Quotes by Women Novelists

I send thee pansies while the year is young,
Yellow as sunshine, purple as the night;
Flowers of remembrance, ever fondly sung
By all the chiefest of the Sons of Light.

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.

Is this just what you do? You start to get involved, get scared when the emotions are too much, and then dream up any excuse you can to run? Or to invite the other person to dump you?

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

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.

Amanda McKittrick Ros

A legacy is a contract that obligates the recipient to rise to meet the best that the legacy symbolizes.

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.

'Jolly good! Super!' He occasionally adopted the mannerisms of an effusive scout-master.

The tiny flame danced beneath her fluttering breath, and she lifted the taper high above her head as she warily approached her visitor. His translucent eyes reflected the flickering light, and the hungry yearning visible in those luminous depths was so intense it seemed almost tangible.

Kathleen E. Woodiwiss

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.

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

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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.

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

Jayne Ann Krentz

Some men were nothing but overgrown boys who never got over the "fun" of teasing girls, just to get noticed

Esther Friesner

A lot of people get flipped out if you're quiet. They say stuff like, What are you thinking? And if they don't start interrogating you, they start talking, going on and on about stuff that's totally irrelevant, and the silence gets so big and loud that it's scary.

And off in the far distance, the gold on the wings of the angel atop the bell tower of San Marco flashed in the sun, bathing the entire city in its glistening benediction.

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.

Life on earth, filled with uncertainty and change, seemed far more difficult than what lay beyond the grave.

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

There was nothing more dangerous than people convinced of their own good intentions.

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

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

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

Kristin Cashore