Women Authors From The United States

"Human lives were like quicksilver; let go and they vanished. But not this time. (p319)"

"Know that the only remedy for love is to love more."

"Many of us know what it's like to try to escape a family legacy of one sort or another, only to discover that in the long run we carry our heritage with us no matter how far we might run."

"Don't forget books. What would life be without them? Emily Brontë, Edgar Allan Poe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Toni Morrison, Jane Austen, William Faulkner. Read the greats-they're great for a reason. They know how to chart the human soul. (p 32)"

"I've always believed there is a very thin line that separates readers and writers. You make a leap over that line when there's a book you want to read and you can't find it and you have to write it yourself. (preface)"

"I just do the best I can to face what life brings. That’s the secret, you know. That’s the way you change your fate."

""We must hope for the best," she told the girl. She might have said more if she'd had the freedom to speak her mind, but in her formation she hadn't been given the choice to confide what she felt. If she could do so there would have been much she would have said: how green the verdant countryside was, how bright the light had become, how grateful she was to her maker each and every minute, how the birds in the treetops could be heard even when the train rumbled by, how the first of the season's bees hit against the windowpanes as if searching for flowers, how absolutely marvelous it was to be in the world. (p72)"

"What they held in common was their aloneness, and in time, thrown together, with no world other than their own, they grew close. (p103)"

"This is how it began, out of water, out of clay, out of air, when it was not expected, when it should have never happened, when no one else understood who she was. (p113)"

"The most she dared to wish for now was to live long enough to become a woman. (p46)"

"I didn't believe in writers block until I had it. After 9/11 I couldn't write and the way I got out of it was to read one of my favorite authors, Ray Bradbury...(Why couldn't you write after 9/11?) AH: I was so depressed and hopeless about the state of the world. When I re-read Fahrenheit 451, a book about how important books are, I was reminded of the reason to write."

"I always think it helps not to think about anyone reading your work, but to write what you would want to read."

"If you do not believe in evil, you are doomed to live in a world you will never understand. But if you do believe, you may see it everywhere, in every cellar, in every tree, along streets you know and streets you've never been on before. In the world that we knew, Hanni Kohn saw what was before her. She would do whatever she must to save those she loved, whether it was right or wrong, permitted or forbidden. (first lines)"

"Two brilliant colleagues who were now wearing rags, carrying their children on their backs, thinking of starvation rather than algebra. (p116)"

"I think that I always wanted to tell the stories of women who were not able to tell their own stories."

"It is clear when reading about the Holocaust that evil exists. But what was less apparent to me until I began to do research (for "The World That We Knew") was how much good there also is in the world."

"For me, magic is reading and writing."

"I don't think it's a good idea to compare yourself to anyone. You are who you are and no one can write the way you do. I always want to tell that to young writers. The most important thing is to tell your story."

"“For me—as I think it is for a lot of women and girls—I felt that they were figures that had power, and I felt very powerless,” she said. “It was just very exciting and thrilling to think of a witch who didn’t care if she was portrayed as ugly—which of course, I felt like I was—or not beautiful enough or whatever, but still had power and didn’t need to be rescued.”"

"I usually do start with setting. I try to build a fictional world, and then hope that the characters will walk into it."

"When all is said and done, the weather and love are the two elements about which one can never be sure."

"She was finally here, in the place where she had found a future. Still, night after night, the past was with her. (p197)"

"the Germans had researched her family; they were very thorough after all, and they knew things about her grandfather that she herself didn't know. She would think of this in the camp they took her to after she was arrested, how little she knew about the person she loved most in this world. (p214)"

"The persecution of people who are different, whether it's women as witches, whether it's Jews, whoever it is, it always comes from the same place of being against anyone who's different. Fear of the other."

"Artists have themes that they go back to—that they are haunted by and obsessed with."

"I think it's bad for writers to think too much about what their themes are, or to over-intellectualize their own work. I think it is much better for readers to think about that. They are not defensive, so they usually understand it at a different level, a purer level. I don't want to understand it too thoroughly. I just want to do it."

"What you dream, you can grow."

"Alix Kates Shulman had no idea that its main principle, that "a woman and man should share equally the responsibility for their household and children in every way, from the insidiously unacknowledged tasks of daily life to the pleasures of guiding a young human to maturity," would cause such uproar. Reprinted in the debut issue of Ms., in Redbook (attracting two thousand letters), Life, a Harvard textbook on contract law, and other anthologies, it drew scorn from Norman Mailer, who famously mocked Shulman by declaring that he never would be married to a woman like her-he would never help his wife with the dishes!"

"In "Sex and Power: Sexual Bases of Radical Feminism," her contribution to the Signs collection, Alix Kates Shulman explains the premise of radical feminist consciousness raising: "The so-called experts on women had traditionally been men who. as part of the male-supremacist power structure, benefited from perpetuating certain ideas. ... We wanted to get at the truth about how women felt.. .. Not how we were supposed to feel but how we really did feel." As it turned out this was easier said than done, especially when the feelings in question were sexual."

"She liked to disappear, even when she was in the same room as other people. It was a talent, as it was a curse."

"The weak are cruel. The strong have no need to be."

"Jewish women in second-wave feminism helped to provide the theoretical underpinnings and models for radical action that were seized on and imitated throughout the United States and abroad. Their articles and books became classics of the movement and led the way into new arenas of cultural and political understanding in academe, politics, and grassroots organizing. Even a partial honor roll of Jewish women's liberation pioneers must include such figures as Shulamith Firestone, Ellen Willis, Robin Morgan, Alix Kates Shulman, Naomi Weisstein, Heather Booth, Susan Brownmiller, Marilyn Webb, Meredith Tax, Andrea Dworkin, Linda Gordon, Ellen DuBois, Ann Snitow, Marge Piercy, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, and Vivian Gornick. Despite historians' acknowledgment of the salience of Jewish women in earlier social movements, their prominence within radical feminism failed to attract much attention."

"Advocates, no matter how old, face forward and upward toward the light; funerals can only momentarily divert them."

"By the early 1980s the explosive phase of the movement was over, at least for the time being-explosive and quiescent phases having alternated for several hundred years. Yet throughout that decade and the following, the ideas advanced by the movement were so warmly embraced by the mainstream that their very success sparked an organized, sometimes virulent backlash (including widespread bombings of abortion clinics and torture of gays), producing what became known as the culture wars."

"Compared to the heavy burden of age I felt in my early thirties-panicked over the impending loss of youth about to finish me off-seventy feels positively young. Remember the 1960s slogan, "don't trust anyone over thirty"? Remember the thirty-year-old admission age to Older Women's Liberation (OWL)? Never have I felt older or more irrelevant than before feminism's Second Wave, when thirty was considered over-the-hill (for women) and the last safe age to begin a family, and your life was supposed to be fulfilled by having babies. Still feeling then like a 1950s middle class Midwestern girl, though living in New York, I retired from full-time work to become a mother; and by the time my youngest started school I was a disillusioned wife with a wandering husband, no savings, no prospects, no future. A has-been at thirty-four! Then the women's liberation movement hit New York and quickly restored my youthful ardor. Suddenly I had a compelling purpose and important work. Far from being a has-been, I knew life had not, would not pass me by. Fired by movement passion, in quick succession I defied my husband, began organizing women's groups, gave my first speech, wrote my first essay and before long first novel. Though that early movement euphoria couldn't last, I never again felt as impotent or "old" as I had before it touched me. In an instant I switched from a woman with a past ("old") to one with a future ("young")."

"It was in 1967, in the midst of that decade of emotional upheaval and political dissent, that I heard the first rumblings of the women's liberation movement. News reached me in my Greenwich Village apartment via the radio, while I was washing the dinner dishes. I was in my thirties, raising two small children and beginning to write. On the air, several fervent young women were discussing the injustice of women's situation in words that spoke directly to me. When they invited their listeners to attend an upcoming meeting of the fledgling movement, I put down my sponge and picked up my pen. Jotting down the telephone number and date of the meeting, in that moment I launched myself into one of the great liberation movements of our time, which profoundly transformed the lives of women worldwide, mine included."

"each generation can do no more than add its bit to the endless river of consciousness and change, and that's about as good as it gets."

"He started to look at me in a manner I recognized: it was the way I looked at a new book, one I had never read before, one that surprised me with all it had to say."

"When I ask Shulman if she is surprised that women are still having such bad sex, her response is swift. “Not really,” she says. “And the reason is that the power relations between genders haven’t changed much. I think it takes a lot of trust and caring for good sex to happen—for women at least.”"

"My inspiration for the novel came from my participation in the first national demonstration of the women’s liberation movement: the 1968 protest against the Miss America Pageant, in Atlantic City, that symbol of traditional white beauty standards. That protest brought women’s liberation to national attention for the first time."

"(about writing her 1972 novel Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen) I wanted to show everything that we were talking about, in consciousness-raising"

"“Looks were an advantage for getting a husband, and getting a husband was everything,” Shulman explains. “You couldn’t even go to upscale restaurants in the evening if you were a woman alone or even two women. You had to have a man with you. It’s very hard for people to understand what it was like then."

"As a feminist, I believe that individuals on their own cannot change the culture; individual solutions don’t have traction. It takes a mass movement to really change things."

"Win or lose, Scalia remains energized. Justice Breyer has often referred to the "physical energy" and "intellectual rigor" Scalia brings to the task. And Thomas observes, "He puts on his music and gets his computer ready. It's like he's conducting a symphony... with majority opinions, and dissents, too." Scalia might be at the apex of his influence. With conservatives holding the balance of power, and still being among the younger members of the nine, these final years of the first decade of the twenty-first century might offer Scalia his best ever opportunity to prevail. This could be his best shot."

"Supreme Court eras are often identified with their chief justices, as is true of the current period that began with Roberts nearly two decades ago. But the Court can be measured also by presidential influence. Certain presidents, such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, who appointed eight justices in his twelve years in office, had a disproportionate effect on the Court. Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon also stood out for their imprint. The Trump effect, especially in terms of the individuals chosen and the resulting shift in the balance of power, has been incomparable. He is gone from office and they are here for life."

"Each generation must define the problems anew, from their own observations and experience."

"Once a writer has published a book, it belongs to its readers."

"Joan Biskupic has covered the Supreme Court since 1989. Previously the Supreme Court reporter for The Washington Post, she is the legal affairs correspondent for USA Today, a frequent panelist on PBS's Washington Week, and the author of Sandra Day O'Connor: How the First Woman on the Supreme Court Became Its Most Influential Justice. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and daughter."

"Around this time, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said of Scalia, "I love him. But sometimes I'd like to strangle him." Justice John Paul Stevens, the eldest member of the bench, added separately, "I think everybody respects Nino's wonderful writing ability and his style and all the rest. But everybody on the Court from time to time has thought he was unwise to take such an extreme position, both in tone and position." Stevens, who expressed fondness for Scalia even when Scalia was his most rhetorically overdramatic, later elaborated, "If he thinks a position is totally indefensible, he'll say so. And sometimes I think his rhetoric is stronger than what is justified or what is actually persuasive. He's got to have the last word. But is it really worth it?""

"The Supreme Court is likely never to go as far as Scalia wants on racial policies. And in an equally explosive area of the law, he will likely never see the overturning of Roe v. Wade- Kennedy would block that. Scalia is also likely to continue on the losing side of gay rights, courtesy of Kennedy. Yet, in upcoming years, Scalia could help bring about more mingling of church and state and less government regulation of campaign financing- again, because of votes by Kennedy and fellow conservatives. Scalia will also certainly continue to nourish his originalist constitutional theory and bring it to wider audiences."