun at you when drunk and angry is simply not husband material, regardless of his taste in literature.