Well, it’s been a tough couple months and I’ve fallen behind miserably on my 365 quotes by women year. But I don’t want to throw in the towel, so here you go … it’s catch-up day! 25 of the missing quotes. More to come in the coming days.
First, a few from Alice McDermott, who is an extraordinary person and a great teacher, as well as a National Book Award-winning author:
- “We are surrounded by story.”
- “Scribble out the world since it was not to your liking and make up a new one, something better.”
- “It was not the future they’d been objecting to, but the loss of the past. As if it was his fault that you could now have one without the other.”
- “We are at the mercy of time, and for all the ways we are remembered, a sea of things will be lost. But how much is contained in what lingers.”
- “It’s sometimes more torment for a man … to consider what might have been than to live with what is.”
- “The lesson, I suppose, is that none of us have much control over how we will be remembered. Every life is an amalgam, and it is impossible to know what moments, what foibles, what charms will come to define us once we’re gone. All we can do is live our lives fully, be authentically ourselves, and trust that the right things about us, the best and most fitting things, will echo in the memories of us that endure.”
- “Incident (in novels and in life) is momentary, and temporary, but the memory of an incident, the story told about it, the meaning it takes on or loses over time, is lifelong and fluid, and that’s what interests me and what I hope will prove interesting to readers. We’re deluged with stories of things that have happened, events, circumstances, actions, etc. We need some stories that reveal how we think and feel and hope and dream.”
- “Forever is composed of nows.”
- “Saying nothing sometimes says the most.”
- “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.”
- “Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all.” - “The Brain—is wider than the Sky—”
- “Beauty is not caused. It is.”
- “The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.”
- “If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain.”
- “A little Madness in the Spring Is wholesome even for the King.”
- “I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine.”
- “Men like women who write, even though they don’t say so. A writer is a foreign country.” – Marguerite Duras
- “Male writers are thought of as ‘writers’ first and then ‘men.’ As for female writers, they are first ‘female’ and only then ‘writers.'” – Elif Shafak, Black Milk: On Writing, Motherhood, and the Harem Within
- “Writing is a kind of revenge against circumstance too: bad luck, loss, pain. If you make something out of it, then you’ve no longer been bested by these events.” – Louise Glück
- “The only way to leave the circle, to stop dancing with the jailer, is to find a way to preserve one’s individuality, that unique quality which evades description but differentiates one human being from the other.” – Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran
- “Certain places seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them.” – Joan Didion
- “If Art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally.” – George Eliot
- “Literature is impoverished beyond our counting by the doors that have been shut upon women.”
- “Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems.”
A few from Emily Dickinson, a poet I love:
A few miscellaneous:
And two from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own:
Happy writing!
Meg
