19 Quotes by Molly Haskell

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)

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).

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

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

The Internet is democracy’s revenge on democracy.

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.

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.