Women Authors From The United States

"One of the duties which devolve upon women in the present interesting crisis, is to prepare themselves for more extensive usefulness, by making use of those religious and literary privileges and advantages that are within their reach, if they will only stretch out their hands and possess them."

"Intellect is not sexed;... strength of mind is not sexed; and … our views about the duties of men and the duties of women, the sphere of man and the sphere of woman, are mere arbitrary opinions, differing in different ages and countries, and dependent solely on the will and judgment of erring mortals."

"There has been a comparatively greater proportion of good queens, than of good kings."

"The virtue of female slaves is wholly at the mercy of irresponsible tyrants, and women are bought and sold in our slave markets, to gratify the brutal lust of those who bear the name of Christians."

"Fashionable women regard themselves, and are regarded by men, as pretty toys or as mere instruments of pleasure; and the vacuity of mind, the heartlessness, the frivolity which is the necessary result of this false and debasing estimate of women, can only be fully understood by those who have mingled in the folly and wickedness of fashionable life."

"I am persuaded that the rights of woman, like the rights of slaves, need only be examined to be understood and asserted."

"I ask no favors for my sex. I surrender not our claim to equality. All I ask of our brethren is, that they will take their feet from off our necks, and permit us to stand upright on that ground which God designed us to occupy."

"All history attests that man has subjected woman to his will, used her as a means to promote his selfish gratification, to minister to his sensual pleasures, to be instrumental in promoting his comfort; but never has he desired to elevate her to that rank she was created to fill. He has done all he could to debase and enslave her mind; and now he looks triumphantly on the ruin he has wrought, and say, the being he has thus deeply injured is his inferior."

"Had Adam tenderly reproved his wife, and endeavored to lead her to repentance instead of sharing in her guilt, I should be much more ready to accord to man that superiority which he claims; but as the facts stand disclosed by the sacred historian, it appears to me that to say the least, there was as much weakness exhibited by Adam as by Eve. They both fell from innocence, and consequently from happiness, but not from equality."

"Oh, had I received the education I desired, had I been bred to the profession of the law, I might have been a useful member of society, and instead of myself and my property being taken care of, I might have been a protector of the helpless, a pleader for the poor and unfortunate."

"At sixty I look back on a life of deep disappointments, of withered hopes, of unlooked for suffering, of severe discipline. Yet I have sometimes tasted exquisite joy and have found solace for many a woe in the innocence and earnest love of Theodore's children. But for this my life would have little to record of mundane pleasures."

"Always remember, Peggy, it's matrimonial suicide to be jealous when you have a really good reason."

"You know, that's the only good thing about divorce; you get to sleep with your mother."

"A man has only one escape from his old self: to see a different self — in the mirror of some woman's eyes."

"There are no hopeless situations; there are only men who have grown hopeless about them."

"No good deed goes unpunished."

"Communism is the opiate of the intellectuals [with] no cure except as a guillotine might be called a cure for dandruff."

"You see few people here in America who really care very much about living a Christian life in a democratic world."

"I have resolved to grow old, naturally and gracefully, content in the knowledge that the greatest intellects are the homeliest ones, and that the height of sophistication is simplicity."

"My fantasies have never been safe ones. Don't fuck with me, unless you understand that."

"And the harder the SSC ["safe, sane and consensual"] gets pushed at me, the harder I feel like pushing back. Passion, that's what I'm into, passion and blood and honor, so powerful that it pounds through my veins and blinds me, so terrible that I can't look away. Danger, Dementia, and Denial. I want to hear that panic, scream "No, Please!" and struggle through the haze of pain and pleasure and all that stuff that goes on between the moment we touch eyes and the moment when we both collapse and try to catch our breaths and break the silence."

"There are times when I just want to walk through a room, grab that girl, slap her hard and make her cry. Push her down and fuck her mind over twice as hard as her body. Sometimes, I want to be that girl."

"Fact is, I'm tired of being told what's OK for me. I'm fucking tired of multiple safewords, and sometimes I'm tired of safewords altogether. I don't want to negotiate everything to death, I want to be surprised, or surprise someone. I want to be afraid — I want to cause genuine fear."

"The trouble is, SMers are allowing themselves to be defined by what they are not. We think, "Oh, so many people believe that we're all murderers and rapists, and we have to explain that we're not!" Uh — so, a slogan for the gay civil rights movement should be "Normal, Non-threatening and Not After Your Children"?"

"I can hear the whines — "But it's BAD to do these things without consent!" No fucking kidding. It's bad to conduct medical experiments on people without consent, yet I don't see the AMA adopting the slogan, "Healthy, Helpful and Consensual!""

"What goes on when people overfetishize safety is that they're relapsing into that old frame of mind that what we're doing is BAD."

"This used to be about sex. The literature of my people was pornography, filled with cries for mercy, drama enacted on people without prolonged negotiation, partners engaged in a dance in the middle of a bonfire. Now, it's 300-page manuals about how to make sure nothing bad will happen."

"What is happening to my sexuality? It's cold, it's pasionless, and what's worse, it's dull. John Preston was right. SM has become a nice, sweet alternative to heavy petting, and the leaders of this SM "community" want us to be the Elks or some other animal-named civics association, gathering to sell expensive clothing and raffle tickets, congratulating ourselves on how nice we are."

"Fighting off a yawn (how rude), I wander past two girls earnestly discussing their upcoming scene. Red means stop. Yellow means slow down. Blue means I want to talk to you about something. Green means you can go faster, harder. I don't tell them about fisting, piss and cock-sucking, why feel older than I am? But I want to tell them about muffled yelps, screams, and the moment before the tears start to flow, that terrible moment when you know that one more sharp pain and you won't be able to hold them back. I want to tell them about watching someone's control slip away, clutching a crotch to find that there's pussy cream mixing with drops of panic-piss, about the redness of a face when the sobbing has become regular. I want to thell them about the pleas of the damned, the cries when someone doesn't know when it's going to stop, or how, only that they want their mommy, they want their master, they want to surrender and fall to the ground and feel a boot at the back of their neck. But I smile and nod and don't say a fucking thing."

"Safe, sane and consensual — what do those words really mean? Assimilation, that's what."

"And fuck this, I didn't come out of years of fantasy, rescuing myself from a toxic parent and guilt-tripping myself through anti-sex feminism, politically correct lesbianism and socially-programmed homosexual activism so that someone else can make my goddamn sex life into a slogan."

"Fantasies aren't reality, I know, I know, I know. Except when they are. Except when you make them into reality."

"My fantasies have never been safe ones."

"As the subtitles of Jackson’s biographies echo each other—demons, haunted—so both biographies present a near-identical portrait of her as daughter, wife, mother, writer: these roles inextricably knotted together through Jackson’s adult life, often to the point of near-unbearable pressure and stress. Jackson’s patrician, socially conscious, and woundingly censorious mother, Geraldine Bugbee, was the great-great-granddaughter of a wealthy San Francisco architect; clearly the model for the nightmare mother-figures in Jackson’s fiction, particularly the embittered invalid-mother of Hill House, Geraldine persisted in criticizing and belittling Jackson long after she had acquired national renown as a writer."

"("Stanley Hyman did a tribute to his late wife Shirley Jackson and noted how surprised people were that the author of disturbing and grim fiction should be a wife and mother and an apparently happy one.") UKLG: Being a wife and mother is supposed to be a consuming occupation, therefore you couldn't do anything else. And then the fact that Shirley Jackson wrote the kind of books she did. I suppose people think: I wonder if she strangled her children."

"My mother was a writer. That's what she did. She loved nothing more than writing, though she certainly also loved her children, cooking, friends, cats, music, and playing bridge. I can picture her sitting on her beloved red kitchen stool, spiced meatballs simmering on the stove, making a shopping list — with scribbled asides of insight into or warnings for her characters in whatever novel she was working on."

"The tension between socially acceptable housewifery and creative ambition is certainly easy to find in Jackson’s life, but it’s rather harder to locate in her fiction. There’s no question that, in her books, the house is a deeply ambiguous symbol—a place of warmth and security and also one of imprisonment and catastrophe. But the evil that lurks in Jackson’s fair-seeming homes is not housework; it’s other people—husbands, neighbors, mothers, hellbent on squashing and consuming those they profess to care for. And what keeps women inside these ghastly places is not societal pressure, or a patriarchal jailer, but the demon in their own minds. In this sense, Jackson’s work is less an anticipation of second-wave feminism than a conversation with her female forebears in the gothic tradition. Her stories take the figure of the imprisoned "madwoman," as found in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" or Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, and make her the warder of her own jail."

"Shirley Jackson’s work The Haunting of Hill House may be the most delicate novel of terror ever written."

"All cat stories start with this statement: "My mother, who was the first cat, told me this…""

"My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often tthought that with any luck at all I could have born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead."

"This house, which seemed somehow to have formed itself, flying together into its own powerful pattern under the hands of its builders, fitting itself into its own construction of lines and angles, reared its great head back against the sky without concession to humanity. It was a house without kindness, never meant to be lived in, not a fit place for people or for love or for hope. Exorcism cannot alter the countenance of a house; Hill House would stay as it was until it was destroyed."

"Certainly there are spots which inevitably attach to themselves an atmosphere of holiness and goodness; it might not then be too fanciful to say that some houses are born bad."

"No human eye can isolate the unhappy coincidence of line and place which suggests evil in the face of a house, and yet somehow a maniac juxtaposition, a badly turned angle, some chance meeting of roof and sky, turned Hill House into a place of despair, more frightening because the face of Hill House seemed awake, with a watchfulness from the blank windows and a touch of glee in the eyebrow of a cornice."

"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone."

""It isn't fair, it isn't right," Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her."

"Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones."

"Bill Hutchinson went over to his wife and forced the slip of paper out of her hand. It had a black spot on it, the black spot Mr. Summers had made the night before with the heavy pencil in the coal company office. Bill Hutchinson held it up, and there was a stir in the crowd."

"Some places have already quit lotteries." Mrs. Adams said. "Nothing but trouble in that," Old Man Warner said stoutly. "Pack of young fools."

""They do say," Mr. Adams said to Old Man Warner, who stood next to him, "that over in the north village they're talking of giving up the lottery." Old Man Warner snorted. "Pack of crazy fools", he said. "Listening to the young folks, nothing's good enough for them. Next thing you know, they'll be wanting to go back to living in caves, nobody work any more, live that way for a while. Used to be a saying about 'Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.' First thing you know, we'd all be eating stewed chickweed and acorns. There's always been a lottery," he added petulantly."

"Mr. Summers spoke frequently to the villagers about making a new box, but no one liked to upset even as much tradition as was represented by the black box. There was a story that the present box had been made with some pieces of the box that had preceded it, the one that had been constructed when the first people settled down to make a village here. Every year, after the lottery, Mr. Summers began talking again about a new box, but every year the subject was allowed to fade off without anything's being done. The black box grew shabbier each year: by now it was no longer completely black but splintered badly along one side to show the original wood color, and in some places faded or stained."