Novelists From England

"I’ve got the worst time of my life ahead of me, and our wonderful medical establishment will stretch it out and out until I just scream for it to end."

"It didn’t matter that Nicole had made all the moves; sleeping with a friend’s granddaughter had to be pretty close to the top of all-time Bad Things."

"It was a struggle that had turned her into a minor media celebrity, and produced a great many supporters from across the political spectrum, all of them loud."

"Jesus, what planet do they import people like that from?"

"“Ladies,” Pamela raise her glass. “A toast.” “A toast,” they agreed. “Expensive shopping, older champagne, and younger men.”"

"“Bankers in pain,” Alan said. “Now there’s a happy thought.”"

"It must be a sign of true age to think parties were a pain to be avoided at all costs."

"We have been extraordinarily successful. As a result, only Europe is in a position to provide this treatment for its citizens. America, with its increasingly isolationist foreign policy and Religious Right cultural dominance, is a long way behind us in this field. Our unquestioned leadership in this field can only be seen as an endorsement of our social inclusiveness. Ours is the culture in which the promotion of human life can flourish to its full potential."

"Lost causes are the worst kind to fight."

"Even Sue was impressed by how quickly he slid from reasonable human being to petulant teenage grouch."

"One of the reasons she’d never quite made it to supermodel status was her generous bust size."

"Well, just remember, babies are God’s way of persuading parents to have teenagers."

"Having a famous father is a difficult concept for any child to understand. After all, he is just your father, nothing else, nothing exceptional."

"Faith, Quinn mused, was a strange power. They had committed their lives to the sect, never questioning its gospels. Yet in all of that time, they had the reassurance of routine… The bedrock of every religion, that your God is a promise, never to be encountered in this life, this universe."

"Like men in his position throughout history, Kingsley Pryor did nothing as events swept him to their conclusion; simply waiting and praying that a magical third option would spring from nowhere."

"Here there was only yourself; a soul buried alive. Nothing to comfort you but your own life. Screaming from the pain of the blows which battered him down might have stopped, but the internal scream of self-loathing could never cease."

"Mockery; the righteousness of fools everywhere."

"But to have dreamed the dream is to have flown above the mountains so high in all but deed."

"The whole concept of salvation through belief offers strength to those who doubt themselves."

"I believe that intelligence and rationality will always be primary no matter what shape sentient creatures take. To not think that would be to doubt the value of life itself."

"“They lied!” “Of course they lied. They’re politicians, it’s what they do.”"

"Jeff didn’t blame Dr. Sperber, but he’d been around long enough to know how the information would be used, twisted, sanitized, controlled, released in a way that left Brussels devoid of responsibility. That was the way of all government and politicians; it was never their fault."

"Politicians, they’re all as bad as each other."

"“Want to talk about it?” “No.” “I think you’re supposed to. All my friends who talk native psychobabble say you should rationalize events back to their origin point so you can acknowledge their structural integration within your life flow.” “Alison, that’s…that…such a load of crap.” “I know that.”"

"You cannot impose ideologies on people who do not embrace it wholeheartedly."

"When he thought about it, he wasn’t totally sure what kind of group he did want to be with on a permanent social basis. Late twenties, probably, or early thirties. Young enough not to be boring, old enough to have some wisdom."

"“I look young, almost as young as you lot; but the real difference between us is cynicism. You don’t have any, while I’ve got a ton of it.” “I’m cynical, Philip protested. “I don’t believe a word politicians say.” “That’s not cynicism,” Sophie said. “That’s just common sense.”"

"Jeff hadn’t played croquet for twenty years. It was fun remembering all the dirty tricks. Anybody who believed that croquet was a civilized sport had clearly never played before."

"Joshua was the most dynamic lover she had ever known. Gentle and domineering; it was a lethal combination. If only he wasn't quite so ruthlessly mechanical about it. A little too much of his pleasure had come from seeing her lose all control. But then that was Joshua; unwilling to share… Joshua didn't trust people."

"Nothing could be more natural than the developement of the passions, nor more striking than the views of the human heart. What delicate struggles! and uncommonly pretty turns of thought!"

"Ideas of female equality were in the air during and after the Revolution. Tom Paine spoke out for the equal rights of women. And the pioneering book of Mary Wollstonecraft in England, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, was reprinted in the United States shortly after the Revolutionary War. Wollstonecraft was responding to the English conservative and opponent of the French Revolution, Edmund Burke, who had written in his Reflections on the Revolution in France that "a woman is but an animal, and an animal not of the highest order." She wrote: "I wish to persuade women to endeavor to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, with delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous epithets of weakness, and that those beings who are only the objects of pity and that kind of love... will soon become objects of contempt....I wish to show that the first object of laudable ambition is to obtain a character as a human being, regardless of the distinction of sex.""

"According to Wollstonecraft, "Independence is the grand blessing of life"… Wollstonecraft here refers to both economic independence and independent opinion. Education is the key to both."

"She strove to reconcile integrity and sexual desire, the duties and needs of women, motherhood and intellectual life, domesticity and fame."

"Women have crucified the Mary Wollstonecrafts, the Fanny Wrights, and the George Sands of all ages. Men mock us with the fact and say we are ever cruel to each other... If this present woman must be crucified, let men drive the spikes."

"Wollstonecraft was an Enlightenment philosopher who argued for the rule of reason and the education of women, and against monarchy and slavery. Her "radical" views earned her the epithet "a hyena in petticoats," most likely from an ancestor of Bill O'Reilly."

"According to the liberal tradition outlined by Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), education is the key to social improvement, allowing a woman to develop her rational and moral capacities."

"Mary Wollstonecraft conceded the central point of the genteel theory with these words: "That woman is naturally weak, or degraded by a concurrence of circumstances, is, I think, clear." In effect she took over Rousseau's thesis, and phrased it in her fashion: Woman is everywhere in chains but I propose to show her the road to freedom. In Wollstonecraft's view, the idea that woman was formed to please man and could govern him by the use of sex charms "is the philosophy of lasciviousness," an offense against virtue, reason, and respectability - against everything that gives dignity and value to human life...Scattered through Vindication of the Rights of Woman were innumerable opinions equally preposterous. Yet the boldness of the book, like the experiments in living which the author undertook, attracted attention, friendly and adverse, to this ardent advocate of human "rights." Mary Wollstonecraft's unrepressed thrust at conventions was issued in an American edition at Boston the same year of its publication in England. Her name entered the stream of consciousness in which other names of social rebels floated near the surface or deeper in memory. To this day she is a near-saint of countless feminists, most of whom have probably never read a line of her pamphlet on women critically at least."

"I think I've brought figures of resistance into my poetry for quite a while-going back to the voice of Mary Wollstonecraft in "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law" (1960). History has always felt to me an immense resource for art, and poetry as a place where history can be kept alive-not grandmaster narratives, but otherwise forgotten or erased people and actions."

"Young women of America, I want you to make yourselves acquainted with the history of the Woman’s Rights movement, from the days of Mary Wollstonecraft. All honor to Mary Wollstoncraft. Her name was cast out as evil, even as that of Jesus was cast out as evil, and as those of the apostles were cast out as evil; but her name shall yet go forth and stand as the pioneer of this movement. I want you to note the progress of this cause, and know now that Woman’s redemption is a hand, yea, even at the doors."

"Deriving their analytic framework from the work of an earlier generation of feminists, particularly such singular rebels as Mary Wollstonecraft and Sarah Grimké, the anarchist women insisted that the humanity of women was all the justification their cause required."

"women's marginalization in the process of History-making has set them back intellectually and has kept them for far longer than was necessary from developing a consciousness of their collectivity in sisterhood, not motherhood. The cruel repetitiousness by which individual women have struggled to a higher level of consciousness, repeating an effort made a number of times by other women in previous centuries, is not only a symbol of women's oppression but is its actual manifestation. Thus, even the most advanced feminist thinkers, up to and including those in the early 20th century, have been in dialogue with the "great men" before them and have been unable to verify, test and improve their ideas by being in dialogue with the women thinkers before them. Mary Wollstonecraft argued with Burke and Rousseau, when arguing with Makin, Astell and Margaret Fell might have sharpened her thought and radicalized her...Simone de Beauvoir, in a passionate dialogue with Marx, Freud, Sartre and Camus, could go as far with a feminist critique of patriarchal values and institutions as it was possible to go when the thinker was male-centered. Had she truly engaged with Mary Wollstonecraft's thought, the works of Mary Astell, the Quaker feminists of the early 19th century, the mystical revisioners among the black spiritualists and the feminism of Anna Cooper, her analysis might have become woman-centered and therefore capable of projecting alternatives to the basic mental constructs of patriarchal thought. Her erroneous assertion that, "They [women] have no past, no history, no religion of their own," was not just an oversight and a flaw, but a manifestation of the basic limitations which have for millennia limited the power and effectiveness of women's thought."

"Even though Mary Wollstonecraft had little or no presence in history or literature curricula as recently as a generation ago, she has never exactly been a minor figure. Some, certainly, have wished her so. A dauntless advocate of political reform, Wollstonecraft was one of the first to vindicate the "rights of man," but in her own — brief — lifetime and ever since, she achieved notoriety principally for her championship of women's rights. And while some of this notoriety took the particular form of scandal of the sort that often attends women directly involved in public affairs, some of it she directly sought in her writing and in her conduct. Controversy always inspired Wollstonecraft, always sharpened her sense of purpose."

"Mary Wollstonecraft's reputation has suffered vicissitudes which, even in the history of genius, are unusual. Her name, during her lifetime, was lauded to the skies by one half of the reading public, and — in exactly proportional measure — vituperated by the other half. Then, for more than half a century, it was wholly forgotten, or remembered only as suggesting certain vague associations of a grotesque and not altogether decorous kind. Within the last forty years, the mists have been gradually lifting, and she stands revealed for what she was — a woman singularly original in thought and noble in character."

"I firmly believe there does not exist her equal in the world. I know from experience we were formed to make each other happy. I have not the least expectation that I can now ever know happiness again."

"If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book. She speaks of her sorrows, in a way that fills us with melancholy, and dissolves us in tenderness, at the same time that she displays a genius which commands all our admiration. Affliction had tempered her heart to a softness, almost more than human; and the gentleness of her spirit seems precisely to accord with all the romance of unbounded attachment."

"During that period (around 1906) I had studied two more books, which helped to catapult me into socialist activities. One was the Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft; the other was Women and Socialism by August Bebel."

"I never saw that great woman, Mary Wollstonecraft, but I l have read her eloquent and unanswerable arguments in behalf of the liberty of womankind. I have met and known most of the progressive women who came after her...a long galaxy of great women...There have been others also just as true and devoted to the cause — I wish I could name every one — but with such women consecrating their lives, failure is impossible!"

"An ardent affection for the human race makes enthusiastic characters eager to produce alteration in laws and governments prematurely. To render them useful and permanent, they must be the growth of each particular soil, and the gradual fruit of the ripening understanding of the nation, matured by time, not forced by an unnatural fermentation."

"Situation seems to be the mould in which men's characters are formed."

"It is the preservation of the species, not of individuals, which appears to be the design of Deity throughout the whole of nature."