J. Courtney Sullivan Quotes

For whatever reason, various outlets and individuals are committed to making the world think that young girls don't talk or care about feminism anymore, that it's totally over. But it's not.

Her faith in God was renewed by the simple return of morning, containing the seeds of the day ahead, bringing with it new seeds of redemption, for grace.

But then you were alone, your body trying to heal itself while your mind went numb. There was a mix of joy and the purest love, couples with real boredom and occasional rage. It got easier as the kids got older, but it never got easy.

Women leave their marriages when they can't take any more. Men leave when they find someone new.

I read as much poetry as time allows and circumstance dictates: No heartache can pass without a little Dorothy Parker, no thunderstorm without W. H. Auden, no sleepless night without W. B. Yeats.

Nothing had just happened to her, she had made a choice, and then she had made another and another after that. Taken together, the small choices anyone made added up to a life.

If things had been different, she would be in Carolyn's place right now. She didn't want that sort of existence, but there was something so attractive about the security of feeling like you had stopped moving toward your life, and actually arrived.

Maggie wondered if in some ways all the complaining only made matters worse.

A glimpse at my night stand gives the mostly true impression that I am a book hoarder.

I think we're just different sorts of people, me and you. You're a planner. Everything has to be perfectly aligned before you make a move, or you're afraid the whole damn world will come crashing down. For me, it's more like, We're having a baby. Now what?

Each of Nora's children had arrived on this earth as him or herself, the more she knew them, the more she felt it to be true. They were so different from one another, and from her.

I like dressing up for dates and dissecting a dinner conversation with a new guy to determine if he might be The One.

There are as many paths to God as there are souls on this Earth. Rumi

We don't always do the things our parents want us to do, but it is their mistake if they can't find a way to love us anyway.

Once this kid came into the world, Sally knew, she would live in constant terror of somehow injuring or losing her. Having her tucked deep inside her belly was the safest she would ever feel about the child, and even that was scary.

She remembered how she had felt cleaning out her father's clothes, wanting at once to hold on to every dirty handkerchief and musty page of sheet much, and yet wishing she were anywhere else on earth, free of it all.

Old age had distilled her down to her essence.

Ruby shook her head, but she smiled, a look that said she loved this man, loved the life they had made together. They seemed utterly comfortable with one another, like they knew each other all the way through.

When I was in fourth grade, a novelist came to talk to my English class. She told us that being an author meant sitting at the kitchen table in pajamas, drinking tea with the dogs at your feet.

Timing was everything when it came to being a woman - the moment you entered the world could seal your fate.

How could a person have and do all these stupid things
clip coupons and double lock the front door
and then one day just cease to exist?

Men made mistakes and when they asked forgiveness, women forgave. It happened every day.

You all seem to think you should marry someone when you feel this intense emotion, which you call love. And then you expect the love will fade over time, as life gets harder. When what you should do is find yourself a nice enough fellow and let real love develop over years and births and deaths and so on.

All of it remained, a constant reminder: He existed, then he didn't. The world spins on, indifferent to the mess.

Sometimes April worried that she'd been built without some fundamental piece that everyone else had that just let them deal. Even her mother, who got involved in every lefty cause she could, seemed to be able to shake it all off at the end of the day and enjoy life. But the evil in the world, everywhere you looked, was always on April's mind.

All over the planet women were being tormented, yet if you took sexism seriously, you were a bore, an idiot, or a pain in the ass.

It was amazing that you did not become your grief entirely, and walk about leaking it everywhere.

Even if there was no God there was always the ocean- before you and after you, breathing in and out for all eternity.

This was how the modern working girl behaved. She didn't hide her femininity or apologize for it, as they did in the old days. She flaunted it and, having been given more than any woman before her, demanded even more than that.

She had once said that she believed the women's liberation movement of the sixties and seventies was actually a ploy by men to get women to do more.

It felt something like being in love, but without the weight of having to choose just one heart to hold on to, and without the fear of ever losing it.

April's just a Dixie cup of crazy. Lydia's more like a twenty-gallon tank

She thought about him all the time - not so much about Doug the individual, but rather about the nature of love, and the shock of learning how quickly it could disappear.

You could sell crack on the street and go to jail for decades. Or you could sell a woman, and be back out by morning.

Well, Chrissy, I'm afraid your grandmother's Irish Alzheimer's has gotten quite advanced - she's forgotten everything but her grudges.

Beyond those was a stretch of sand and miles of dark blue sea. You couldn't make out a thing on the other side. As a little girl, Maggie believed that the world dropped off out there, that if you swam far enough you might fall into a starry sky.

Character development is what I value most as a reader of fiction. If an author can manage to create the sort of characters who feel fully real, who I find myself worrying about while I'm walking through the grocery store aisles a week later, that to me is as close to perfection as it gets.

Every woman needs secrets,' her mother said with a smile then, her eyes meeting Sally's in the rearview mirror. 'Remember that when you're old like me, pumpkin, because the world has a way of making a woman's life everyone else's business
you have to dig out a little place that's only yours.

Some women were created to make other women feel like shit about themselves.

What would you have today if you woke up with only the things you thanked God for yesterday?" He wondered

The girls said she was too cynical about love, but how could you not be? On the surface, relations between men and women were all soft kisses and white gowns and hand-holding. But underneath they were a scary, complicated, ugly mess, just waiting to rise to the surface.

And anyway, once you allowed yourself to picture such a scenario, it couldn't happen. That was just the way life went.

Fiction will always be my greatest love, with poetry close behind.

Kids are amazing. The first few months, they're just like these loaves of bread that shit. You're wondering what the hell you got yourself into. But then, they turn into people. It's the most incredible thing I've ever seen.

Someone could save your life without you ever knowing it. It happened more than most people realized.

She didn't have a single friend on earth to see her off. She had outlived them all.

I love the smell of a man's skin.