Women Academics From The United States

"Better do a good deed near at home than go far away to burn incense."

"Never interrupt someone doing something you said couldn't be done."

"Never do things others can do and will do, if there are things others cannot do or will not do."

"Please know that I am aware of the hazards. I want to do it because I want to do it. Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be a challenge to others."

"In my life I had come to realize that when things were going very well indeed it was just the time to anticipate trouble. And, conversely, I learned from pleasant experience that at the most despairing crisis, when all looked sour beyond words, some delightful "break" was apt to lurk just around the corner."

"Preparation, I have often said, is rightly two-thirds of any venture."

"Anticipation, I suppose, sometimes exceeds realization."

"The most difficult thing is the decision to act. The rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life and the procedure. The process is its own reward."

"The more one does and sees and feels, the more one is able to do, and the more genuine may be one's appreciation of fundamental things like home, and love, and understanding companionship."

"The time to worry is three months before a flight. Decide then whether or not the goal is worth the risks involved. If it is, stop worrying. To worry is to add another hazard. It retards reactions, makes one unfit. . . . Hamlet would have been a bad aviator. He worried too much."

"I want you to understand I shall not hold you to any midaevil code of faithfulness to me nor shall I consider myself bound to you similarly."

"As I look back on the flight I think two questions have been asked me most frequently. First: Was I afraid? Secondly: What did I wear?"

"There is so much that must be done in a civilized barbarism like war."

"In soloing—as in other activities—it is far easier to start something than it is to finish it. Almost every beginner hops off with a whoop of joy, though he is likely to end his flight with something akin to the D.T.'s."

"I understood. I was a girl-a "nervous lady." I might jump out. There had to be somebody on hand to grab my ankle as I went over. It was no use to explain I had seen aeroplanes before and wasn't excitable. I was not to be permitted to go alone in the front cockpit."

"Ours is the commencement of a flying age, and I am happy to have popped into existence at a period so interesting."

"How can Life grant us boon of living, compensate For dull grey ugliness and pregnant hate Unless we dare The soul's dominion? Each time we make a choice, we pay With courage to behold the restless day, And count it fair."

"Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be but a challenge to others."

"A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension."

"Once, Lucille and I walked beside the train to the shore. There had been a freezing rain that glazed the snow with a crust of ice, and we found that, when the sun went down, the crust was thick enough for us to walk on. So we followed the train at a distance of twenty feet or so, falling now and then, because the glazed snow swelled and sank in dunes, and the tops of bushes and fence posts rose out of it in places where we did not expect them to be. But by crawling up, and sliding down, and steadying ourselves against the roofs of sheds and rabbit hutches, we managed to stay just abreast of the window of a young woman with a small head and a small hat and a brightly painted face. She wore pearl-gray gloves that reached almost to her elbows, and hooped bracelets that fell down her arms when she reached up to push a loose wisp of hair underneath her hat. The woman looked at the window very often, clearly absorbed by what she saw, which was not but merely seemed to be Lucille and me scrambling to stay beside her, too breathless to shout. When we came to the shore, where the land fell down and the bridge began to rise, we stopped and watched her window sail slowly away, along the abstract arc of the bridge."

"This document explained my aunt Molly’s departure to my whole satisfaction. Even now I always imagine her leaning from the low side of some small boat, dropping her net through the spumy billows of the upper air. Her net would sweep the turning world unremarked as a wind in the grass, and when she began to pull it in, perhaps in a pell-mell ascension of formal gentlemen and thin pigs and old women and odd socks that would astonish this lower world, she would gather the net, so easily, until the very burden itself lay all in a heap just under the surface. One last pull of measureless power and ease would spill her catch into the boat, gasping and amazed, gleaming rainbows in the rarer light."

"Such a net, such a harvesting, would put an end to all anomaly. If it swept the whole floor of heaven, it must, finally, sweep the black floor of Fingerbone, too. From there, we must imagine, would arise a great army of paleolithic and neolithic frequenters of the lake-berry gatherers and hunters and strayed children from those and all subsequent eons, down to the earliest present, to the faith-healing lady in the long, white robe who rowed a quarter of a mile out and tried to walk back in again just at sunrise, to the farmer who bet five dollars one spring that the ice was still strong enough for him to gallop his horse across. Add to them the swimmers, the boaters and canoers, and in such a crowd my mother would hardly seem remarkable. There would be a general reclaiming of fallen buttons and misplaced spectacles, of neighbors and kin, till time and error and accident were undone, and the world became comprehensible and whole. Sylvie said that in fact Molly had gone to work as a bookkeeper in a missionary hospital. It was perhaps only from watching gulls fly like sparks up the face of clouds that dragged rain the length of the lake that I imagined such an enterprise might succeed. Or it was from watching gnats sail out of the grass, or from watching some discarded leaf gleaming at the top of the wind. Ascension seemed at such times a natural law. If one added to it a law of completion--that everything must finally be made comprehensible--then some general rescue of the sort I imagined my aunt to have undertaken would be inevitable. For why do our thoughts turn to some gesture of a hand, the fall of a sleeve, some corner of a room on a particular anonymous afternoon, even when we are asleep, and even when we are so old that our thoughts have abandoned other business? What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?"

"Why were there an infinite number of ways to feel awkward? He believed this was a theological question having to do with man's place in the universe. But when he felt the true force of the question, he was always in the middle of an embarrassing emergency of some kind that paralyzed reflection."

"He wanted to assure her that his life was solitary and ascetic, as it was, almost past bearing, relieved by the library, occasional drunkenness, and lately by lunch with the Baptists. But he knew how this would sound, either pathetic or, better, like lying."

"But prison was terrible. It reduced him to absolute Jack, no matter what anyone thought of him. His great problem, after all, was other people. Prison was full of them."

"He had a way of anticipating memories he particularly did not want to have. That memory would be as unbearable as things are when there is nothing else to do but live with them."

"I love loneliness. I consider my history with loneliness to be among my great blessings…I hasten to add that it is definitely not for everyone. It should be approached with caution."

"To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know anything so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is foreshadowing -- the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries."

"She said, "Meaninglessness would come as a terrible blow to most people. It would be full of significance for them. So it wouldn't be meaningless. That's where I always end up. Once you ask if there is meaning, the only answer is yes. You can't get away from it.""

"Her family was slower to forgive a failure of discretion than they were to forgive most things actually prohibited in Scripture."

"…People are complex — that’s the whole center of interest. I don’t make my characters complex. I have a feeling that I know a character, and one of the aspects of that is knowing that they are complex. I never have the feeling of putting a character together from a selection of qualities."

"As a matter of courtesy they treated one another's deceptions like truth, which was a different thing from deceiving or being deceived. In fact, it was a great part of the fabric of mutual understanding that made their family close."

"That is why it is called a Spirit," he said. "The word in Hebrew also means wind. 'The Spirit of God brooded on the face of the deep.' It is a sort of enveloping atmosphere."

"Many people find it hard to go to church if they've been away for a while. I've seen it very often. And I'd say to them, It's because it means something to you. As it should be! So, you see, there's no reason at all to be disappointed. I used to say, The Sabbath is faithful. In a week she'll be here again."

"Experience had taught them that truth had sharp edges and hard corners, and could be seriously at odds with kindness."

"It is worth living long enough to outlast whatever sense of grievance you may acquire. Another reason why you must be careful of your health."

"I meant to leave you a reasonably candid testament to my better self, and it seems to me now that what you must see here is just an old man struggling with the difficulty of understanding what it is he's struggling with."

"Cynicism induces a state of helplessness…It disables resistance to all these ills and reduces those who can see and name them into passive collaborators.” It is used as “a kind of cover for what might otherwise seem naive”."

"Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable – which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live."

"He could knock me down the stairs and I would have worked out the theology for forgiving him before I reached the bottom. But if he harmed you in the slightest way, I'm afraid theology would fail me."

"It is one of the best traits of good people that they love where they pity. And this is truer of women than of men. So they get themselves drawn into situations that are harmful to them. I have seen this happen many, many times. I have always had trouble finding a way to caution against it. Since it is, in a word, Christlike."

"I was trying to remember what birds did before there were telephone wires. It would have been much harder for them to roost in the sunlight, which is a thing they clearly enjoy doing."

"I don’t really have an ideal reader in mind at all, whether one with or without faith. When I write it is to try to figure out something for my own purposes. It is self-indulgent really. It is much more the blank page that I write for, in some way. I have this feeling, should a problem present itself, that I should try to resolve it."

"Any human face is a claim on you, because you can't help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it."

"I can imagine Jesus befriending my grandfather, too, frying up some breakfast for him, talking things over with him, and in fact the old man did report several experiences of just that kind."

"Because of the nature of the penis, men have performance anxiety, whereas no woman ever has to prove herself in this way. So men's egos are totally involved in performance, in doing, achieving. An erection is a kind of achievement. So is peeing. As I've said, a boy has to learn to aim in order to no longer be infantile. So it's an accomplishment. The male orgasm is short-lived and transient — and that's the irony of men's sexuality. It's ironic that feminism looks at the penis as power and violence when in fact it is very weak."

"Scholars who refuse to toe the feminist line are also ignored... The iconoclastic Camille Paglia appears [only] once [...], in Women’s Realities, Women’s Choices, and is described as someone who “assails feminists for what she regards as dull rhetoric.”"

"It is very rare these days to hear anyone praising masculinity. The dissident feminist writer Camille Paglia is a refreshing example. Her observations are effective antidotes to the surfeit of disparagements."

"When I mentioned to friends that I was heading to Philadelphia to meet Camille Paglia, I realized the degree of animosity she provokes. She was contemptuously dismissed, often by people who had never read her work. Others seemed torn by her … Some praised her as fresh and profound, but even more dismissed her as outrageous and repugnant. … Despite such opinions, in person and in context instead of in sound bites, Paglia is often reasonable, witty and likable … She is also correct in at least one of her assessments — that she, like such loudmouths as Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern and Ross Perot, helps to encourage discourse and free speech in a country that needs all it can get."

"When pro-choice social commentator Camille Paglia wrote that she sanctions "murder" when it is called "abortion," pro-lifers were horrified. They should have cheered. […] Almost every pro-abortion activist lives in a zone where they conceal what abortion really is -- though they know that the procedure involves killing a person each and every time. The difference between them and Paglia is that they don't come out and say it."