Ruth > Ruth's Quotes

“It is common knowledge that Belle women make hard men melt like butter in a pan. They are equally adept at reversing the process.”
― Paula Wall, The Rock Orchard

“I was born trash in a land where the people all believe themselves natural aristocrats.”
― Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure

“In a flashback, we hear Holly's mother summing up her life in a conversation with her husband, Wylie: "My life is one big mistake," she said. "No, it's not," he said. "It's a series of small mistakes.”
― Will Allison

“the two girls emanated an incorrigible idle inertia.”
― William Faulkner, Barn Burning and other stories

“no pain was permanent, and no loss was real. That even though people treated each other abominably, even though they left, even though you let them go, even though you never laid eyes on them again, this fugue that linked you continued, whether you liked it or not.”
― Lisa Alther, Bedrock

“All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“Sometimes you know before you know.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Range of Motion

“I will never be crazy," repeats the adolescent hero to herself. "I will never get killed. I have to grow up.”
― Blanche M. Boyd

“I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods.”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories

“Stick to the needle, learn shirt-making and gown-making and piecrust-making, and you will be a clever woman some day.”
― Charlotte Bronte

“do what only a true artist can do ... pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“Neither the cat nor I missed you while you were gone. It's worse than that. We danced the visitor-gone dance, flinging our feet (and paws) with particular glee. You remember the dance - the one you do after shutting the door behind a difficult visitor (like a family member)? You hold your breath for 120 seconds then deadbolt the door, race to the bed, leap on to it and jump, twirl, bell-kick and prance, singing all the while, "she's go-onnne, she's gooo-oonne.”
― Melissa Checker

“I am in love with a pianist, without his piano what is he?”
― Jai Clare

“I know once you repent, Jesus himself isn't big on punishment, but according to all the Old Testament stories, I ever heard, his was not above it”
― Pearl Cleage, What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day

“Swans sing before they die— 't were no bad thing
Should certain persons die before they sing.”
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“an arsenal of serious tools that needed to be sworn at to work properly.”
― C. Bard Cole

“There are all kinds of truth ... but behind all of them there is only one truth and that is that there's no truth.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood

“On the third Wednesday of every month I'd visit fat Dr. Pinski, an old demoralized psychiatrist who couldn't have spotted a suicide if the malcontent's errant bullet ricocheted off his desk and grazed him with a flesh wound. And chances are it would be a flesh wound, cuz he was packing. Flesh. Lots of it too.”
― Trebor Healey

“There is light in darkness, you just have to find it.”
― bell hooks

“This is what you learned in college," the narrator tells you early on. "A man desires the satisfaction of his desire; a woman desires the condition of desiring.”
― Pam Muñoz Ryan

“What happens to a dream deferred? / Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?”
― Langston Hughes

“If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat. It is an unnecessary insult.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“I am an invisible man. No I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe: Nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids, and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, simply because people refuse to see me.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Reader, I married him.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“The thought of him was a smoky cloud from hell that moved and crept in her head.”
― Katherine Anne Porter, The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter

“When Jo's conservative sister Meg says she must turn up her hair now that she is a "young lady," Jo shouts, "I'm not! and if turning up my hair makes me one, I'll wear it in two tails till I'm twenty.... I hate to think I've got to grow up, and be Miss March, and wear long gowns, and look as prim as a China aster! It's bad enough to be a girl anyway, when I like boys' games and work and manners! I can't get over my disappointment in not being a boy; and it's worse than ever now, for I'm dying to go and fight with Papa, and I can only stay at home and knit, like a poky old woman.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“it's what makes you grow up to have younguns and be a sho-nuff mammy all your own ... . A man ain't but trouble, just breath and britches and trouble”
― Margaret Walker, Jubilee

“The first time I had sex with a man for money, it was September.”
― Laura Kasischke, Suspicious River

“Her name was a joke, she said, like Karen Cutter's family nick-naming her Cookie, or poor Marie Antoinette Jones, whose parents had liked the sound of the name but who were a tad weak in French history.”
― Miriam N. Kotzin

“But why should I cast myself in the ancient female part of victim of men's plots and passions?”
― Ellen Douglas, A Lifetime Burning