The German passion for bureaucracy -- for written and signal forms . . . to move about, to work, to exist -- is like a steel pin pinning each French individual to a sheet of paper, the way an entomologist pins each specimen insect . . .

I act as a sponge. I soak it up and squeeze it out in ink every two weeks.

Women have invented nothing in all that, except the men who were born as male babies and grew up to be men big enough to be killed fighting.

I keep going over a sentence. I nag it, gnaw it, pat and flatter it.

By jove, no wonder women don't love war nor understand it, nor can operate in it as a rule; it takes a man to suffer what other men have invented . . .