Susan Jane Gilman quotes:

Weddings are giant Rorschach tests onto which everyone around you projects their fears, fantasies, and expectations - many of which they've been cultivating since the day you were born.

Good girls don't hurt other people's feelings. Good girls are not overly aggressive, competitive, or boastful. Good girls please others. But what good girls are good for is another question.

Approximately seventy percent of the female population is on a diet at any given time. More women diet than vote.

A girl doesn't need a guy in her life in order to act like a complete idiot. Certainly I, at least, never have.

Every woman should see herself looking uniquely breathtaking, in something tailored to celebrate her body, so that she is better able to appreciate her own beauty and better equipped to withstand the ideals of our narrow-waisted, narrow- minded culture.

I'm aware that there is a bigger, far more complicated world out there than I'd ever realized, and just like the students at Beijing University, I've glimpsed it only fleetingly, peripherally. I've sensed the vast expanse of my own ignorance now. I feel antsy and constricted and a deep, almost sexual yearning for velocity, for some sort of raw, transcendent experience that I cannot even begin to articulate.

Sure, beauty has the power to excite men. But so does a box of donuts.