Continuing to play catch up on my year of quotes by women, another 25. These are all from women writers I have the privilege to have met!
From Ann Patchett’s Truth and Beauty:
“Writing is a job, a talent, but it’s also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon.”
“I was starting to wonder if I was ready to be a writer, not someone who won prizes, got published and was given the time and space to work, but someone who wrote as a course of life. Maybe writing wouldn’t have any rewards. Maybe the salvation I would gain through work would only be emotional and intellectual. Wouldn’t that be enough, to be a waitress who found an hour or two hidden in every day to write?”
“The process of putting the thing you value most in the world out for the assessment of strangers is a confidence-shaking business even in the best of times.”
“I wrote the last sentence of The Patron Saint of Liars in early April and stumbled out of my apartment and into the beautiful spring feeling panicked and amazed. There is no single experience in my life as a writer to match that moment, the blue of the sky and the breeze drifting in from the bay. I had done the thing I had always wanted to do: I had written a book, all the way to the end. Even if it proved to be terrible, it was mine.”
From Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto:
“It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.”
From Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale:
“If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending… But if it’s a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don’t tell a story only to yourself. There’s always someone else. Even when there is no one.”
“When we think of the past it’s the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.”
“Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”
“But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.”
“Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”
From Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves:
“In the phrase ‘ human being,’ the word ‘being’ is much more important than the word ‘human.’ ”
“When I run the world, librarians will be exempt from tragedy. Even their smaller sorrows will last only for as long as you can take out a book.”
“The happening and telling are very different things. This doesn’t mean that the story isn’t true, only that I honestly don’t know anymore if I really remember it or only remember how to tell it. Language does this to our memories, simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An off-told story is like a photograph in a family album. Eventually it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.”
“In everyone’s life there are people who stay and people who go and people who are taken against their will.”
“You learn as much from failure as from success … Though no one admires you for it.”
From Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club:
“Fate is shaped half by expectation, half by inattention.”
“You must think for yourself, what you must do. If someone tells you, then you are not trying.”
“The wound begins to close in on itself, to protect what is hurting so much. And once it is closed, you no longer see what is underneath, what started the pain.”
“Isn’t hate merely the result of wounded love?”
“To despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable.”
From Lalita Tademy’s Cane River:
“You can’t tell how heavy somebody else’s load is just from looking. The Lord doesn’t give us more than we can carry.”
“Sometimes while you wait for what you think is better … what is good enough slips away.”
“There is nothing more satisfying than having plans.”
From Michelle Richmond’s No One You Know:
“A story … does not only belong to the one who is telling it. It belongs, in equal measure, to the one who is listening.”
“Life isn’t just about major characters and the big events. It’s about everyone, everything, in between.”
Have a great week!
Meg
