*because I love a good quote, and always have – finding the deep and powerful in pithy phrases by peeps much wiser than I am. I collect the quotes I love, and share a few with you here…
Accept that you are a work in progress, both a revision and a draft: you are better and more complete than earlier versions of yourself, but you also have work to do. Be open to change. Allow yourself to be revised. ~ Dame Maggie Smith, from Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change
“Women’s bodies are our territory, and it’s a territory that has been colonized by the power of men. … We are taking back the power of our own lives.” – Mary-Jo Bonnet
“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.”- Charlotte Brontë – Jane Eyre, 1847
“As life goes on it becomes tiring to keep up the character you invented for yourself, and so you relapse into individuality and become more like yourself everyday.” ~ Agatha Christie – An Autobiography
“Being a teenage girl is like being invited to a glorious picnic, only to discover you’re one of the sandwiches.” – from TVs The Trial of Christine Keeler.
If I know that my professor sees me not (only) as a student to be taught, but (also) as a body to be fucked, how self-possessed, how exuberant, can I feel sitting in his classroom? – Amia Srinivasan, The Right to Sex
I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself. – Simone de Beauvoir
I used to think I was the strangest person in the world but then I thought there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me too. Well, I hope that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes, it’s true I’m here, and I’m just as strange as you. ~ Frida Kahlo
“With age there comes a richness that’s divine. Age takes on a beauty everyone can’t see, perhaps. But I see it … I don’t know of anything in the world more beautiful, more fascinating than a woman ripe with years, rich and lush as velvet with experience, her humor as tangy and flavorous as sun-ripe fruit. If women wouldn’t get so self-conscious about getting old, they wouldn’t get old mentally, and then they wouldn’t be old at all, only wise and simply divine. I LOVE the idea of getting old.” – Carole Lombard
“You can close the windows and darken your room, and you can open the windows and let light in . . .It is a matter of choice. Your mind is your room. Do you darken it or do you fill it with light?” ~ Agnes Hobbs
I can live alone, if self-respect, and circumstances require me so to do. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss. I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld, or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give. ~ Charlotte Brontë – Jane Eyre
“When you teach your daughter, explicitly or by passive rejection, that she must ignore her outrage, that she must be kind and accepting to the point of not defending herself or other people, that she must not rock the boat for any reason, you are not strengthening her prosocial sense; you are damaging it—and the first person she will stop protecting is herself.” – Martha Stout
“I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it.’ – Joan Didion – Commencement address at the University of California, Riverside, 1975.
“Let’s tell the truth to people. When people ask, ‘How are you?’ have the nerve sometimes to answer truthfully. You must know, however, that people will start avoiding you because, they, too, have knees that pain them and heads that hurt and they don’t want to know about yours. But think of it this way: If people avoid you, you will have more time to meditate and do fine research on a cure for whatever truly afflicts you.” ~ Maya Angelou – Letter to My Daughter
Hope is leaving room for magic that is bigger than you. – Kerry Washington
For it would seem – her case proved it – that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.” – from Orlando, Virginia Woolf
