Quotes by Women Novelists

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

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

A writer starts out, I think, wanting to be a transfiguring agent, and ends up usually just making contact, contact with other human beings. This, unsurprisingly, is not enough.

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

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

Marguerite de Angeli

After all, this is a world of rock and water and air. It is elemental. It is not ours.

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

If we think saying no is going to hurt a guy's feelings, imagine what a restraining order will do.

Susan Jane Gilman

No accident of environment or circumstance need cut us off from nature.... It does not matter how shut in we are. Opportunity for wide experience is of small acccount in this as in other things; it is depth that brings understanding and life.

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

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

You are a terror, aren't you? Leave this yard alone. I know just where everything is in it, and I won't be able to find the things I need for my transport spells if you tidy them up.'So there was probably a bundle of souls or a box of chewed hearts somewhere out here, Sophie thought. She felt really thwarted. 'Tidying up is what I'm here for!' she shouted at Howl. 'Then you must think of a new meaning for your life,' Howl said.

Diana Wynne Jones

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

Jayne Ann Krentz

A fruit is not afraid of its own weight. It grows into its skin fully. It is whole, each part of its body equally alive.

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

There is a difference between the facts of a person and the truth of him.

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?

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

You didn't realize what was passing you by until you slowed down a little bit to get a better look.

Karin Slaughter

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.

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

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.

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

Kristin Cashore