Quotes by Women Novelists

It's easy now, now that it's a story. When you were going through it, it was life. Always much harder to get the plot line on.

All of us create our own versions of an event, of our lives, even, not because were liars, necessarily, but because we can only see and understand the truth from our own viewpoint, and a shifting viewpoint at that.

The road to hell was paved with the bones of men who did not know when to quit fighting.

What compels any of us to do the things we do when deep down a part of us just wants to break free from it all?

Since each child reads only about six hundred books in the course of childhood, each book should nourish them in some way — with new ideas, insight, humor, or vocabulary.

No," I said finally. "Slowness in Answering," she said into the handheld. "When's the last time you slept?" "1940" I said promptly, which is the problem with Quickness in Answering.

Riding upon the back of a waterhorse - what mortal had ever stayed in such a seat for so long? On a horse made of cold currents and liquid convergences, jests and trickery - pressed against a hide like the burnished sea of midnight, thing look different to the rider.

Cecilia Dart-Thornton

I know where my heart is, and I can go home again, whenever I like. Mother likes to say, "You can take the girl out the projects, but you can't take the projects out the girl." That may not apply to everyone, but in my case it's true. And I would have it no other way.

All schoolchildren are hostages to red tape and fiscal insufficiency.

It takes bravery to care for someone — no matter who he is or what made him, whether he is weak or walking or jumping out of windows. The risk involved is enormous.

Deb Olin Unferth

Souls were the same. They, too, had useless baggage that impeded their proper performance, these annoying, holier-than-thou bits dangling like an appendix waiting for infection. Faith and hope and love...prudence, temperance, justice, and fortitude...all this useless clutter just packed too much damn morality into the heart, getting in the way of the soul's innate desire for malignancy.

Why is it that so many people think that charity consists in giving away merely what they cannot use instead of the article the recipient needs?

Mabel Osgood Wright

That there should be a purpose to suffering, that a person should be chosen for it, special — these are houses of the mind, in which whole peoples have found shelter.

No one knows how it is that with one glance a boy can break through into a girl's heart.

Is that all? The mountain in labor has brought forth a mouse.

May Agnes Fleming

It just goes to show that what one person considers a "bad attitude" might actually just be total frustration over being pushed beyond the brink of one's mental and physical endurance.

O how beautiful is morning!
How the sunbeams strike the daisies
And the kingcups fill the meadow
Like a golden-shielded army
Marching to the uplands fair.

Coleridge cried; "O God, how glorious it is to live!" Renan asks, "O God, when will it be worth while to live?" In Nature we echo the poet; in the world we echo the thinker.

In Europe, where human relations like clothes are supposed to last, one's got to be wearable. In France one has to be interesting, in Italy pleasant, in England one has to fit.

Sybille Bedford

They will come, not to paint the bay and the sea and the boots and the moors, but the warmth of the sun and the colour of the wind. A whole new concept. Such stimulation. Such vitality.

Rosamunde Pilcher

Surrealism could not be made up. It was the very electricity of the real.

Oh — oh, why is it that the members of a family feel privileged to treat one another with a cruelty they would not exhibit to the merest stranger?

I only want to walk a little longer in the cold blessing of the rain, and lift my face to it.

God is forgiving or we would not still be walking this world. But to be moral is not to need his divine forgiveness, I think.

Actors between plays are like ghosts looking for bodies to inhabit.