Charlotte Perkins Gilman - The Yellow Wallpaper (1892)

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You think you have mastered it [the wallpaper pattern], but just as you get well under way in following, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
We all need one another; much and often. Just as every human creature needs a place to be alone in, a sacred, private "home" of his own, so all human creatures need a place to be together in, from the two who can show each other their souls uninterruptedly, to the largest throng that can throb and stir in unison.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The female of the genus homo is economically dependent on the male. He is her food supply.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
I'm getting really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper. Perhaps because of the wallpaper.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
This wallpaper has a kind of sub-pattern in a different shade, a particularly irritating one, for you can only see it in certain lights, and not clearly then.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The color is repellent, almost revolting: a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Many years later I was told that the great specialist had admitted to friends of his that he had altered his treatment of neurasthenia since reading The Yellow Wallpaper.
It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
There are things in that wallpaper that nobody knows about but me, or ever will. Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day. It is always the same shape, only very numerous. And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Through watching so much at night, when it changes so, I have finally found out. The front pattern does move-and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
It becomes bars! The outside pattern, I mean, and the women behind it is as plain as can be. I didn't realize for a long time what the thing was that showed behind, that dim sub-pattern, but now I am quite sure it is a woman. By daylight she is subdued, quiet. I fancy it is the pattern that keeps her so still.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
To be surrounded by beautiful things has much influence upon the human creature; to make beautiful things has more.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Specialization and organization are the basis of human progress.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Grateful return for happiness conferred is not the method of exchange in a partnership. The comfort a man takes with his wife is not in the nature of a business partnership, nor are her frugality and industry.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman