Quotes by Women Novelists

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

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?

In every person's face, there is one place that seems to express them most accurately. With my grandmother, you always looked at her mouth.

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.

Sometimes you remember your life in photographs that were never taken.

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.

Despite disappointments, the Christian is obligated to pray for the sick because we are bidden to do so and because the crumb of our caring is but a morsel broken from the whole loaf of the Father's infinite and tender love.

Catherine Marshall

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

These are all I have. I do not have the wide, bright beacon of some solid old lighthouse, guiding ships safely home, past the jaggedrocks. I only have these little glimmers that flicker and then go out.

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

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

I know heaps of quotations, so I can always make quite a fair show of knowledge.

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

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.

The idea of a series of items, following one another docilely, forms the only possible reasonable approach to life if you have to live it with a home and a husband and children, none of whom would dream of following one another docilely.

Shirley Jackson

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

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.

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

I think you will agree that life's plans are not always tied up in neat little packages. Occasionally we find ourselves at unexpected crossroads with more than one opportunity from which to choose. Time itself is often the best indicator of which decision to make, for it can tell so many thing that are now hazy.

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.

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

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?