Quotes by Women Essayists

Herta Müller

Christa Wolf

Arundhati Roy

Willa Cather

Maria Edgeworth

Marilynne Robinson

Tatyana Tolstaya

To me physical beauty is not the issue, vibrational beauty is and the most beautiful people I meet are those who are radiating the love and wisdom of the Divine force that breathes them.

I remember the time I said, 'I don't think you love yourself. You need to learn to love yourself.'

Girls have to be toughened so they can survive a world that presses harder on women.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

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

You know what they say - sleep is the mother's drug of choice, but like heroin, only the very rich and the very poor can afford it.

Elissa Schappell

The transsexually constructed lesbian-feminist feeds off woman's true energy source, i.e. her woman-identified self. It is he who recognises that if female spirit, mind, creativity and sexuality exist anywhere in a powerful way it is here, among lesbian-feminists.

It is this ability to bear what is unbearable and to go on living, to go on doing what one is used to doing—it is this uncanny ability that the existence of the human species is based on.

According to our social pyramid, all men who feel displaced racially, culturally, and/or because of economic hardships will turn on those whom they feel they can order and humiliate, usually women, children, and animals--just as they have been ordered and humiliated by those privileged few who are in power. However, this definition does not explain why there are privileged men who behave this way toward women.

I speak of knowledge, sir, which is not the bed-equal of learning... I speak of what comes from learning. I speak of understanding.

We are not indeed obliged always to speak what we think, but we must always think what we speak.

Anne-Thérèse de Marguenat de Courcelles, marquise de Lambert

If a person is to be unconventional, he must be amusing or he is intolerable: for, in the nature of the case, he guarantees you nothing but amusement. He does not guarantee you any of the little amenities by which society has assured itself that, if it must go to sleep, it will at least sleep in a comfortable chair.

Katharine Fullerton Gerould

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

Fashion is in ceaseless pursuit of things that are about to look familiar and in uneasy flight from things that have just become a bore.

Magic is what happens when you have encountered the Divine. It is the life-altering experiences of connecting to the divinity that dwells within yourself and in the world.

To marry for love were no reproachful thing if we did not see that of ten thousand couples that do it, hardly one can be brought for an example that it may be done and not repented afterwards...

Dorothy Osborne

The subject of walking is, in some sense, about how we invest universal acts with particular meanings. Like eating or breathing, it can be invested with wildly different cultural meanings, from the erotic to the spiritual, from the revolutionary to the artistic.

I like to think of landscape not as a fixed place but as a path that is unwinding before my eyes, under my feet. To see and know a place is a contemplative act. It means emptying our minds and letting what is there, in all its multiplicity and endless variety, come in.

Reason is necessarily the language of moral, political, and scientific argument: not because reason is holy or on some elevated plane, but because it isn't; because it is accessible to all humans; because, as well as working, it can be seen to work.

It is the first experience you ever had of reading a decent poem: 'Oh, somebody else is lonely, too!

As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a matter of gravity and the fall into death becomes an easy step.

Alison Hawthorne Deming

The world is full of tragedy; and sympathy, a little common sympathy, can do so much to soften the worst of grief. It is for the lack of that, that people despair and go down.

Fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification,

Marilynne Robinson

Children are born optimists and we slowly educate them out of their heresy

Louise Imogen Guiney

Conversation succeeds conversation, Until there's nothing left to talk about Except truth, the perennial monologue, And no talker to dispute it but itself.

Claude Wheeler opened his eyes before the sun was up and vigorously shook his younger brother, who lay in the other half of the same bed.