Quotes by Women Authors

Jealousy had a taste, all right. A bitter and tongue-tasting flavor, like a pitch pit.

When we strike a balance between the challenge of an activity and our skill at performing it, when the rhythm of the work itself feels in sync with our pulse, when we know that what we're doing matters, we can get totally absorbed in our task. That is happiness.

But truth, that dangerous commodity, has a way of sticking...

Margery Sharp
Margery Sharp
It's not the fledgling birds that are thrown out of the nest by their parents and made to fly; it's the parents who are made to get the hell out of cozy family nest by their teenage offspring. It's we who are made to be independent of them, crash-landing if we don't manage it.

Be kind to thy sister. Not many may know the depths of true sisterly love.

Boredom is that awful state of inaction when the very medicine - that is, activity - which could solve it, is seen as odious.

The Door Without a Key is the Door of Dreams; it is the door by which the sensitive escape into insanity when life is too hard for them, and artists use it as a window in a watch-tower. Psychologists call it a psychological mechanism; magicians call it magic, and the man in the street calls it illusion or charlatanry according to taste. It does not matter to me what it is called, for it is effectual.

I often think that the ideal of our perfection that we set up, and often go through torture to achieve, may not be God's idea of how He wants us to be at all. That may be something quite different that we never would have thought of, and what seems like a failure to us may really be something bringing us closer to His will for us.

I have often thought I would have been quite happy as a spider.
Even a spider has the right to a mate.

Jane nodded, and she mentally thanked the several-greats-grandmother who had decided she'd rather risk royal displeasure than give up a book.

I've got this image in my head of how I want my life to look, and I have absolutely no idea how to get there. And I'm so scared that I'll make some wrong decision - just one - and everything will get messed up and go wrong -for good.

Love is a state of the heart, but also, an activity. And quite an awesome one.

Carolyn Crane
Carolyn Crane
She had gradually changed her name. "Jane" was too dull. Last year, she'd added a "y", becoming Jayne, which had more personality.

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
You must not allow yourself to be advised, cautioned, influenced, persuaded

Minnie Maddern Fiske
Minnie Maddern Fiske
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.

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 dizzy rapture of starving. The power of needing nothing. By force of will I make myself the impossible sprite who lives on air, on water, on purity.

Kathryn Harrison
Kathryn Harrison
People do pretty ugly things to make themselves feel better, this I do know.

No matter what historians claimed, BC really stood for 'Before Coffee'.

Maybe sometimes we can only see the truth about ourselves if someone shows us where to look.

If you tell someone a secret, and ask them to keep it secret, you are asking them to display a discretion you are unable to display yourself.

A lot of people get flipped out if you're quiet. They say stuff like, What are you thinking? And if they don't start interrogating you, they start talking, going on and on about stuff that's totally irrelevant, and the silence gets so big and loud that it's scary.

A. M. Homes
A. M. Homes
It were a blessed sight to see That child become a willow tree, His brother trees among. He'd be four times as tall as me, And live three times as long.

There is generally no such thing as duty to the people who do it. They simply take life as it comes, meeting, not, shirking its demands, whether pleasant or unpleasant; and that is pretty much all there is of it.

Mary Abigail Dodge
Mary Abigail Dodge