Quotes by Women Biographers

Mary Shelley

Doris Lessing

Patricia Cornwell

Doris Kearns Goodwin

Mary Soames

Laura E. Richards

Kitty Kelley

Housework is a breeze. Cooking is a pleasant diversion. Putting up a retaining wall is a lark. But teaching is like climbing a mountain.

The first time you are reconciled to the terrible unfairness of disappointment, you are getting old.

Mary Lee Settle

Just as a child is born without fear, so is it born without prejudice. Prejudice, like fear, is acquired.

She imagines herself clean as a fish,
evasive, solitary, dumb. Her prayer:
to make peace with her own monstrous nature.

Elaine Feinstein

Competition with a parent is doomed from the start: you're a loser if you fail, a traitor if you win.

In the love affair, as in sculpture, poetry, and every other fine art, no lasting success can be achieved without skill.

Doris Langley Moore

Measuring is one of the more practical uses of mathematics, but the ability and desire to measure aren't always wrapped up with the need to know useful answers.

I eat till, honest, I felt every button on all my clo'es. The folks where we were stayin' were the old-fashioned hospitable kind; they didn't let you off till your jaws struck work and wouldn't wag no more.

Laura E. Richards

For mothers who must earn, there is indeed no leisure time problem. The long hours of earning are increased by the hours of domestic labor, until no slightest margin for relaxation or change of thought remains.

Katharine Anthony

In things greate and extraordinary some perhaps will take notice of God's working, who either forgett or believe not that he takes as well a care and account of their smallest concernments...

Lucy Hutchinson

The literature of women's lives is a tradition of escapees, women who have lived to tell the tale.

I tried to do it all myself: be mommy and camp counselor and art teacher and prereading specialist (and somehow, in my off-hours, to do my own work). I tried my absolute best. And like so many of the moms around me, I started to go a little crazy.

One of the penalties of longevity is that some of the dearest and most familiar faces depart, leaving gaps which cannot be filled.

It was on Good Friday that Miss Bendix lost her faith. She had really lost it before then, but, as is often the case with losses, she did not notice that anything was missing for some time after it had gone.

Naomi Royde-Smith

Night fell clean and cold in Dublin, and wind moaned beyond my room as if a million pipes played the air.

Patricia Cornwell

I used to think it was great to disregard happiness, to press on to a high goal, careless, disdainful of it. But now I see that there is nothing so great as to be capable of happiness...

Anne Gilchrist (writer)

All men now allow that if any human power could have stemmed the avalanche of the French Revolution, it would have been the reforms of Turgot.

Evelyn Beatrice Hall

We must be willing to change chairs if we want to grow. There is no permanent compatibility between a chair and a person. And there is no one right chair. What is right at one stage may be restricting at another or too soft. During the passage from one stage to another, we will be between two chairs. Wobbling no doubt, but developing.

To be a biographer is a somewhat peculiar endeavor. It seems to me it requires not only the tact, patience, and thoroughness of a scholar but the stamina of a horse.

You think she's warm, but she's really quite aloof. She gives it all to the camera.

It's okay to be afraid. It's not okay to let the fear STOP you.

The part we play is not as we want it, but as we are made-with the genitals God gave us.

Lincoln had internalized the pain of those around him-the wounded soldiers, the captured prisoners, the defeated Southerners. Little wonder that he was overwhelmed at times by a profound sadness that even his own resilient temperament could not dispel.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

I, a miserable wretch, haunted by a curse that shut up every avenue to enjoyment.

Here lies the tremendous mystery - that God should be all-powerful, yet refuse to coerce. He summons us to cooperation. We are honored in being given the opportunity to participate in his good deeds. Remember how He asked for help in performing his miracles: Fill the water pots, stretch out your hand, distribute the loaves.

Elisabeth Elliot