Quotes by Women Novelists

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

I've always believed that luck ranked right up there with brains.

Catherine Coulter

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.

He always said she was smart, but their conversations were a mined field in which at any moment she might make the wrong verbal move and find her ignorance exploding in her face.

We approached our new microwave oven with the trepidation of two people returning to a reactor station after a leak.

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

Marguerite de Angeli

There's more than one way to tell each other things, and there's more than one way to listen, too.

Katherine Hannigan

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

Kristin Cashore

It's important to be smart, but it's also important to be active with your intelligence. The more you sit around over-thinking things, the more trouble you get into.

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

This is what I will forever hold against men in general: that they have carefully selected out and inoculated intelligent women with a sense of specialness: you're not like other girls. Damn, for a woman, you sure are bright as hell!

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.

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

Nothing comes back. The eye sees for a moment, the ear hears, but look, now it is gone.

Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in. In other words: Home has exceedingly low standards.

In my experience ideology is a lot like religion; it's a belief system and most people cling to it long after it becomes clear that their ideology doesn't describe the real world.

Maureen F. McHugh

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.

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

Hey, God made us sexual creatures. If he wanted teenagers to wait that long, he would have made puberty start at twenty-five.

There's Conservatives an' they want to make things better by keepin' 'em jus' like what they are now. An' there's Lib'rals an' they want to make things better by alterin' them jus' a bit, but not so's anyone'd notice, an' there's communists an' they want to make things better by killin' everyone but themselves.

Richmal Crompton

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

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.

Sisterhood is a funny thing. It's easy to recognize, but hard to define.