Quotes by Women Novelists

It takes bravery to care for someone — no matter who he is or what made him, whether he is weak or walking or jumping out of windows. The risk involved is enormous.

Deb Olin Unferth

To define a man: he must be a creature who makes me feel that I am a woman.

You build your world around someone, and then what happens when he disappears? Where do you go-into pieces, into atoms, into the arms of another man? You go shopping, you cook dinner, you work odd hours, you make love to someone else on June nights. But you're not really there.

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

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?

Everything on the earth has a purpose, every disease an herb to cure it, and every person a mission. This is the Indian theory of existence.

Mourning Dove (author)

That's how fossil hunting is: It takes over, like a hunger, and nothing else matters but what you find. And even when you find it, you still start looking again the next minute, because there might be something even better waiting.

Tracy Chevalier

Fresh blood at midnight isn't red. It's a purplish black that easily blends into the shadows.

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

The world is shaped by two things — stories told and the memories they leave behind.

The easy road is always under construction,so have an alternate route planned.

It is easier to learn a bad habit than to break one. It is easier to break a good habit than to learn one.

Evelyn E. Smith

In life, periods of solitude were blessings. Dying alone was a bitter curse.

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

Fortune does not change men, it unmasks them. —SUZANNE NECKER, WIFE OF JACQUES NECKER, MINISTER OF FINANCE

There has come a time when we can no longer remain silent but must speak up for our country which is being sold, abused, mined, depleted, drained, overworked, over-loved, its plants and animals becoming endangered and exterminated faster than we can renew them. Our country is silent, so we must speak and act to save it.

You'd have thought that after suffering such a loss nothing else would matter to her but that didn't seem to be how it worked. She was fearful about everything now. It was as if she had finally seen the awful power of fate, it's deviousness, the way it could wipe out in an instant the one thing you had been certain you could rely on, and now she was constantly looking over her shoulder, trying to work out where the next blow might fall.

Surrealism could not be made up. It was the very electricity of the real.

You have this comet trail of your own lived life, sparks from which arrive in the head all the time, whether you want them or not - life has been lived but it is still all going on, in the mind for better and for worse.

Penelope Lively

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.

I couldn't take my eyes off him. Like a desert wanderer afraid of mirages, I gazed at my oasis, but he was real.

Although intelligence tests are usually speed tests for the sake of convenience, it is debatable whether speed has any rightful place in the basic concept of intelligence.

Isabel Briggs Myers

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

Who expects small things to survive when even the largest get lost? People forget years and remember moments.

Pacifists lead a lonely life. Not even gathering together can take the place of that vast, warm sun of approval that is shed on motherhood, on law-abiding, on killing, and on making money. Someday will we come into our own? Well, motherhood may move into the shade. Law-abiding is going through a trauma. But killing and making money are good for a long, long time.

Josephine Johnson