Women Authors From The United States

"There’s a part of me in every I write, whether it’s male or female, because everything has to go through me. Everything I’ve observed or heard or whatever—it all has to go through me. I’m the one who makes these people up, and so there’s a part of me in some form in all of these people, but I really have made them up. But they’re so real to me, you know? By the time I’m done with them on the page, they’re very, very real to me. They’re just as real to me as anybody that I’ve ever met."

"I’ve always been fascinated with this sense that every single person walking down the street has a whole story. It’s so interesting to think about the vast variety of things that can take place within one person’s life, and how nobody ever really knows it, because we only tell parts of our story to different people, and oh, I just want to know it so much! I always have, so I make it up."

"I thought if I could talk to editors, if I could talk to s, if I could show them the kinds of things you could do if you were making use of the page rather than just using words, then people would understand there has to be a way of approaching a book more like a film. With film, yes, you start out with a , but the director is given resources with which to realize that film. And everybody understands you can’t know from the beginning what that film is going to be in the end. You are not expected to submit an already completed film in order to get funding. But that is the way publishing works. It’s constrained by a specific restricted idea of what text is, which is this: text is word. You hand in your text, and then it’s handed over to the designer, but you have no contact with that person. The is theirs, the s are theirs; they just do whatever they want, and you have no discussion with them about how the presentation actually relates to what the text is about."

"The literary world does quite like the notion of genius, but it has no place for a Picasso."

"DeWitt has an insatiable mind and deep pockets of knowledge in disparate subjects; she went on tangents about strategies, the quirks of and her obsession with the , who inspired one of her many unfinished novels. She speaks French and German, can read Greek and Latin, and understands close to a dozen other languages with varying degrees of proficiency — among them Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Arabic, Hebrew and Japanese."

"As it turns out, the is not remotely about Tom Cruise fighting alongside 19th-century Samurai in Japan. Rather, it follows the story of a woman named Sibylla raising her brilliant young son Ludo in in 1990s London. Unable to afford heat for their home, the two spend their days riding the . While the story is nominally centered around Ludo’s efforts to find his father, it is really about the pain and pleasure of integrating a unique mind into a world that values different things. Sibylla and Ludo both have excruciatingly high standards, the genius needed to attain them, and a near-total inability to tolerate compromise. Because most people’s lives are a series of compromises made bearable by self-delusion, Sibylla and Ludo are isolated, cut off from the outside world and outside relationships. The particular joy of the book, I think, is that the characters are so intensely and specifically themselves that it is impossible to imagine them working in a more conventional novel. But I believed in them completely — a testament to the strength of DeWitt’s writing."

"... was taught at the age of three. ... he had an extremely challenging early education. What would happen if you had a single mother who tried out the ? ... What if the mother would use ' to provide s for her fatherless boy?"

"You just can't put roses in the ground and hope they'll thrive ... If you want a lot of show and color but no work, then plant easy things like that don't take much work."

"Why tussle with a when you can walk outside, spend time in fresh air and come in with an armful of fresh food?"

"One thing we can control, if we want to embark on it, is getting our own food supply. I think that, for a lot of people, it could be an economic necessity or improvement. In my case, it's much more the satisfaction of knowing how fresh it is, what's gone into growing it, how it tastes, the fact that it's right out there — I can go grab it — you know, that kind of thing."

"Oddly enough, modern gardens have become more and more scentless. Bigger, hardier, more beed flowers are the goal of the hybridizers, and while the new plants are often superior in many ways to old favorites, they are rarely more fragrant. Scent is a ghost you find in old gardens, or in plantings of old-fashioned varieties. It is also found aplenty in gardens for the blind, who are particularly attuned to scent, and in herb beds where the subtle scents of foliage are treasured."

"Lamb's quarters. '. How this weed got to be associated with so many animals I'll never know, but it also goes by the names pigweed, fat hen, and white goosefoot. An annual that likes any garden soil, it has ragged-edged leaves and grows as tall as 6 feet. On the plus side, it's easy to pull out and is delicious cooked like . But it grows very fast, and unless you consume an awful lot of creamed greens there is always too much of it."

"When we think of eating homegrown food during the cold season, we often think of staples such as potatoes squirreled away in the , or of vegetables like stashed in a cool, dry place. But many s are discovering the joys of harvesting fresh produce all winter long, which allows for feasts of cold-hardy crops that are just-picked and just right for the time of year. ... Winter fare is about leaves, stems, and roots, which mature more and more slowly as the weather cools and the days shorten. Better still, winter vegetables sweeten with the cold. If you’ve ever tasted a winter-pulled carrot or winter-cut , you’re familiar with the treasures winter gardening can bring. ... ... Winter has always been a good season for a wide array of crops in the southern states, and in the northern tier of the United States, you can grow the same crops if you use a winter-protection device to broaden your garden’s productive season. This might be a , a simple , the quick-hoop system, or just a layer or two of floating row cover, often called Reemay. All of these season-extension devices capture some of the earth’s natural warmth, especially at night, and block the chilling, drying effect of wind."

"When it comes to learning, Triumph is the real foe; it’s Disaster that’s your teacher. It’s Disaster that brings objectivity. It’s Disaster that’s the antidote to that greatest of delusions, overconfidence. And ultimately, both Triumph and Disaster are impostors. They are results that are subject to chance. One of them just happens to be a better teaching tool than the other."

"The successful funds in any given year are mostly lucky; they have a good roll of the dice. There is general agreement among researchers that nearly all stock pickers, whether they know it or not— and few of them do— are playing a game of chance."

"Your likelihood of slipping in a shower is orders of magnitude larger than your likelihood of being in a terrorist attack— but just try convincing someone of that, especially if they knew someone who died in the Twin Towers."

"I have no television – I hate it"

"I don’t want to know movie directors."

"I don’t think Ripley is gay. He appreciates good looks in other men, that’s true. But he’s married in later books. I’m not saying he’s very strong in the sex department. But he makes it in bed with his wife."

"My plan, had I not gotten sick, was to write a book about the oceans — their destruction, but also the possibilities they offer. During treatment, I learned that one of my chemotherapy drugs, cytarabine, owes its existence to an ocean animal: a sponge that lives in the Caribbean Sea, Tectitethya crypta. This discovery was made by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, who first synthesized the drug in 1959, and who almost certainly relied on government funding, the very thing that Bobby has already cut. I won't write about cytarabine. I won’t find out if we were able to harness the power of the oceans, or if we let them boil and turn into a garbage dump. My son knows that I am a writer and that I write about our planet. Since I've been sick, I remind him a lot, so that he will know that I was not just a sick person."

"Bobby has said, "There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective." Bobby probably doesn’t remember the millions of people who were paralyzed or killed by polio before the vaccine was available. My dad, who grew up in New York City in the nineteen-forties and fifties, does remember. Recently, I asked him what it was like when he got the vaccine. He said that it felt like freedom."

"I let the memories come and go. So many of them are from my childhood that I feel as if I'm watching myself and my kids grow up at the same time. Sometimes I trick myself into thinking I'll remember this forever, I'll remember this when I'm dead. Obviously, I won't. But since I don't know what death is like and there's no one to tell me what comes after it, I'll keep pretending. I will keep trying to remember."

"I ended up spending five weeks at Columbia-Presbyterian, and the strangeness and sadness of what I was being told about myself made me hunt for the humor in it. I didn't know what else to do. I decided that everyone in the hospital had Munchausen syndrome by proxy, and I was their target. It was a joke that I found funnier than everyone else did. Later, when I was bald and had a scrape on my face from a fall, my joke was that I was a busted-up Voldemort."

"I did not — could not — believe that they were talking about me. I had swum a mile in the pool the day before, nine months pregnant. I wasn’t sick. I didn’t feel sick. I was actually one of the healthiest people I knew. I regularly ran five to ten miles in Central Park. I once swam three miles across the Hudson River — eerily, to raise money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. I work as an environmental journalist, and for one article I skied the Birkebeiner, a fifty-kilometre cross-country race in Wisconsin, which took me seven and a half hours. I loved to have people over for dinner and to make cakes for my friends’ birthdays. I went to museums and plays and got to jump in a cranberry bog for my job. I had a son whom I loved more than anything and a newborn I needed to take care of. This could not possibly be my life."

"I know that not everyone can be married to a doctor, but, if you can, it’s a very good idea. He is perfect, and I feel so cheated and so sad that I don't get to keep living the wonderful life I had with this kind, funny, handsome genius I managed to find. My parents and my brother and sister, too, have been raising my children and sitting in my various hospital rooms almost every day for the last year and a half. They have held my hand unflinchingly while I have suffered, trying not to show their pain and sadness in order to protect me from it. This has been a great gift, even though I feel their pain every day. For my whole life, I have tried to be good, to be a good student and a good sister and a good daughter, and to protect my mother and never make her upset or angry. Now I have added a new tragedy to her life, to our family's life, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it."

"When you are dying, at least in my limited experience, you start remembering everything. Images come in flashes — people and places and stray conversations — and refuse to stop."

"I also think the scale of the change is only going to be solved by governmental action and corporate responsibility, which often will come from governmental regulation. Which is why it's so important to be able to vote and understand these issues."

"The diagnosis was acute myeloid leukemia, with a rare mutation called Inversion 3. It was mostly seen in older patients. Every doctor I saw asked me if I had spent a lot of time at Ground Zero, given how common blood cancers are among first responders. I was in New York on 9/11, in the sixth grade, but I didn’t visit the site until years later. I am not elderly — I had just turned thirty-four."

"During the latest clinical trial, my doctor told me that he could keep me alive for a year, maybe. My first thought was that my kids, whose faces live permanently on the inside of my eyelids, wouldn’t remember me. My son might have a few memories, but he'll probably start confusing them with pictures he sees or stories he hears. I didn't ever really get to take care of my daughter — I couldn't change her diaper or give her a bath or feed her, all because of the risk of infection after my transplants. I was gone for almost half of her first year of life. I don't know who, really, she thinks I am, and whether she will feel or remember, when I am gone, that I am her mother."

"I don't buy a lot of bags or shoes, but it's easier to cut beef out of your diet than to not get the new pair of sneakers you need."

"I want people to feel they can do things. They may not be easy things, but the possibility of change exists."

"Meanwhile, during the CAR-T treatment, a method developed over many decades with millions of dollars of government funding, my cousin Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was in the process of being nominated and confirmed as the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Throughout my treatment, he had been on the national stage: previously a Democrat, he was running for President as an Independent, but mostly as an embarrassment to me and the rest of my immediate family. In August, 2024, he suspended his campaign and endorsed Donald Trump, who said that he was going to "let Bobby go wild" on health. My mother wrote a letter to the Senate, to try and stop his confirmation; my brother had been speaking out against his lies for months. I watched from my hospital bed as Bobby, in the face of logic and common sense, was confirmed for the position, despite never having worked in medicine, public health, or the government. Suddenly, the health-care system on which I relied felt strained, shaky. Doctors and scientists at Columbia, including George, didn’t know if they would be able to continue their research, or even have jobs. (Columbia was one of the Trump Administration’s first targets in its crusade against alleged antisemitism on campuses; in May, the university laid off a hundred and eighty researchers after federal-funding cuts.)"

"a world in which the hospital industrial complex makes “obsolete” different bodies"

"Friends change toward the ill person, some revealed in their strange and beautiful kindness and some exposed in their utter, ugly selfishness."

"It’s curious that the Latin root of the Middle English word for tradition, tradere, means not only to “impart” and “give over,” but also to “betray."

"Why would anyone write about illness except the ill? And at first, too, the experience is too close for the ill person to be a reliable witness. The mind doesn’t want to write about the body’s condition but to change it, for in dreams the body can still dance!"

"I can’t write myself except through reading others’ words."

"A free-wheeling conversation with Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee 9 March, 2021"

". But because they are in some ways the beneficiaries of racism-they are racists!"

"Racism undercuts confidence. I wish I had known that sooner"

"I usually played good girl wives and mothers. And truthfully those good-girl roles were stretches"

"Critics still see blacks as 'the other,' an 'exotic"

"in a marriage loyalty and fidelity and trust cannot be compromised."

"we gave ourselves permission to have other partners if we wished to"

"Preserving the family means everything to our community now"

"I dream of getting prisons off the stock exchange"

"We have to institute democracy, which is still mostly an aspiration, and universal love, which is still unrealized"

"It is a dastardly crime and an insult to the word democracy to make a commodity of jailing people."

"In the world of entertainment, the problem for African-American artists is "lack of access to the levels of power"

"My constant battle is putting aside time wasters, and I have to watch out for procrastination"