Rita Mae Brown Quotes

135 Sourced Quotes

It's an act of faith to be a writer in a postliterate world.

Rita Mae Brown
Youth moves out, leaving no forwarding address. No matter how you try, you can't reach that person again or that place.

Rita Mae Brown
There's a thin line between collectivity and chaos...

Rita Mae Brown
Monogamy is contrary to nature but necessary for the greater social good.

Rita Mae Brown
So much of life is happenstance. It makes me laugh when I go to a bookstore and see all those titles about controlling your life. You're lucky if you can control your bladder.

Rita Mae Brown
I believe that we often disguise pain through ritual and it may be the only solace we have.

Rita Mae Brown
Death is a greatly overrated experience. I hated Mother's and I'm not looking forward to my own. Apart from the sorrow there are the bills to be paid. Nobody dies for free.

Rita Mae Brown
I don't expect executives to be creative but I do expect them to have courage.

Rita Mae Brown
You can love more than one person at a time, and I don't give a damn what the self-help books say.

Rita Mae Brown
No one remembers her beginnings. Mothers and aunts tell us about infancy and early childhood, hoping we won't forget the past when they had total control over our lives and secretly praying that because of it, we'll include them in our future.

Rita Mae Brown
Tragedy massages the human ego even as comedy deflates it.... Tragedy pits us against large foes and the trip wire is our own character.... In comedy we fall afoul of one another. Comedy depends on social life, on our behavior in groups. In tragedy you can observe one human against the gods. In comedy it's one human versus other humans and often one man (or woman if I'm writing it) against her own worst impulses.

Rita Mae Brown
Would it upset men if they found out we weren't different? Are we? Aren't we? Damned if I know.

Rita Mae Brown
The last thing I have to say is that ice is the past tense of water. I've always wanted to write that sentence and now I have.

Rita Mae Brown
Mother love is the most powerful, the most irrational force on earth, even more powerful than sexual love. However, one does lead to the other, so best not to spurn the former.

Rita Mae Brown
When the corpses are cleared no new order will emerge. Power, society, relationships, will descend in all their confusion on a new generation. The old, who started this conflagration, will retreat, worn out, the survivors and the young will continue the dance.

Rita Mae Brown
Never underestimate the power of self-absorption, including your parents' self-absorption.

Rita Mae Brown
What's the point of being a lesbian if a woman is going to look and act like an imitation man?

Rita Mae Brown
The human animal varies from class to class, culture to culture. In one way we are consistent: We are irrational.

Rita Mae Brown
Humor comes from self-confidence. There's an aggressive element to wit.

Rita Mae Brown
Mothers have a habit of proving right except you don't find that out until you're the age your mother was when she gave you the advice.

Rita Mae Brown
Never let money control you. I'd rather see someone spend every red cent and relish his/her life than scrimp, obsess, and pinch the pennies. There's something repugnant about a person who centers his life around money.

Rita Mae Brown
English is weak in describing emotional states or intensities of interpersonal relationships.

Rita Mae Brown
Two wrongs don't make a right. No, but three will get you back on the freeway!

Rita Mae Brown
I became a lesbian out of devout Christian charity. All those women out there are praying for a man and I gave them my share.

Rita Mae Brown
Whoever heard of a neurotic frog? Where do humans get off thinking they're the pinnacle of evolution?

Rita Mae Brown
Sport strips away personality, letting the white bone of character shine through. Sport gives players an opportunity to know and test themselves. The great difference between sport and art is that sport, like a sonnet, forces beauty within its own system. Art, on the other hand, cyclically destroys boundaries and breaks free.

Rita Mae Brown
All outcast peoples struggle to be recognized as individuals. The damage of oppression is that it robs you of your individuality. You're just a faggot. Or whatever — fill in the blank. Everything you do is seen through the prism of your gayness or your womanness or your blackness by some people.

Rita Mae Brown
Never expect your partner to understand your work. You can hope that he or she appreciates it, but don't push your luck. Hell, you might not even understand your work.

Rita Mae Brown
The only good thing ever done by a committee was the King James Version.

Rita Mae Brown
Virginia Woolf said that writers must be androgynous. I'll go a step further. You must be bisexual.

Rita Mae Brown