Women Authors From The United States

"She made me laugh. I will miss her. Baba Wawa."

"What kind of tree are you, if you think you're a tree now?"

"Deep breaths are very helpful at shallow parties."

"A great many people think that polysyllables are a sign of intelligence and refinement so they think they will impress others with their command of obscure words."

"I find very often people like to confront rumors. It depends on how much they trust you. And you have to have a line between what is tasteful and what isn't."

"Now here I was, half Jane Wyman, half Shirley Temple, and people began to stop me in the street and say, 'Don't worry, Barbara, it's all right, you won't lose your job.' It was really very touching."

"The magical, metaphorical strain in The Future is what makes it powerful, unsettling and strange, as well as charming. The everyday fears and frustrations that shadow us on our awkward trip through the life cycle often feel enormous, even cosmic, and Ms. July has the audacity to find images and situations that give form to those metaphysical inklings. … The complexity of “The Future” is contained in its title, which refers simultaneously to a terrifying abstraction — an unknowable territory bounded by death, eternity, the end of time — and to a concrete, trivial fact. What are you going to do next? It’s a huge, scary question, but the answer is usually to be small and specific. Use your imagination. Go see this movie."

"A recent profile in The New York Times Magazine depicted Ms. July — a quiet figure on the screen and a thoughtful, witty presence on the page — as an improbably polarizing filmmaker, as likely to be scorned for her supposed preciosity as celebrated for her ingenuity. And the first part of The Future seems, quite deliberately, to test the spectrum of audience response. Are you curious? Enchanted? Frustrated? All of the above?"

"The Future is really good, a film that’s not only tighter than the free-ranging Me and You but also more mature and tonally darker. (It’s literally darker, too: July shot it in a pastel-free palette of beiges and browns.) It may not convert all her critics, and it might shock some of her fans. But “The Future” should definitively dispel the lingering notion that her art is some gossamer, transient confection. The film is devoted to the only truths worth engaging, about love, sex and death, all questions unasked in the neutered, cutesy world of, say, Napoleon Dynamite and the like. “I do believe my work should be of service,” she told me. The Future is not just a rebuke to the idea that her work is somehow shallow; it actively attacks the idea of shallowness. July wants you to feel a part of something larger than yourself and, in The Future, you do."

"Unlike certain directors who fixate on marginalia, creating art in which the engraving on a character’s belt buckle takes precedence over the story, July’s seemingly superficial gestures service something greater: a pulsing emotional center. It’s odd that she has come to represent, for some, a kind of soulless hipster cool, because in July’s work, nobody is cool. There’s no irony to it, no insider wink. Her characters are ordinary people whose lives don’t normally invite investigation. So her project is the opposite of hipster exclusion: her work is desperate to bring people together, forcing them into a kind of fellow feeling. She’s unrelentingly sincere, and maybe that sincerity makes her difficult to bear. It also might make her culturally essential."

"July’s film fits no genre, fulfills no expectations, creates its own rules and seeks only to share a strange, lovable mind with us."

"July’s unnamed narrator is a married artist with a young child — not unlike the author herself — who has just turned 45 and plans to mark the occasion by traveling alone from her home in Los Angeles to New York, temporarily leaving the domestic space to conjure inspiration for her next project. Instead of flying, she decides to try to become someone who drives across the country. "This could be the turning point of my life," she reflects. "If I lived to be ninety I was halfway through. Or if you thought of it as two lives, then I was at the very start of my second life." The splitting of one life into two. Another binary. She doesn’t make it to New York. In a move that rejects the traditional arc of the hero’s journey, she never even leaves California. But transformation happens anyway."

"What I like best is the kind of complicated messed up truth, you know … the one that's so imperfect that you know it's true."

"No one's keeping track — no one's making of an archive of these "unimportant" things, you know… but now we have an archive … and in a way, the second there's many, it becomes proof of something, something that's so unspecific — that it's — that it's lively — to me that's really alive — that kind of half nauseous, half beautiful feeling."

"I guess my favorite thing in the world is when I look at a piece of art, or read a story, or watch a movie where I walk away feeling like "Oh my god — I have to do something, I have to make something or talk to someone — things are not the same anymore" — and so I try to make work where you come away with that feeling. It's like, yeah, you're thinking about what you just saw, but even more than that — you feel able, you feel like, kind of propelled."

"Since I started making art, I’ve always had some kind of project that was really about and for other people, because I think I just need that balance to feel sane myself — you know?"

"Do you have doubts about life? Are you unsure if it is really worth the trouble? Look at the sky: that is for you. Look at each person's face as you pass them on the street: those faces are for you. And the street itself, and the ground under the street, and the ball of fire underneath the ground: all these things are for you. They are as much for you as they are for other people. Remember this when you wake up in the morning and think you have nothing. Stand up and face the east. Now praise the sky and praise the light within each person under the sky. It's okay to be unsure. But praise, praise, praise."

"Common sense and the truth should feel authorless, writ by time itself. It is actually really hard to write something that will make a terminally ill person feel better. And Positive has rules, you can't just lift your guidance from the Bible or a book about Zen; they want original material. So far none of my submissions have gotten in, but I'm getting closer."

"I pressed my lips against his ear and whispered, again, It's not your fault. Perhaps this was really the only thing I had ever wanted to say to anyone, and be told. I imagined couples at the altar, standing before the priest, declaring It's not your fault to each other, before kissing in the union."

"I pretended that I was pausing before telling him about the secret feeling of joy that I hide in my chest, waiting, waiting, waiting for someone to notice that I rise each morning seemingly with nothing to live for, but I do rise, and it is only because of this secret joy, God's love, in my chest. I looked down from the sky and into his eyes and I said, It wasn't your fault. I excused him for the cover and for everything else. For not yet being a New Man. We fell into silence then; he did not ask me any more questions. I was still happy to sit there beside him, but that is only because I have very, very low expectations of most people, and he had now become Most People."

"I think, ultimately, my character comes to think that the desire for a shared dream, a shared fantasy, a shared world, was really an attempt at a recreation of a certain kind of childhood pain. Our relationships are built on our first experiences with our parents, so the idea that longing and fantasy and boundarylessness had been established then and didn’t quite function in an adult landscape was — I mean, it’s still quite slippery for me to talk about in this way, and in fiction I felt like I had a shot. You don’t have to be articulate, which I think is important — you can let characters be dumb and stumbling. That is what art can do that talking about art can’t."

"At this point, I’ve come to realize that where you are, the space you’re in, what you wear, this one body that you’re in for this life — those of course matter because you are really here, you’re not just an idea in your head. And there is something profound about noticing again and again that you’re here."

"I’m totally not kidding. … Life is too short. This is all too hard to do to actually be kidding about the whole thing."

"I think there’s something spiritual in a very day-to-day, mundane existence. It’s impossible to articulate, and it’s happening now, almost like a perverse secret. . . . That’s always sort of fascinating to me."

"I wanted to make the movie feel like life feels to me — and life feels both sad and dark and confusing and more than hopeful — it feels like something totally incredible could happen at any moment and with no explanation."

"That is my problem with life, I just rush through it, like I'm being chased. Even things whose whole point is slowness, like drinking relaxing tea. When I drink relaxing tea I suck it down like I'm in a contest for who can drink relaxing tea the quickest."

"It was a tiny sound but it woke me up because it was a human sound."

"They wordlessly excused each other for not loving each other as much as they had planned. There were empty rooms in the house where they had meant to put their love and they worked together to fill these rooms with high-end, consumer-grade equipment. It was a tight situation. The next sudden move would have to be through the wall."

"Now began the part of her life where she was just very beautiful. Except for nothing. Only winners will know what this feels like. Have you ever wanted something very badly and then gotten it. Then you know that winning is many things, but it is never the thing you thought it would be."

"The frontier will nevertheless survive in the attitudes a few of us inherited from it. One of those attitudes—to me a beatitude—is the conviction that the past matters, that history weighs on us and refuses to be forgotten by us, and that the worst poverty women—or men—can suffer is to be bereft of their past."

"People just showed up and were always made welcome. To stay less than an hour was an insult, and there was always a meal."

"If I grew up in the simple-minded belief that women were as strong and intelligent as men, it was because I came from a society that had once believed it."

"Within our family there was no such thing as a person who did not matter. Second cousins thrice removed mattered."

"We all grow up with the weight of history on us. Our ancestors dwell in the attics of our brains as they do in the spiraling chains of knowledge hidden in every cell of our bodies."

"All fiction may be autobiography, but all autobiography is of course fiction."

"My parents raised me, of course, but it was a different adult who shaped my mental landscape. My imagination, my capacity for empathy, my sense of curiosity and my awareness that, while I was unique, I wasn't alone: others felt the same fears and feelings as me. On top of all that, this woman taught me about menstruation, masturbation, making out and sex, which is a damned sight more than any teacher ever did. I was not the only one she took under her wing: there are millions and millions of us who were shaped by her – whole generations who grew up under her tutelage – because this woman is Judy Blume."

"But if you aren't any religion, how are you going to know if you should join the Y or the Jewish Community Center?"

"We must — we must — we must increase our bust!"

"Are you there God? It's Me, Margaret...."

"It's not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written. The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers."

"Let children read whatever they want and then talk about it with them. If parents and kids can talk together, we won't have as much censorship because we won't have as much fear."

"Katie Hepburn went to the meetings. She was a good friend of 's. I had a little car, a little broken down Ford Roadster with a rumble seat. I used to go around and collect people Saturday night and we'd go up to Eunice's house. She lived in a brownstone house of her parents on 65th Street. We would go up to the third floor, which was her bedroom with a lovely fire glowing, and lie on the floor and talk about the theatre. I remember one night Katie Hepburn said: ‘Well, I'm not going to join the organization. I've decided against it.' ‘Why, Katie, how can you even think that way?' She said, ‘I don't know. I just feel that I have to do it alone.' I'll never forget that night."

"I survived those three weeks with hardly a decent meal or anyone to help. I kept a brown paper bag in the wastebasket next to my bed. I ate all my meals in my bedroom during this time, so I could pitch the inedible food into it and not be rude to the cooks. This problem, though it had overtones of comedy, was not good for my health. All my film career I had envied Katharine Hepburn's high cheekbones and narrow face. Now I had them."

"My beautiful Grandmother -- Caroline Garlinghouse -- came from Pittsburgh -- my mother's mother. I never met her but I have followed many of her ideas -- through my mother -- And it has given me a warm spot in my heart for your city...My grandmother's brother, Fred Garlinghouse, lived in Pittsburgh, was an engineer and apparently worked for Jones and Laughlin Steel Company."

"The unique function of the nurse is to assist the individual, sick or well, in the performance of those activities contributing to health or its recovery (or to peaceful death) that he would perform unaided if he had the necessary strength, will or knowledge."

"Her ex stops by when he's in town and we pretend he's welcome. The two of them, Holly and this ex of hers, sit around and depress each other. They know all of each other's weak points and failings, so they can bring each down in two-tenths of a second. When she see him, Holly says, it's like the sunsets at the beach--once the sun drops the sand chills quickly. Then it's like a lot of times that were good ten minutes ago and don't count now."

"There is no friction here. It's a kind and buoyant place. What you forget, living here, is that just because you have stopped sinking doesn't mean you're not still underwater."

"Maybe this is not a come-down-from-the-ledge story. But I tell it with the thought that the woman on the ledge will ask herself a question, the question that occurred to that man in Bogota. He wondered how we know that what happens to us isn't good?"

"I think of the chimp, the one with the talking hands. In the course of the experiment, that chimp had a baby. Imagine how her trainers must have thrilled when the mother, without prompting, began to sign her newborn. Baby, drink milk. Baby, play ball. And when the baby died, the mother stood over the body, her wrinkled hands moving with animal grace, forming again and again the words: Baby, come hug, Baby come hug, fluent now in the language of grief."

"Then the children went to bed, or at least went upstairs, and the men joined the women for a cigarette on the porch, absently picking ticks engorged like grapes off the sleeping dogs. And when the men kissed the women good night, and their weekend whiskers scratched the women's cheeks, the women did not think shave, they thought stay."