"If you're lucky, home is not only a place you leave, but also a place where you someday arrive."
-Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own by Kate Bolick

"If you're a daughter, your mother's face is your first mirror, and if you share her features - in our case hazel eyes, brown hair, a serious amount of freckles, a small frame with those 'narrow shoulders held erect' - odds are you'll unconsciously adopt her attitude of self-regard.  My mother considered herself to be plain, if not homely, and so I believed her, and so I considered myself...I carried this phantom twin wherever I went, no matter that I couldn't have been more different myself..."
-Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own by Kate Bolick

"I wondered what my childhood home might reveal about me to a stranger.  It never ceases to astonish me how readily we presume to know ourselves, when in fact we know so little."
-Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own by Kate Bolick

"Besides, I decided, isn't that how falling in love so often works?  Some stranger appears out of nowhere and becomes a fixed star in your universe." 
-Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own by Kate Bolick

"Eventually, whether you choose or are chosen, joyously accept or grudgingly resist, you take the plunge.

You are born, you grow up, you become a wife.

But what if it wasn't this way?

What if a girl grew up like a boy, with marriage an abstract, someday thought, a thing to think about when she became an adult, a thing she could do, or not do, depending?

What would that look and feel like?"
 -Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own by Kate Bolick