Quotes by Women Novelists

To share a hiding place, physical or psychological, is as intimate as love.

Are you determined to leave me in this world to live without my heart?

Kristin Cashore

How I love them. How good they are. They endure endless hours of me talking about the future. They keep me near and at the same time bid me farewell. That is what real love is.

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

Love shouldn't make a beggar of one. I wouldn't want love if I had to beg for it, to barter or qualify it. And I should despise it if anyone ever begged for my love. Love is something that must be given — it can't be bought with words or pity, or even reason.

Jacqueline Susann

Maybe da Vinci didn't serve lamb in his painting of the Last Supper, but there was room for interpretation. Jesus himself was the lamb led to the slaughter.

A name is precious; it carries inside it a language, a history, a set of traditions, a particular way of looking at the world. Losing it meant losing my ties to all those things too.

She said, 'God knows they owe me nought,
I tossed them to the foaming sea,
I tossed them to the howling wastes,
Yet still their love comes home to me.'

Finally democracy is catching up with the old, hierarchical, father-dominated family: the family is being democratized.

You are my country, Desdemona.... My Egypt. My hot, harrowing desert and my cool, verdant Nile, infinitely lovely and unfathomable and sustaining.

Connie Brockway

Prove it. I'll measure your words against your actions, and from that I will determine your worth.

But thou mayst grant this humble prayer,
Forget me not! forget me not!

Rather like spent swimmers, who had given up the hope of rescue and then had suddenly met with it, they were sensing with all their being, the feel of the solid ground beneath their feet, the grateful monotony of the skies above their heads,... and everywhere about them the immanence of God.... The Chinaberry Tree became a Temple.

Jessie Redmon Fauset

The only people who are truly happy are the people we do not know very well...

It is an easy thing to call names; any fool is equal to that... and the weapon of vituperation is generally used by those who lack brains for argument or are upon the wrong side.

He's been a waiten there in th wood you might say since before I was born. I jist brung him out a little — but one a these days, jist you wait an see, we'll find th time an a face fer him an bring him out a that block.

Harriette Simpson Arnow

I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Books are for me, it must be said, the most important thing.

Diane Setterfield

Lia: "You've changed your mind about wanting to marry me. You're afraid I'll burn down your home. Embarrass you in front of all the other city brutes." Zane: "I'm afraid," he said gently, "that you will burn down my heart.

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.

Dean flashed me a smile that promised rule-breaking and breathlessness.

Caitlin Kittredge

There's no way out of this, it's stark: live or die. Every given moment a bubble that bursts. Step on, from one to the next, ever onwards, a rainbow of stepping stones, each bursting softly as your foot touches and passes on. Till one step finds only empty air. Till that step, live.

It is interesting how keen people are for you to do something they would never dream of doing themselves, how enthusiasticall y they drive you to your own destruction.

It was a noteworthy lesson, even for someone who'd been fed a daily diet of italicized lessons: that people in high places, luminaries with advanced degrees in Classics and in possession of excellent manners, can disappoint you as profoundly as anyone else.

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

Happiness is simple. Everything we do to find it is complicated.