Quotes by Women Novelists

You want a husband who has time to ask you if you wish to eat rice, or drink corn pap with honey? Forget it. Men here are too busy being white men's servants to be men. We women mind the home. Not our husbands. Their manhood has been taken away from them The shame of it is that they don't know it. All they see is the money, shining white man's money.

And they need not cause you grief. As my Highland grandmother said-and she had the Sight-Tis not the dead ye have to be concerned about! Beware of the Living! And she was a wise woman. The dead are beyond your help or mine, poor things. But the living need us. Thirty souls at the least, Phryne, are still on that island to praise God who might now be angels-or devils.

Kerry Greenwood

The gorilla is a strict vegetarian like the elephant and buffalo — three of the four most dangerous animals in Africa. It behooves one to walk softly with vegetarians.

Mary Hastings Bradley

Patriotism was a great thing but it worked best when it was tempered by common sense.

Jayne Ann Krentz

Work is a dull thing; you cannot get away from that. The only agreeable existence is one of idleness, and that is not, unfortunately, always compatible with continuing to exist at all.

You wouldn't be caught wearing cheap perfume, would you? Then why do you want to wear cheap perfume in your conduct?

Margaret Culkin Banning

Nothing comes back. The eye sees for a moment, the ear hears, but look, now it is gone.

Sometimes you just want the comfort of knowing that somebody really does care about you (even if they show it in peculiar ways).

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.

You can tell a lot about a person not just by their successes, but by how they deal with their setbacks

Sarah Mlynowski

How we danced. The music poured through our veins and we flowed with the beat. The wheel had come full circle. We wound and unwound our bodies seamlessly as if we had no bones. Is there a sight more beautiful, the older women said, than a Yoruba girl dancing?

Three things Marco taught me today race through my mind: boys will lie to your face just to have sex with you, don't trust any boy who says I love you, and never date a boy who lives on the south side of Fairfield.

He always said she was smart, but their conversations were a mined field in which at any moment she might make the wrong verbal move and find her ignorance exploding in her face.

The Christian Scientists held that it was not God Who wanted sickness, but man who [put] himself in the way of suffering. If this were the case, though, wouldn't we all die in perfect health?

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

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.

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

Is it not the case that many a life journey starts out in the opposite direction to its destiny?

Sena Jeter Naslund

People think they have to be good before they can act good. But... it works just as well the other way 'round.

What would have been the effect upon religion if it had come to us through the minds of women?

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

A woman will not understand what true dependency is until she is cradling her own infant in her arms; nor will she likely achieve the self-confidence she craves until she has withstood, and transcended, the weight of responsibility a family places upon her — a weight that makes all the paperwork and assignments of her in-basket seem feather-light.

Danielle Crittenden

All schoolchildren are hostages to red tape and fiscal insufficiency.

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.

Thou hast only to follow the wall far enough and there will be a door in it.

Marguerite de Angeli

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