22 quotes
Art is at least in part a way of collecting information about the universe.
I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.
Everyone realizes that one can believe little of what people say about each other. But it is not so widely realized that even less can one trust what people say about themselves.
Socialism is not a bomb thrown at the natural institution of society, but a well-considered medicine for a diseased community.
The word “idiot” comes from a Greek root meaning private person.
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941)
All men should have a drop of treason in their veins, if the nations are not to go soft like so many sleepy pears.
Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one’s own Trojan horse.
There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence.
Mary Biggs Women's Words: The Columbia Book of Quotations by Women (1996)
The point is that nobody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.
The Harsh Voice: Four Short Novels (1935)
God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.
Present-day women's lib … is repudiation of the obligation to follow a certain pattern if you are a woman. It is much more fundamental than suffragism. And, on the whole, I am with it.
To him boredom was a tragedy, for he had no more realization than if he had been an animal that any state he was in would ever come to an end.
The Thinking Reed (1936)
There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.
The Harsh Voice: Four Short Novels (1935)
It is not until a community or an individual has advanced a fair distance along the path of civilisation and shows by its laws its elimination of many of its most mischievous dispositions — notably sadism — that it can bear to admit the equality of women.
Woman as Artist and Thinker (1931)
She was indeed aching with that depression, which oddly takes the form of a sense of guilt, that comes to those who find themselves alone in sobriety among the alcoholized.
The Thinking Reed (1936)
It would seem … that man has been shocked by the war into forgetting how to be a political animal. This suspicion is confirmed by the spread of Fascism, which is a headlong flight into fantasy from the necessity for political thought.
The Necessity and Grandeur of the International Ideal (1935)
One performed public duties, for which one was paid in full by deference; one was chaste, refusing to run away from one's husband with other men who for the most part did not ask one to do so, and who in any case had nothing to offer better than one’s own home.
For one cannot serve the national spirit merely by getting a lump in the throat whenever one catches sight of the Union Jack, or by seeing red when a newspaper reports that some foreign power has acted aggressively towards England. These reactions bear the same relation to true love of country that a chance encounter between a man and a woman who meet in the street bears to a happy marriage.
The Necessity and Grandeur of the International Ideal (1935)
She had in all her life never stopped talking long enough to given anyone time to approach her with any proposition regarding sexual irregularity; and the general tendency to be censorious of the vices to which one has not been tempted was present in her in a specially rank form.
The Thinking Reed (1936)
I do not myself find it agreeable to be 90, and I cannot imagine why it should seem so to other people. It is not that you have any fears about your own death, it is that your upholstery is already dead around you.