Literary Girls Quotes

What I want, and this is what I want for myself and for all of my fellow sad young literary girls, is to be able to read something without it fundamentally altering how you write or read or talk about the things you like, to invite more nuance and more complexity to everything, to over-examine your likes and dislikes and hold them to the highest scrutiny, until you are the thing that stays still in a turning world of people who can keep themselves still as well ["Free Joan Didion," The Awl, January 13, 2015]. ~ Hailey Mlotek

I started falling for you as soon as you bumped into me. I knew I could be a goner so easily."
"Really?"
"Oh, yeah. And when I pictured you in shoulder pads and a helmet--"
I shoved his shoulder. "You did not!"
"Oh, yeah, I did. And I thought, of all the girls in this town, she is the one that I absolutely can't find fascinating. ~ Rachel Hawthorne

You ask Why to a lot of things and you wind up very unhappy indeed, if you keep at it. The poor girl's better off dead ~ Ray Bradbury

Could a literary life be referred to with the iambic pentameter of, say, harnessing wind power, transplanting hearts or saving the whales. Or did it necessitate the sombre and monotonous dirge of software, priority banking or turbine building. ~ Anita Nair

Ivanov had been a party member since 1902. Back then he had tried to write stories in the manner of Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gorky, or rather he had tried to plagiarize them without much success, which led him, after long reflection (a whole summer night), to the astute decision that he should write in the manner of Odoevsky and Lazhechnikov. Fifty percent Odoevsky and fifty percent Lazhecknikov. This went over well, in part because readers, their memories mostly faulty, had forgotten poor Odoevsky (1803-1869) and poor Lazhechnikov (1792-1869), who died the same year, and in part because literary criticism, as keen as ever, neither extrapolated nor made the connection nor noticed a thing. ~ Roberto Bolano

Jay-Z, he knows precisely who he's going for - 14-year-old white suburban girls. ~ Penn Jillette

We all have a book in us. The first step is recognising this. Writing it is a whole new journey. ~ Kathryn Joyce

People have this conception of plus size models as girls who aren't fit or don't work out or don't really take care of their bodies. ~ Hayley Hasselhoff

There are so many beautiful girls around that after a while you start looking for someone who can make you laugh ~ Candace Bushnell

Everyone goes to the 'Grands-Boulevards' (in Paris, ed.) and let himself loose ... Do not picture these in costume, they are not for the most part ... perhaps a clown with a big nose, or two girls with bare necks and short skirts ... the parade of the queens of the halls (markets) is also one of the events ... Some are pretty but look awkward in their silk dresses and crowns, particularly as the broad sun displays their defects - perhaps a neck too thin or a painted face which shows ghastley white in the sunlight. ~ Edward Hopper

I like to be somewhere at least where you can see a few girls around once in a while, even if they're only scratching their arms or blowing their noses or even just giggling or something. ~ J.D. Salinger

There are people, primarily women!
who are what I call 'conduits of emotion.' In their company, the half dead can come alive. They need not be beautiful women or girls. It's a matter of blood warmth. The integrity of the spirit." He turned the page of his sketch pad and began anew, whistling thinly through his teeth.
"Thus an icy-cold soul, in the presence of one so blessed, can regain something of his lost self. Sometimes! ~ Joyce Carol Oates

For, of course, being a girl, one's whole dignity and meaning in life consisted in the achievement of an absolute, a perfect, a pure and noble freedom. What else did a girl's life mean? ~ D.H. Lawrence

For all the invisible girls and for my readers, for seeing me ~ Sarah Dessen

Should the girls decide to go for a walk, they would need to change into a different outfit, a light woollen tweed suit and sturdier boots - but on simpler days, such as for the garden party, they make mercifully few changes. Cora, like many married ladies in her position, takes the opportunity on quiet afternoons to take off her corset and wear a teagown for an hour or two before getting into her evening dress. Its huge advantage was that it was always ornately decorated but simply cut, meaning it was the only garment a woman could conceivably get in and out of alone, as it could be worn without a corset underneath. Worn between five and seven o'clock, it gave rise to the French phrase 'cinq a sept'. This referred to the hours when lovers were received, the only time of day when a maid wouldn't need to be there to help you undress and therefore discover your secret. Lady Colin Campbell's divorce had hinged on the fact that her clothes had clearly been fastened by a man who didn't know what he was doing; when her lady's maid saw her for the next change, the fastenings were higgledy-piggledy. But for Cora, the teagown is not for any illicit behaviour, just for respite from her underpinnings. ~ Jessica Fellowes

In literary translations, it is this very articulation of expressions that matters the most to bring home to the readers the full essence of the original text in question. ~ Suman Pokhrel

A girl's desire is like a pretty butterfly. And a man's desire is like a butterfly net. His desire captures and kills her. He turns her into an object to be pinned on a corkboard. I don't think I'm interested in the tyranny of the couple. I'm more interested in what a person does when they're forced to be by themselves. ~ Heather O'Neill

The Sunday school trip: While us girls were alone, a nasty piece of work called Louise, aged about eleven, decided that it would be a 'fun' idea to hang someone over the cliff ... me! ~ Eskay Teel

And we are so fragile,and our cracking nones make noise, and we are just breakable, breable, breakable girls ~ Ingrid Michaelson

And I tell her about his description because I want her to know what I now know, which is that the place where the pepper grows is not a place to be afraid of ...
I tell her: Mama, exile is not always the darkest corner of the earth. Sometimes it is lush and plentiful, sometimes it is full of life ... ~ Carola Perla

I'd been writing poems for many years, but most of them I didn't like. Then, when I was 23, I wrote one I did like, sent it to 'The Paris Review' - the highest publication I could think of - and they accepted it. No other moment in my literary life has quite come close to that. ~ Siri Hustvedt

I find some small, twisted comfort in thinking that perhaps we used each other. Him, for a glimpse into what it would be like to live a life entirely different from the one he'd been raised to desire, and me for the steady diet of angst and emotional damage that seemed to make me better, sharper, like a sword against a whetstone.
I was his intellectual escape from a long parade of pretty, empty girls... and he was my drug of choice -- unhealthy, probably lethal, but ultimately so addictive it was hard to turn away.
The problem, of course, with this theory of mutual exploitation, is that it is the deepest of lies. There was nothing equal or mutual about the way we used each other. I barely scratched his surface while he sliced me limb from limb.
There's no comfort in that. None at all. ~ Julie Johnson

it's even harder to talk about girls who have died young: by dying, they stay young forever. ~ Haruki Murakami

The man jumped and stared at the two little girls. "What are you doing here?" he demanded.
"We live here, in the caretaker's cabin," Rosetta answered. "Do you need help?"
"Do I need help?" he roared. "What do you think, you little snippet?"
"What's a snippet?" asked Bianca innocently. ~ Sarah Brazytis

I think I'm a bit in love with these girls. They make me feel giddy. Like I haven't a care in the world. Like I'm fearless.
Like I used to be. ~ Melina Marchetta

I'm just a bad writer who drinks too much and falls in love with girls ~ Graham Greene

I prefer girls to wear dresses because I like how they influence a woman's body language. I also love skirts. One of my favorite pieces of clothing is the pencil skirt because it obliges the wearer to have a pretty attitude. I like anything that shows a woman's legs because I love to see her skin and how she walks. ~ Christian Louboutin

When girls bully, it's very subtle, and you can't define it. At least with boys, the bullying is usually explicit, and you can deal with it. It's psychological with girls. ~ Natalie Dormer

and here instead's another version of what was happening that morning, as if from a novel in which sophia is the kind of character she'd choose to be, prefer to be, a character in a much more classic sort of story, perfectly honed and comforting, about how sombre yet bright the major-symphony of winter is and how beautiful everything looks under a high frost, how every grassblade is enhanced and silvered into individual beauty by it, how even the dull tarmac of the roads, the paving under our feet, shines when the weather's been cold enough and how something at the heart of us, at the heart of all our cold and frozen states, melts when we encounter a time of peace on earth, goodwill to all men; a story in which there's no room for severed heads; a work in which sophia's perfectly honed minor-symphony modesty and narrative decorum complement the story she's in with the right kind of quiet wisdom-from-experience ageing-female status, making it a story that's thoughtful, dignified, conventional in structure thank god, the kind of quality literary fiction where the slow drift of snow across the landscape is merciful, has a perfect muffling decorum of its own, snow falling to whiten, soften, blur and prettify even further a landscape where there are no heads divided from bodies hanging around in the air or anywhere, either new ones, from new atrocities or murders or terrorisms, or old ones, left over from old historic atrocities and murders and terrorisms and bequeathed to the fut ~ Ali Smith

One Direction? The young girls will grow up and forget about 'em. ~ Jake Bugg

Let's face it: Most girls are annoying. I mean, most humans are annoying, so it's not specific to girls. Also, I don't really mean "annoying." I guess I mean that most humans like to try to fuck up your plans. ~ Jesse Andrews

I was first published in the newspaper put out by School of The Art Institute of Chicago, where I was a student. I wince to read that story nowadays, but I published it with an odd photo I'd found in a junk shop, and at least I still like the picture. I had a few things in the school paper, and then I got published in a small literary magazine. I hoped I would one day get published in The New Yorker, but I never allowed myself to actually believe it. Getting published is one of those things that feels just as good as you'd hoped it would. ~ David Sedaris

What is it, Master Calligrapher, that little girls do in the way that spiders weave?" sleeve asked primly.
The Calligrapher coughed, for his room was very dusty, and there was dust even on his eyelashes, and said: "It is right and proper," he said, "for a girl to read as many books as there are bricks in this city, and then, when she is finished, to begin to write new ones which are made out of the old ones, as this city is made of those stones. ~ Catherynne M Valente

We have a foundation, the Soledad O'Brien Starfish Foundation. We send girls to and through college. We started-off saying we send girls to college, but to do so is not enough. Seeing them through college is the key. ~ Soledad O'Brien

One of the girls read somewhere that a red flag was the proper symbol for the oppressed workers, and so they mounted one, and paraded all about the yards, yelling with rage. A new union was the result of this outburst, but the impromptu strike went to pieces in three days, owing to the rush of new labour. ~ Upton Sinclair

There are a lot of us, some published, some not, who think the literary life is the loveliest one possible, this life of reading and writing and corresponding. We think this life is nearly ideal. ~ Anne Lamott

Come, take these two wicked girls, they are tender morsels for you, fat as young quails; for mercy's sake eat them!' The ~ Jacob Grimm