Quotes by Women Novelists

The moon drowsed between the trees like a great yellow moth.

Hallie Erminie Rives

To define a man: he must be a creature who makes me feel that I am a woman.

Intimacy between stepchildren and stepparents is indeed proverbially difficult.

Murasaki Shikibu

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

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

You'd have thought that after suffering such a loss nothing else would matter to her but that didn't seem to be how it worked. She was fearful about everything now. It was as if she had finally seen the awful power of fate, it's deviousness, the way it could wipe out in an instant the one thing you had been certain you could rely on, and now she was constantly looking over her shoulder, trying to work out where the next blow might fall.

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

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?

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

Sena Jeter Naslund

After she wrote her first two novels:

I thought I'd walk down the street and everybody would know I had written a book. But nobody took any notice of these two novels, and I stopped writing. I felt uneasy for about three years.

Beryl Bainbridge

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.

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

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?

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.

Perhaps lovers aren't supposed to look down at the ground. That kind of story is told in symbols-and earth represents reality, and reality represents frustrations, chance illnesses, death, murder, and all kinds of other tragedies. Lovers are meant to look up at the sky, for up there no beautiful illusions can be trampled upon.

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.

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?

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.

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

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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

All schoolchildren are hostages to red tape and fiscal insufficiency.

People and dogs and cows are born to be what they are. They may cover it up for a long time, but it will come out sooner or later.

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

Your past is your shadow. It has form but no substance, except in the places you allow it to touch you. (