Quotes by Women Novelists

Let bygones be bygones because everybody knew that forgiveness was divine.

Everything on the earth has a purpose, every disease an herb to cure it, and every person a mission. This is the Indian theory of existence.

Mourning Dove (author)
Mourning Dove (author)
I have a work presently in the Press named 'Six Months in Hell' which you may one day read. I consider it will be worth perusing, bruising badly the morals of Britain and America, while Royalty, clergy, critics, society and bloodhounds of law must all incur its censure.

It takes more than Love and Passion to make a relationship work

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?

In life, periods of solitude were blessings. Dying alone was a bitter curse.

In our days of prosperity it is more difficult to sustain a religious spirit than in times of adversity, because we are apt to forget that God who has bountifully given may also take away.

To act the part of a true friend requires more conscientious feeling than to fill with credit and complacency any other station or capacity in social life.

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

Gail Godwin
Gail Godwin
What arrogance, what stupidity led us to this desolation, to this madness, to this wickedness, to this war, to this death? When this cruel war was over, there will be no more war. It will not happen again, never again. NEVER AGAIN, never again.

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

I will be thin and pure like a glass cup. Empty. Pure as light. Music. I move my hands over my body - my shoulders, my collarbone, my rib cage, my hip bones like part of an animal skull, my small thighs. In the mirror my face is pale and my eyes look bruised. My hair is pale and thin and the light comes through. I could be a lot younger than seventeen. I could be a child still, untouched.

Francesca Lia Block
Francesca Lia Block
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.

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.'

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
Jacqueline Susann
We turn to literature to remedy the loss, to impose some kind of meaningful order on the nonsequential.

My life is flashing lights and pointing fingers and uninvited visitors. Inches away, humans flatten their little hands against the wall of glass that separates us.The glass says you are this and we are that and that is how it will always be.

K. A. Applegate
K. A. Applegate
Perfume companies ought to bottle the smell of crisp bacon. Forget pheromones. I'll bet a woman with a little spot of bacon grease behind her ears would attract every male within a five-mile radius.

It is easier to learn a bad habit than to break one. It is easier to break a good habit than to learn one.

Intimacy between stepchildren and stepparents is indeed proverbially difficult.

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.

Juliana's a year older than me, but she sometimes seems younger - mostly because she's the opposite of cynical and I'm the opposite of the opposite of cynical.

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
Jessie Redmon Fauset
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.

Laila Lalami
Laila Lalami
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.