Women Authors From The United States

"I didn't enter into this to get any kind of affirmation or confirmation. I entered into this to see what I could do for other people — to give them my sincerity, to give them my love and my care, to take a load off, to have a smile, to have a memory or two. Singing the blues has always been about alleviating the blues, and that's apparent when you listen to them. Sure is nice to hear that someone else is, or has been where you are, or have been. Because we forget sometimes, that we're all in this together, and we have many, many similar experiences — all the time, all across the world, in every age."

"I've been asked by a lot of new YouTube people or other singers — all kinds of professions, frankly, as to whether I feel very successful and very loved now that I've got bup-up-up-up subscribers and however many nice comments and sweetness, and I really, really do! I was thinking going into this that the odds were against me — you're online, there's this anonymity, people are mean sometimes, and still considering all that, it's overwhelming the sweetness and the affection that I am getting — I'm every day impressed by this — every day! And there are a lot of horrible, horrible people on here, just like there is in the rest of the world. But remember, "don't be overcome with evil — overcome evil with good.""

"Hears the music under the rock One of these days he'll stop Don't stop when the music stops."

"I believe in a God, who, whether we understand it now or ever will, does the thing for us, which is the best thing for us — out of Love — even if it’s painful. And I think that’s the truth. So, if you’re in a great pain, and if you’re suffering, remember that this is… in the middle… and that you’re on your way… some place…, and it’s beneficial to you… and even better than that, it might be beneficial to others… so, that what I have to say to that tonight… I know it’s… short… I hope it’s sweet, and… I’ll see you next time… so, good night."

"So, it's just no hope. I cant be cool. I tried with the giant sunglasses — no dice. Sorry. I remain dorky forever. So — it's okay."

"You need to laugh more. Life is filled with too many problems, to not laugh every day. ... We need to have a sense of humor going into this because it's too tough without it."

"You know you're already brave. You don't get very far in life without having to be brave an awful lot. Because we all have our frightening moments and difficult trials and we don't have much of a choice but to get through 'em, and it takes a lot of bravery to do that. The most important thing about bravery is this — It's not about not being scared — it's about being scared and doing it anyway — that's bravery."

"I look at the lyrics, and if that's something honest for me at the moment, I'll sing it."

"I had no idea how much music and singing really means to people, and in my own tiny way to be a part of that is very humbling and very sweet, and and I feel very honored. ... I have a great appreciation for this, in every ways and a new understanding, and I'm just as amazed as anyone else."

"There is a big difference you see between privately letting someone know that you're displeased, whether they've done something they may not be aware of, and just rudeness — and you do not have to tolerate rudeness, by any means."

"'There is always hope, we can always love, we can always be kind; we have neither excuse or loss by degree of suffering.'"

"I've been told I sound like I'm out of an old movie; that perhaps I'm faking my voice, that it's nice, that it's not nice — all kinds of things. Well it's my voice. The only thing I can think of is sometimes you're in one mood or another mood, and so maybe it sounds a little different, but I've always spoken this way — and I'm trying to sound pleasant — I hope it does sound pleasant, but that's about it."

"Many people have said since the beginning — actually, all my life — "don't you suppose you were born in the wrong era — the wrong time?" Well, I don't think so at all! Because, don't you see, I can come into your home, in your office, and wherever you are, and sing to you these silly songs. And I'm just a simple lady, and I can show you how much I love you very much, and share these feelings with you. And I don't know that could have been done really this way at any other time. So I think that I was born at just the right time — wouldn't you say?"

"Don't you think that it's amazing that I'm singing into this silly camera with the desk lamp, and it's going through all these wires and everything else, and these computers, and you still feel what I'm feeling, and you still get what I'm trying to do? Yeah. I think its amazing. And I think it's so nice in a period when we're very isolated people, and kind of emotionless people, I think it's great that we can still touch one another and we can still feel what we're feeling, and we can still have fun, and we can be sad, and we can be happy, and to know that someone cares about you — because I really do. I really do. And I can't believe that I have over 10,000 subscribers. What is wrong with you people?"

"I went, and I was rejected immediately — like that. First chance I got to sing, they said "you have a very excellent voice, it's amazing, blah, blah, blah — not what we're looking for." And that was it. And you know, thinking about it later: I don't think it's really for me — you know what I mean? That's all we're going to say about that. Let's move on."

"I appreciate that you have your own tastes, but — give me a break!"

"Hi, new people — there's a lot of new people. Welcome to the family. We're a little weird here, but we're all very nice — so you'll fit in here. We're kind of intense — but you'll figure it out."

"The intention appears to be to create a list of ‘American Novelists’ on Wikipedia that is made up almost entirely of men. The category lists 3,837 authors, and the first few hundred of them are mainly men."

"His body was now very close to hers, and he dared to bring his hand under her skirt. “Where is your underwear?” he asked. “I lost it.” “Where?” “In the garden. It fell off when I was spying. I didn’t have time to retrieve it.”"

"Reality is so dull, Alan thought. Any mistake in one’s perception of it is inevitably more interesting than the real thing, and lucky are those who remain uninformed of their error."

"“One of my greatest pleasures in life is promising myself I will not drink, or smoke, or take coke, or do heroin, or eat cookies, then doing it. It’s a pleasure that can be repeated daily.”"

"Lynn stalked. She had taken up stalking for health reasons, but it was not paying off as handsomely as she had hoped."

""My gift to you will be to take away your freedom of choice for a while. Freedom can be very unhealthy and unproductive. Instead, you’ll have freedom from choice.”"

"For months I had been trying to be less myself."

"I bring Laura to the edge of the clapping crowd, and I watch her sink, becoming engulfed in the sea of clapter."

"I am a man without many pleasures in life, a man whose few pleasures are small, but a man whose small pleasures are very important to him. One of them is eating. One reading. Another eating while reading."

"[p]eople who go to Wikipedia to get ideas for whom to hire, or honor, or read, and look at that list of 'American Novelists' for inspiration ... might simply use that list without thinking twice about it."

"Calmer than midnight's deepest bush Is the sun-bright Summer nooning, With its cloudy shadows seeking rest, That fall on the hillside swooning. Great Night with its solemn starry eyes, Over Day's gate asks us whither We go, what our password is, To the camp beyond the river. ..."

"All quiet along the Potomac to-night, No sound save the rush of the river, While soft falls the dew on the face of the dead— The picket ’s off duty forever."

"The antidomesticity of Charlotte Perkins Gilman influenced their views on social organization; both Henrietta Rodman and Crystal Eastman tried to encourage the construction of apartment houses based on the Gilmanesque model. Nevertheless, they did not share Gilman's pronounced antierotic biases."

"Gilman, like Bebel and Engels, integrated the causes of labor and feminism; but she altered the priorities: "The great woman's movement and labor movement of today are parts of the same pressure, the same world-progress. An economic democracy must rest on a free womanhood; and a free womanhood inevitably leads to an economic democracy." Gilman's practical device for freeing women before the victory of socialism was the cooperative apartment house, containing common kitchens, laundry facilities, and nurseries, thus liberating the individual couple from the unshared burden of those responsibilities. Her idea never came to fruition, and William O'Neill has suggested that her scheme was inadequate: "Her solution to the problem was largely mechanical, a matter of revised domestic arrangements, which would free women for outside work. The alternative would seem to have been some kind of socialist order that would provide the institutions public nurseries, paid maternity leaves, and the like-necessary to fulfill the promise of feminine emancipation. Surprisingly enough, the key writings of this professed socialist neglected the point. She believed that feminism would have to socialize the home, but she apparently believed it possible to have socialized homes in a capitalist society.... Mrs. Gilman was a socialist and a feminist, yet in her mind the two remained separate and distinct causes. In the end, her failure to integrate them prevented her from fully utilizing the insights she had gained from each.""

"Charlotte Perkins Gilman-brilliant, outspoken, and iconoclastic-was both a socialist and a leader of the organized women's rights movement. Undoubtedly the most radical of the second generation of suffrage leaders, she attacked the home and domesticity because of its deadening influence on the female mind and spirit, and she announced her willingness-even eagerness-to abandon the conventional social structure to which most of her sisters in the mainstream feminist movement were committed. Gilman's socialism was non-Marxist; Edward Bellamy, the author of Looking Backward and a sequel, Equality, had influenced her profoundly. Both of Bellamy's utopian visions, but particularly the latter, advocated participation of women in the work force in traditionally masculine occupations such as engineering and the skilled crafts as well as in more conventionally feminine pursuits; economic equality; and the removal of domestic tasks, including child care, to the public realm. Gilman concurred that equality would never be possible without full participation in economic life. And such participation required the socialization of childrearing and domestic tasks. Men and children, as well as women, would benefit under the new arrangement. An economically independent woman would marry for love, and children would grow to maturity in an environment that consisted not merely of an untrained mother's efforts, but of the attention of specialists in child care and education. Although she attacked conventional domestic arrangements, Gilman was not against the family. She argued: "Like all natural institutions the family has a purpose; and is to be measured primarily as it serves that purpose; which is, the care and nurture of the young. To protect the helpless little ones, to feed and shelter them, to ensure them the benefits of an even longer period of immaturity, and so to improve the race-this is the original purpose of the family." Men, she determined, had subverted that purpose: "What man has done to the family, speaking broadly, is to change it from an institution for the best service of the child, to one modified to his own service, the vehicle of his comfort, power and pride." In order to create a mutually rewarding family life a family "based on love and ... maintained because of its happiness and use"-society must destroy the old notion of home." People trained for the tasks of cooking, cleaning, and child care could better perform house-keeping duties than the isolated wife. Women would become free to develop their special talents, and Gilman believed that a free womanhood was necessary to full social development."

"The anarchist-feminists' denial of gender-based distinctions precluded their use of many of the arguments for equality utilized by the mainstream feminists during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries...even Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who almost alone among the younger generation of mainstream feminists stressed the similarities between men and women, also on occasion found it necessary or expedient to exploit the concept of a special relationship between woman's biology and her drive for equality. In 1912 Gilman wrote: "We are the makers of men, and because we are the makers of men, it is requisite that we should be citizens of the world we live in.""

"So impressed by her writings was W. D. Howells as early as 1902 that he declared: "She has enriched the literary center of New York by the addition of a talent in sociological satire which would be extraordinary even if it were not altogether unrivaled among us.""

"The theory that women had been members of a subject sex throughout long history, but coupled with a plan for their emancipation by socialism or communism, found expression with increasing force in the United States as the twentieth century advanced. Among the women who expounded this theory of woman none was more influential than Charlotte Perkins Stetson who long before her death in 1935 attained national and international fame as an exponent of a new feminism...In her writings she ranged from light, humorous verse and witty narrative poetry, through articles gravely gay and wholly serious books, to novels. Captivated by Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, published in 1888, Mrs. Stetson discovered in idealistic socialism what she deemed the clue to the emancipation of women and joined the disciples of Bellamy. Henceforward, with growing stress, she dwelt on the economic aspects of the "woman question"...Her belief in woman's long subjection to man was embodied in the following lines, quoted from a poem in her collection entitled In This Our World: "Close, close he bound her, that she should leave him never/Weak still he kept her, lest she be strong to flee;/And the fainting flame of passion he kept alive forever/With all the arts and forces of earth and sky and sea." But the future could be different, she believed. It had been and was woman's economic dependence on man that kept her in thrall. This was Mrs. Gilman's contention, especially, in Woman and Economics. Hence, she concluded, woman - especially the mother as guardian of the social spirit in social evolution - when freed from economic bondage to her mate would achieve liberty and make her "culture" and her "religion" prevail over his culture and his religion. And this economic freedom was to be won through various economic institutions of a collectivist nature, especially a form of cooperative living that would ease, if not abolish, the home drudgery of woman. To the old doctrine, so often advanced by parsons and lay men, that "woman's place is in the home," Mrs. Gilman opposed the doctrine that woman's place is in community and public life. In a poem on the assumption of male prerogatives, she stated the case in boasting words by the male: "I sing to the wide world/And she to the nest." But Mrs. Gilman did not deride singing to the nest. She approved it and gave it social significance. She proposed, however, that henceforward there should be a common singing to the wide world, her idea being that such singing had been done by man alone."

"As the drive for the vote heated up in the years before World War I, another less sharply defined movement emerged among more radical women, who called themselves feminists. While women like Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Crystal Eastman supported the suffrage campaign, their ideas moved beyond women's political rights to include more modern themes of economic independence and more modern sexual relationships and marriages…Unlike the votes-for-women movement, feminism placed the cutting edge of change in women's private lives, not in their public roles. Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a feminist favorite for her conviction that the family-oriented life of the middle class was narrow and inefficient, a point she explored in her pathbreaking books Women and Economics (1890) and The Home (1903)."

"I read "The Yellow Wallpaper" and found another example of a woman who was locked away by her husband because she was different from other women-too strong, too assertive, and a writer. The captivity drives her mad, too."

"The mother as a social servant instead of a home servant will not lack in true mother duty.... From her work, loved and honored though it is, she will return to her home life, the child life, with an eager, ceaseless pleasure, cleansed of all the fret and fraction and weariness that so mar it now."

"Only as we live, think, feel, and work outside the home, do we become humanly developed, civilized, socialized."

"To-day there is hardly a woman of intelligence in all America, to say nothing of other countries, who is not definitely and actively concerned in some social interest, who does not recognize some duty besides those incident to her own blood relationship."

"There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver."

"Where young boys plan for what they will achieve and attain, young girls plan for whom they will achieve and attain."

"The labor of women in the house, certainly, enables men to produce more wealth than they otherwise could; and in this way women are economic factors in society. But so are horses."

"I do not want to be a fly, I want to be a worm!"

"Said I, in scorn all burning hot, In rage and anger high, "You ignominious idiot, Those wings are made to fly!""

"A million million worlds that move in peace; A million mighty laws that never cease; And one small ant-heap, hidden by small weeds, Rich with eggs, slaves and store of millet-seeds. They sleep beneath the sod And trust in God."

"Through watching so much at night, when it changes so, I have finally found out. The front pattern does move-and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!"

"It becomes bars! The outside pattern, I mean, and the women behind it is as plain as can be. I didn't realize for a long time what the thing was that showed behind, that dim sub-pattern, but now I am quite sure it is a woman. By daylight she is subdued, quiet. I fancy it is the pattern that keeps her so still."

"You think you have mastered it [the wallpaper pattern], but just as you get well under way in following, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you."

"There are things in that wallpaper that nobody knows about but me, or ever will."