Women Authors From The United States

"“We been writ out of the history of this town. They got a metal marker down to the courthouse tell a crazy twisting of what really happen Easter Sunday sixty years ago. The ones with the upper hand make the story fit how they want, and tell it so loud people tricked into thinking it real but writing down don’t make it so. The littlest colored child in Colfax, Louisiana, know better than to speak the truth of that time out loud, but real stories somehow carry forward, generation to generation.”"

"“Making a better way for the children. In the end, making a better life for our children what we all want.”"

"It isn't as if there were a lot of women, let alone African American women vice presidents," Tademy said. "There was a lot of bewilderment. And then 18 months later, when I said I was going to write a book, that's when people's eyes rolled back in their heads."

"Sugarcane EVA is a preferred material because it is made using swift-growing, rainwater-fed, renewable sugarcane. Using sugarcane provides a more sustainable alternative to petroleum-based, non-renewable materials often used in conventional footwear. Additionally, sugarcane captures CO2 from the atmosphere thereby sequestering carbon"

"In my head, I lived on the plantation, and then I lived through the Civil War, and then I lived in Reconstruction and then I lived in the Jim Crow South, " she said. "It was always very personal, and I think that's something that's an added complexity. I was these women, but on the flip side, they were me. I really felt them as ancestors, not just characters I made up."

"“There is a special way of seeing come with age and distance, a kind of knowing how things happen even without knowing why. Seeing what show up one or two generations removed, from a father to a son or grandson, like repeating threads weaving through the same bolt of cloth. Repeating scraps at the foot and the head of a quilt.”"

"An author's life is very solitary and that part is sometimes difficult," she said. "I think about how stimulating it was to have so many smart people around (at Sun Microsystems), but I enjoy this."

"“You can’t tell how heavy somebody else’s load is just from looking. The Lord doesn’t give us more than we can carry.”"

"I literally woke up one morning and said 'I am going to write a book.' I didn't write it from chapter one. I just tried to get to know who these women [my ancestors] were. I wrote in their voices for a couple of months. I would write it as a diary, and then I would put two of them in the room together and see how they interacted with one another. And then I put three in a room together until I began to really feel that I had a handle on who they were and how they would react. And what happened was a novel."

"“Sometimes while you wait for what you think is better … what is good enough slips away.”"

"If I had not ventured into technology with a business background, I would not have had this career trajectory."

"“This was the face of slavery. To have nothing, and still have something more to lose.”"

"While my HBS classmates veered toward management consulting and Wall Street, I took the technology road less traveled. I’ve always followed my favorite quote from management guru Peter Drucker who says: ‘The best way to predict the future is to create it.’ Most of my career has been centered around technologies that ‘created the future’"

"For Deckers, being transparent and honest about our sustainability journey is key to the success of our program. We also have well over 200 targets which we use to guide our progress under each of our sustainable development goals. We hope to remain steadfast in our commitment to creating change in our communities, our employees and our planet"

"My childhood had a great influence in making me very determined to be independent and listen to my own voice. And that really put me in very good stead when I started my corporate career. I had built up my career, and I had climbed the corporate ladder. After a couple of decades, I had worked myself up to being a Vice President and General Manager of a Fortune 500 Company in Silicon Valley."

"“There is nothing more satisfying than having plans.”"

"Do not be afraid to follow the road less traveled,."

"Since HBS, I have been intentionally inserting myself into businesses and technologies that have transformed humanity and the workplace as we know it today. In the late 1980s, I witnessed the PC revolution and rise of distributed data processing during my time at IBM. During the ‘90s, I saw the unfolding of consumer driven automotive online retailing at Chrysler and in the 2000s, I followed the allure of the wild, wild, web at Google. Today, I sit at the precipice of AI (artificial intelligence) with my role at Gradient Ventures, Google’s venture capital firm specializing in AI-enabled startups"

"My best experience at HBS was taking the Corporate Information Systems Management class taught by Warren McFarland and James Cash. I inherently knew the intersection of business and technology was a winning combination and they confirmed my thinking early on"

"“We all have a voice. We just have to decide how we want to use it.”"

"“You belong in every room. But not every room deserves to have you.”"

"Unfortunately, the term sustainable is ambiguous and not well defined, which has led to a lot of confusion in the marketplace. At Deckers, we believe in a holistic approach to sustainability, meaning you have to not only be looking at environmental indicators (greenhouse gas emissions, waste generation, waste diversion, water consumption, etc.) but also the social indicators (minimum wage, forced labor, child labor, health and safety, etc.). We strive to be mindful of our actions, respectful of our planet, and to ensure our employees and factory workers feel appreciated and empowered to be their true authentic selves. If we do these things, we believe we will be a sustainable and resilient business"

"At Deckers, we are continually modifying our strategies, adding to our targets, reallocating our resources, and challenging ourselves to make an even greater impact. There is so much more that we want to do and while our own journey will likely never conclude, we hope our actions continue to inspire others, be a positive light, and create change for all."

"I have stood on a mountain of no's for one yes"

"For my board selections and my investments, I seek innovative products and services combined with a culture of corporate responsibility"

"“You can decide where you want to be or what table you want to build”."

"“Success is not a solo sport.”"

"I used to make calls to magazines all the time. I wasn’t discovered. I made them discover me,”"

"“Prepare for your goals by leveling up your skillset.”"

"Martha Stewart has presented herself doing the things domestics and African Americans have done for years...We were always expected to redo the chairs and use everything in the garden. This is the legacy that I was left. Martha just got there first"

"I’m still myself. I just can’t remember things as well as I once did"

"I wrote the book because black women in America have been protected and insulated against certain kinds of criticism and examination."

"I’ve seen beautiful things and terrible things. Until you, I didn’t know that they’re two sides of the same feeling. I want you, Ricki. Actually, it’s not a want. It’s an uncompromising, inconvenient need. But it’ll ruin us both."

"I believe in love at first sight, all of that. I’m a very romantic person. I romanticize life. How grim and sad is your life if you can’t mythologize it? Because life is hard. So I’ve always just tried to make a story out of everything. I don’t want things to be run of the mill. I want everything to be high stakes, more vivid than average: The most interesting people you’ve ever met, the funniest dialogue, the best sex, like ever. Because ultimately, this is a gift from me, to Black women."

"Humor is so important! Life is absurd. It truly is. And in The Perfect Find, the characters find themselves in some dramatic situations that call for some levity – a quip, a witticism, a bit of banter. It’s very much a Black thing to use humor to cope with outrageous circumstances!"

"Most generally, it’s the idea that we should live in a fair, equal society that doesn’t oppress, degrade, silence, ignore, or disempower women. Nobody is free until everybody is free. Most importantly, any true feminism theory must be intersectional."

"To me, love is like listening to an album. Some people skip to their favorite songs and ignore the rest. Other people listen to the entire album over and over until it's familiar and cherished and they know every note by heart."

"I think the thing that I’ve learned the most is that I don’t always have to write exactly about what I know."

"Why did I ever pick up a pen?! It’s hard! It’s hard because you’re not doing it for anyone else. You’re doing it for yourself and you have to be the boss and the taskmaster and if you’re tired or struggling or have writer’s block, it’s very hard to stay on top of your schedule to meet your goals."

"Marilynne Robinson says she read Moby-Dick when she was nine. I wish I could say such a thing! I was reading horse books, dog books, the Baba Yaga stories in : my was my most treasured possession, but I didn’t read with much discrimination."

"What would be the point to discuss the craft of Jean Rhys, Janet Frame, Christina Stead, Malcolm Lowry, all of whose works can teach us little about technique, and whose way of touching us is simply by exploding on the lintel of our minds. It is not technique that guided them. Their craft consisted of desire. We are American writers, absorbing the American experience. We must absorb its heat, the recklessness and ruthlessness, the grotesqueries and cruelties. We must reflect the sprawl and smallness of America, its greedy optimism and dangerous sentimentality. And we must write with a pen—in Mark Twain’s phrase—warmed up in hell. We might have something then, worthy, necessary; a real literature instead of the Botox escapist lit told in the shiny prolix comedic style that has come to define us."

"In July of 1995, the Copa, along with the chic restaurant Antonia's, burnt to the ground in the traditional suspicious, middle-of-the-night fire. Built in 1917 as a movie theater, it had been wearily showing Deep Throat for a decade before it was transformed in the '80's into a glossy gay cruise bar."

"There is, between the sexes, a law of incessant reciprocal action, of which God avails himself in the constitution of the family, when He permits brothers and sisters to nestle about the same hearthstone. Its ministration is essential to the best educational results. Our own educational institutions should rest upon this divine basis."

"I have seen no Hindu who seemed to me prepared intellectually and morally for the freedom he would find in American society; nor are Americans prepared for the air of innocence and exaltation worn by very undeserving Orientals."

"Let us candidly confess our indebtedness to the needle. How many hours of sorrow has it softened, how many bitter irritations calmed, how many confused thoughts reduced to order, how many life-plans sketched in purple!"

"... when I just started this book I thought: Roth’s pretty much has it down on what the worse thing a Jewish boy can do but what is the worst thing a Jewish girl can do? Well: it is most likely throwing up her mother’s cooking. Food is identity, it’s love, it’s politics, it’s family. To reject that, and in such a self-destructive manner, is something I wanted to investigate. It also implicitly brings up the notion of privilege, which is also a stereotype many young Jewish women are saddled with."

"It's actually quite frightening to be an author and know the business side of publishing. I imagine it's easier to be in Iowa and not know what's going on with your book. If the industry had stayed the same, I might still feel in control of the publishing process, but sales reps' jobs have changed, marketing jobs have changed, publicity jobs have changed."

"My husband and I were on this protracted and tragic adoption journey. It was really hard and there were a lot of things that went wrong, so I decided while this is happening I'd write a book about it to make it more interesting as opposed to just tragic. It's definitely based on our experience, but not exactly our experience. You know, I feel like if writers used writing as therapy we'd have a ton of happy writers [laughs]. I think I learned some things about it, how to be patient, a little bit, and I'm so hard on that narrator, that I got to see the worst of how I felt. My husband said this to me actually—he said I was taking this horrible thing that we were going through and turning it into something positive. I felt productive in that way."

"There have always been women, from the days of the Queen of Sheba, who sought out wisdom, who made great sacrifices, and endured arduous toil to come to a fountain-head of knowledge. This 19th century, these last fifty years, have brought to women, to large numbers of women, opportunities before accessible only to the gifted few. Now these streams flow freely, and women come in throngs. But does the draught quicken them to new life? Culture is more than the acquisition of knowledge. To bear fruit, learning must pass into life. It is the touch of man upon nature that makes art; and as the highest art is a going back to nature, having received it, having been nourished upon it, to return it stamped with man’s impress, so the finest fruit of learning must be personality. The soul is the supreme power always. To enlarge its kingdom, to bring warring elements under its control — this is the supreme task of education. Intellectual knowledge is so much dead matter until it is vitalized by a union with the soul’s wisdom. To foster this union, to provide material for the nourishment of the spirit, to train the mind to appreciate and to choose and govern — these are the great fundamental tasks which lie at the root of all education."

"Follow your obsessions. It feels lonely and crazy sometimes, but if you believe in them other people will too, and you will create something enduring."