Quotes by Women Authors

Marrows - alas! - are arriving in a steady stream at the back door.... Oddly enough, the majority of people who grow them in Fairacre say, as they hand them over: 'Funny thing! I don't care for them myself. In fact, none of the family likes them!' But still they plant them. It must be the fascination of seeing such a wonderful return for one small seed, that keeps marrow-growers at their dubious task.

There is a special blessing in old clothes, and that aside from their comfort, for which especially they are to be cherished. They confer a kind of anonymity on one who wears them gladly; all their bright places rubbed to a uniform dullness, they achieve an appearance so nearly nondescript that only a close scrutiny could learn that ever they held shape at all.

All it takes for America to become a theocracy is for nonbelievers to do nothing.

The soul is a millstone, an albatross, it meddles in everything. It creates ties to torture us.

Marie Vieux Chauvet
Marie Vieux Chauvet
People do pretty ugly things to make themselves feel better, this I do know.

Poetry is road maintenance for a fragmented world which seeks to be kept together. It's been an integral activity for a long time.

Darlings of the forest! Blossoming alone When Earth's grief is sorest For her jewels gone - Ere the last snow-drift melts, your tender buds have blown.

War rages on the teeming earth;
The hot and sanguinary fight
Begins with each new creature's birth:
A dreadful war where might is right;
Where still the strongest slay and win,
Where weakness is the only sin.

Mathilde Blind
Mathilde Blind
A man gets used to riding on at the break of day. Comes to think that movement and noise is where life is, when after all there's life in stillness and quiet too.

The mining industry might make wealth and power for a few men and women, but the many would always be smashed and battered beneath its giant treads...

Katharine Susannah Prichard
Katharine Susannah Prichard
A Superwoman isn't a woman who can do anything, but a woman who avoids doing too much.

I have a hunch that our obsession with photography arises from an unspoken pessimism; it is our nature to believe the good things will not last... But photos provide a false sense of security> like our flawed memory, they are guaranteed to fade.... We take photographs in order to remember, but it is in the nature of a photograph to forget.

Michelle Richmond
Michelle Richmond
Don Carlos was one of those peaceful and indolent men who do not know how to do evil, nor to go to great lengths to do good.

Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda
Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda
Someone did us all a grave injustice by implying that mourning has a distinct beginning, middle, and end.

Hope Edelman
Hope Edelman
I was raised to feel that doing nothing was a sin. I had to learn to do nothing.

Why didn't children ever see that they could damage and harm their parents as much as parents could damage and harm children?

A poem is a box, a thing, to put other things in. For safe keeping.

Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in. In other words: Home has exceedingly low standards.

Heidi Julavits
Heidi Julavits
When Mama starts to move across a room, people pay attention. You can never be sure she's not going to grab you by the top of the head to steady herself. And she's pretty free with that walking stick, too.

Children live in a way that is very generous. They learn from a young age what you value; they watch your every move. If you value writing, they will learn quickly to value it too, as something they can give to someone, or receive with pleasure from someone else.

So this is one of those times when life is just handing you something, telling you what to do, which way to go. So enjoy it. It'll be fun. I guarantee. I can't guarantee we'll find the goddamn thing, but it'll be interesting. Then if we do find it - if we do- the payoff's huge.

The greatest act of love was to make a tape for someone. It was the only way we could share music and it was also a way of advertising yourself. Selection, order, the lettering you used for the track list, how much technical detail you went into, whether or not you added artwork or offered only artwork and no track list at all, these choices were as codified as a Victorian bouquet.

I have tried many times to express my feelings, but at each attempt, I find myself tongue-tied.

My father and I, we can't soothe each other. I'm too young, he's too old, and we don't know how to talk anymore if we ever did

What the men like best are what there's the least sense in, dresses you can't sit down in, that won't stand a lot of action, that hobble you and truss you up and slow you down and fix it so you can't hardly breathe, till finally you're off in one corner, like a bird in a cage, not cluttering up the busy paths in life that men has got to use. That's the styles they really like!