Quotes by Women Novelists

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

There is a special blessing in old clothes, and that aside from their comfort, for which especially they are to be cherished. They confer a kind of anonymity on one who wears them gladly; all their bright places rubbed to a uniform dullness, they achieve an appearance so nearly nondescript that only a close scrutiny could learn that ever they held shape at all.

It is an easy thing to call names; any fool is equal to that... and the weapon of vituperation is generally used by those who lack brains for argument or are upon the wrong side.

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

The ultimate umpire of all things in Life is — Fact.

Agnes Christina Laut

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.

Claire Scovell LaZebnik

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

Marguerite de Angeli

I myself love getting cookbooks and novels that some congenial person has already tried and liked.

Cheryl Mendelson

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

Kristin Cashore

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

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

All things die not: while the soul lives, love lives: the song may be now gay, now plaintive, but it is deathless.

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

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

I have confidence that God is with us in all things, both tender and tough

The familiar was usually invisible; how many people really noticed everything they saw?

How a mother comes to love her child, her caring at all for this thing that's made her heavy, lopsided and slow, this thing that made her wish she were dead... that's the miracle.

Flee and your bad behavior will be fixed in people's minds. Return, seem in goo spirits, and everyone will doubt their own memory of events.

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.

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.

I felt the kind of desperation, I think, that cancels the possibility of empathy...that makes you unkind.

There are those people who love their mothers, just so; and there are those who, out of whatever accident of temperament have to be in love with them.

Judith Grossman

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

Hallie Erminie Rives

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