Quotes by Women Essayists

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.

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

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

Louise Imogen Guiney

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

Marilynne Robinson

Another reason I wrote Fat Girl is that few writers about fatties write that even thin girls (and women and men) can, behind their bony walls, remain fat. They weigh 110; they think they weigh 200. How this happens is that if a person's been fat and gotten thin and maybe even stayed thin, she doesn't forget she was fat.

Single life should be experimental in nature and open to accidents. Some accidents are happy ones.

Barbara Holland

Too much rigidity on the part of teachers should be followed by a brisk spirit of insubordination on the part of the taught.

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.

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.

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.

From my earliest memory, times of crisis seemed to end up with women in the kitchen preparing food for men.

Barbara Kingsolver

Nor elves, nor fays, nor magic charm, Have pow'r, or will, to work us harm; For those who dare the truth to tell, Fays, elves, and fairies, wish them well.

Maria Edgeworth

Mao said he was prepared to have millions of Chinese people perish in a nuclear war as long as China survived... I'm beginning to find it more and more sick that only humans make it into our calculations... Annihilate life on earth, but save the nation... what's the subject heading? Stupidity or Insanity?

Crippled and crazy, we hobble toward the finish line, pen in hand.

I was compiling a list in my head titled 'Reasons to Get Up: You Don't Have to Leave, but You Can't Pee Here.

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

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

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.

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.

You go out for a walk and the world opens up for you. And before you've even stretched your legs properly, it closes shut. For here to there it's all just the farty sputter of lantern. And they call that having lived. It's not worth the bother of putting on your shoes.

Literature has low enough standards. But we can avoid writing the worst literature if we make ourselves ask ourselves, every two or three sentences we write, 'Is that what I really think?'