19 Quotes by Molly Haskell

The big lie perpetrated on Western society is the idea of women’s inferiority, a lie so deeply ingrained in our social behaviour that merely to recognize it is to risk unravelling the entire fabric of civilization.

American eroticism has always been of a different provenance and complexion than the European variety, an enjoyment both furtive and bland that is closer to a blushing cartoon than a sensual celebration.

Language: the one tool that enables us to grasp hold of our lives and transcend our fate by understanding it.

There are two cinemas: the films we have actually seen and the memories we have of them.

Madness is always fascinating, for it reveals the ungluing we all secretly fear: the mind taking off from the body, the possibility that the magnet that attaches us to a context in the world can lose its grip.

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

Hospitals, like airports and supermarkets, only pretend to be open nights and weekends.

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.

There are very few heroines in literature who have defined their lives morally rather than romantically and likewise but a handful in film.