Author Quotes

God taking from us and loving us at the same time by providing comforters was a kind of spiritual equanimity. It seemed a phenomenon of life how a death insinuates us into the debt of those who stand by us in trouble and console us.

Not alone is the child born through the mother, but the mother also is born through the child.

Gertrud von Le Fort

If history is a record of survivors, Poetry shelters other voices.

The essence of kitsch is the confusion of ethical and esthetic categories; kitsch wants to produce not the "good" but the "beautiful."

My nights are rich with mystery, my dreams breathless with expectation.

Well. I don't suppose you have to believe in ghosts to know that we are all haunted, all of us, by things we can see and feel and guess at, and many more things that we can't.

Pacifists lead a lonely life. Not even gathering together can take the place of that vast, warm sun of approval that is shed on motherhood, on law-abiding, on killing, and on making money. Someday will we come into our own? Well, motherhood may move into the shade. Law-abiding is going through a trauma. But killing and making money are good for a long, long time.

Josephine Johnson

King James of England wrote the Bible... and he made you niggers happy hewers of wood and told you to serve your masters faithfully and you'd get your reward in heaven. You all believe that shit and been worshipping a white Jesus ever since. How in the hell could God take the black earth and make himself a white man out of it? Answer me that?

Louise Meriwether

Why is it that so many people think that charity consists in giving away merely what they cannot use instead of the article the recipient needs?

Mabel Osgood Wright

Every death diminishes us, but those that leave differences unresolved and things unsaid are the most painful of all.

Every child, woman, and man should possess license to speak or sing in his or her true voice.

Generations should not be mingled for daily fare, she thought; they are really contemptuous of one another, and the strong individuals, whether they belong to the older or the younger, impose on the meek their creeds and opinions, and, if they are strong enough, brook no dissent.

There is almost no limit to the possibilities of the imagination, but to get the full power of it, one must trust one's imagination. If you say to yourself constantly, as the mother says to the child, 'But this is only play; this is not real,' you never can make real the things you have created in thought.

We get mad, sure! Like ice an' snow an' thunder an' lightning storm, but they don't hurt the wheat down in the ground any.' Mom picked up her whitewash brush and slapped it against the rough boards. 'Yolochka, you don't know how love is yet.'

Only when we have a respect for time will we have learned something of the art of living.

Jacqueline Winspear

Madame Schmid belonged to that large class of persons who believe that a man who engages in any form of art is necessarily a loafer.

Molly Elliot Seawell

Good-bye is always hello to something else. Good-bye/hello, good-bye/hello, like the sound of a rocking chair.

George Ella Lyon

Home is where i hang my toothbrush and where the cats have their commode

Lilian Jackson Braun

Sisters define their rivalry in terms of competition for the gold cup of parental love. It is never perceived as a cup which runneth over, rather a finite vessel from which the more one sister drinks, the less is left over for the others.

Elizabeth Fishel

Never settle for less than your dreams, somewhere, sometime, someday, somehow, you'll find them

Convalescence is a sort of grown-up rebirth, enabling us to see life with a fresh eye.

Margaret Prescott Montague

When you write something which comes off, it's a feeling like no other. It's like being visited by something outside yourself.

Elizabeth Jane Howard

There are rituals not structures for being a poet, drinking too much, taking too many drugs, being a lady chaser, having your nervous breakdown, being irresponsible about money.

There are some secrets which scarcely admit of being disclosed even to ourselves.

If we think saying no is going to hurt a guy's feelings, imagine what a restraining order will do.

Susan Jane Gilman