Quotes by Women Authors

It's funny. When you leave your home and wander really far, you always think, 'I want to go home.' But then you come home, and of course it's not the same. You can't live with it, you can't live away from it. And it seems like from then on there's always this yearning for some place that doesn't exist. I felt that. Still do. I'm never completely at home anywhere.

How dare you, unless you can hold up your own life as a model of rectitude, achievement, and halcyon happiness, open your mouth about the stubborn secrets of living?

My son called to me that God was inside his red fire engine. He wanted to show me. I did move as fast as I could, spilling like water through the kitchen door into a summer day, but God had left by the time I got there. My son smiled, told me I'd missed him by seconds.

Just remember, Every day of your lives, you must always be sure what you're fighting for.

I keep my clocks a little fast / so time won't take me by surprise.

Our windy, untidy loft
where old people had flung up old junk
they'd thought might come in handy
ploughs, ladles, bears, lions, a clatter of heroes.

Never judge people by who they date — your own sex life is confusing enough without trying to figure out someone else's.

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

Sometimes a name seems our most arbitrary possession,
and sometimes it seems like the grain in a rock
like a sculptor's hunk of Italian marble: Whack it
and you might get either your first glimpse of a saint
or a pile of rubble.

There had been a frozen mist here, and the trees were spun into feathers. Their fragile brilliance made me wonder why, into the spotlessness of Creation, God had seen fit to introduce soiling, twisting, rampaging, Man.

We are the whirlwinds that winnow the West—
We scatter the wicked like straw!
We are the Nemeses, never at rest—
We are Justice, and Right, and the Law!

Is it for you to forgive me? Is it for me to forgive you? Is it for God to forgive us all, and for what? Where there's no judging on one side or the other, there's no forgiveness wanted.

The first thing you do is to forget that I'm Black. Second, you must never forget that I'm Black.

That's how fossil hunting is: It takes over, like a hunger, and nothing else matters but what you find. And even when you find it, you still start looking again the next minute, because there might be something even better waiting.

Tracy Chevalier
Tracy Chevalier
Of Copenhagen:
There are no islands and the country all about is very flat.

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.

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.

Because I longed to comprehend the infinite I drew a line between the known and unknown.

When you lock everything down tight so that the pain can't get out, you also keep good stuff from getting in.

Map age genes place of origin
and love's lineaments. For mapped onto each body is love. Carthography of one's own country
or the contours of a foreign land

There is no gesture more devastating than the back turning away.

Aunt Loretta has something that maybe you could call class. It's not the made-up kind that Grandma has, fake pearls and Sunday hats, but something that comes to you as if you were born to the king and queen. Aunt Loretta understands better than Grandma that reading a big book is more classy than wearing fake pearls watching TV.

I've come to think that's what heaven is- a place in the memory of others where our best selves live on.

Journeys start from where we are. Everything starts from where we are. Where we are is where we're supposed to be.

I battered the cordons around me
And cradled my wings on the breeze,
Then soared to the uttermost reaches
With rapture, with power, with ease!