Great Throughts Treasury

"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."

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

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

"But what's more refreshing is that, except for Nicole Kidman - with her eerily unlined face - they're not trying to look or act 25... These [40-plus] women all have, for me, a must-see quality as opposed to some of the younger ones. Kate Hudson, for example, just doesn't have the star power or personality of [her mother] Goldie Hawn."

"Certainly, 40 is the new 25-plus and has been for some time."

"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."

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

"It may also be that movies are discovering, or rediscovering, the female audience. They're a big factor in DVD purchase, and, as the big-budget films tank, it may lead to at least some rethinking of the go-for-broke bottom-line, franchise-film philosophy."

"La Cage aux Folles is a square love story in titillating drag that has become the Charley's Aunt of the 1980s."

"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 mammary fixation is the most infantile and the most American, of the sex fetishes"

"The propaganda arm of the American Dream machine -- Hollywood."

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