Allison

“Once when I visited Buddy I found Mrs. Willard braiding a rug out of strips of wool from Mr. Willard’s old suits. She’d spent weeks on that rug, and I had admired the tweedy browns and greens and blues patterning the braid, but after Mrs. Willard was through, instead of hanging the rug on the wall the way I would have done, she put it down in place of her kitchen mat, and in a few days it was soiled and dull and indistinguishable from any mat you could buy for under a dollar in the five and ten. And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs. Willard’s kitchen mat.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“The phrase comes from that treasury of literary titles, Ecclesiastes, 7:4: “The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“We brought up issues that concerned us as young feminists and womanists. Was Janie Crawford a good female role model or was she solely defined by the men in her life? Many of us argued that Janie did not have to be a role model at all. She simply had to be a fully realized and complex character, which she was.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“An alienated perspective is valuable in fiction because it establishes a new vision of a world we take to be solid and familiar.”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening