Quotes by Women Novelists

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.

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

Elinor Glyn
Elinor Glyn
If there was no fear, how could there be comfort? Or courage?

There are deep lines on each side of his mouth and I know they are the scars from the thin blade of life.

I send thee pansies while the year is young,
Yellow as sunshine, purple as the night;
Flowers of remembrance, ever fondly sung
By all the chiefest of the Sons of Light.

The message of women's liberation is that women can love each other and ourselves against our degrading education.

Jane Rule
Jane Rule
Finally democracy is catching up with the old, hierarchical, father-dominated family: the family is being democratized.

Things get passed around so easily on the Internet. Fact becomes fiction and fiction becomes fact.

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

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

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.

As Romeo and Juliet found to their cost, marriage is never just about two people falling in love, it is about families.

Men and women will forever make gods of others rather than see the god in themselves.

I shall not tell your husband and you shall not tell my wife." Tell them what?" That you and I were outwitted by a ropma." That would be shamful." Girl, we could never live it down.

You kids were all in college, and I suddenly saw that I was stuck alone with a man who, all those years later, was still wanting me to be someone I wasn't.

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.

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

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

Lorrie Moore
Lorrie Moore
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.

Freedom came in strange forms and from unexpected directions.

She had gradually changed her name. "Jane" was too dull. Last year, she'd added a "y", becoming Jayne, which had more personality.

In our days of prosperity it is more difficult to sustain a religious spirit than in times of adversity, because we are apt to forget that God who has bountifully given may also take away.

A legacy is a contract that obligates the recipient to rise to meet the best that the legacy symbolizes.

It is rather calming to remember that you really couldn't have foreseen what is happening to you.

It ought to be a crime for any woman to have children that writes books.

Josephine Daskam Bacon
Josephine Daskam Bacon