Charlotte Perkins Gilman

“I always liked that Arab saying, 'First tie your camel and then trust in the Lord,”

“The most serious injury is done in childhood. Our cruel waste of the nerve force of children is only more pathetic than it is absurd. The mere business of growing up... which should be a process unconscious or full of joy and rich accumulation, is made by our ignorant mishandling a confusing, irritating, exhausting process, often leaving permanent injuries to the machine, as well as waste of power.”

“There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will.”

“They were inconveniently reasonable, these women.”

“I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind.”

“Will you excuse us all,” [Jeff] said, “if we admit that we find it hard to believe? There is no such-possibility-in the rest of the world.”Have you no kind of life where [asexual reproduction] is possible?” asked Zava.“Why, yes-some low forms, of course.”“How low-or how high, rather?”

“To attain happiness in another world we need only to believe something, while to secure it in this world we must do something.”

“Now why should that man have fainted? But he did,and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!”

“Most men’s eyes, when you look at them critically, are not like that. They may look at you very expressively, but when you look at them, just as features, they are not very nice.”

“I want to marry you, Malda - because I love you - because you are young and strong and beautiful - because you are wild and sweet and - fragrant, and - elusive, like the wild flowers you love. Because you are so truly an artist in your special way, seeing beauty and giving it to others. I love you because of all of this, because you are rational and highminded and capable of friendship - and in spite of your cooking!”“But - how do you want to live?”“As we did here - at first,” he said. “There was peace, exquisite silence. There was beauty - nothing but beauty. There were the clean wood odors and flowers and fragrances and sweet wild wind. And there was you - your fair self, always delicately dressed, with white firm fingers sure of touch in delicate true work. I loved you then.”

“Its time we woke up,” pursued Gerald, still inwardly urged to unfamiliar speech. “Women are pretty much people, seems to me. I know they dress like fools - but who’s to blame for that? We invent all those idiotic hats of theirs, and design their crazy fashions, and what’s more, if a woman is courageous enough to wear common-sense clothes - and shoes - which of us wants to dance with her?”

“One new indulgence was to go out evenings alone. This I worked out carefully in my mind, as not only a right but a duty. Why should a woman be deprived of her only free time, the time allotted to recreation? Why must she be dependent on some man, and thus forced to please him if she wished to go anywhere at night?A stalwart man once sharply contested my claim to this freedom to go alone. “Any true man,” he said with fervor, “is always ready to go with a woman at night. He is her natural protector.” “Against what?” I inquired. As a matter of fact, the thing a woman is most afraid to meet on a dark street is her natural protector. Singular”

“As for mother Eve - I wasn't there and can't deny the story, but I will say this. If she brought evil into the world, we men have had the lion's share of keeping it going ever since.”

“New York - that unnatural city where every one is an exile, none more so than the American”

“It is a big, airy room, the whole floor nearly, with windows that look all ways, and air and sunshine galore. It was nursery first and then playroom and gymnasium, I should judge; for the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls.The paint and paper look as if a boys' school had used it. It is stripped off--the paper--in great patches all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach, and in a great place on the other side of the room low down. I never saw a worse paper in my life.One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide--plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.The color is repellant, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others.No wonder the children hated it! I should hate it myself if I had to live in this room long.”

“To swallow and follow, whether old doctrine or new propaganda, is a weakness still dominating the human mind.”

“In a sick society, women who have difficulty fitting in are not ill but demonstrating a healthy and positive response.”

“I learned a lot, when I was a child, from novels and stories, even fairytales have some point to them--the good ones. The thing that impressed me most forcibly was this: the villains went to work with their brains and always accomplished something. To be sure they were "foiled" in the end, but that was by some special interposition of Providence, not by any equal exertion of intellect on the part of the good people. The heroes and middle ones were mostly very stupid. If bad things happened, they practised patience, endurance, resignation, and similar virtues; if good things happened they practised modesty and magnanimity and virtues like that, but it never seemed to occur to any of them to make things move their way. Whatever the villains planned for them to do, they did, like sheep. The same old combinations of circumstances would be worked off on them in book after book--and they always tumbled.It used to worry me as a discord worries a musician. Hadn't they ever read anything? Couldn't they learn anything from what they read--ever? It appeared not. And it seemed to me, even as a very little child, that what we wanted was good people with brains, not just negative, passive, good people, but positive, active ones, who gave their minds to it."A good villain. That's what we need!" I said to myself. "Why don't they write about them? Aren't there ever any?"I never found any in all my beloved story books, or in real life. And gradually, I made up my mind to be one.”

“Woman" in the abstract is young, and, we assume, charming. As they get older they pass off the stage, somehow, into private ownership mostly, or out of it altogether.”

“Patriotism, red hot, is compatible with the existence of a neglect of national interests, a dishonesty, a cold indifference to the suffering of millions. Patriotism is largely pride, and very largely combativeness. Patriotism generally has a chip on its shoulder.”

“It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide—plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.”

“When all usefulness is over, when one is assured of an unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one.”

“Through it [literature] we know the past, govern the present, and influence the future.”

“I often wonder if I could see her out of all the windows at once.But, turn as fast as I can, I can only see out of one at one time.And though I always see her, she may be able to creep faster than I can turn!I have watched her sometimes away off in the open country, creeping as fast as a cloud shadow in a high wind.”

“It is the same woman, I know, for she is always creeping, and most women do not creep by daylight.”

“A lifted world lifts women up,"the Socalist explained.You cannot lift the world at allWhile half of it is kept so small,"the Suffragist maintained.The world awoke, and tartly spoke:Your work is all the same;Work together or work apart,Work, each of you, with all your heart-Just get into the game!”

“A man's honor always seems to want to kill a woman to satisfy it. ”

“Those who too patiently serve as props sometimes underrate the possibilities of the vine.”

“We all need one another; much and often. Just as every human creature needs a place to be alone in, a sacred, private "home" of his own, so all human creatures need a place to be together in, from the two who can show each other their souls uninterruptedly, to the largest throng that can throb and stir in unison.”

“This is the woman's century, the first chance for the mother of the world to rise to her full place . . . and the world waits while she powders her nose.”

“And, as I traveled farther and farther, exploring the rich, sweet soul of her, my sense of pleasant friendship became but a broad foundation for such height, such breadth, such interlocked combination of feeling as left me fairly blinded with the wonder of it.”

“Death? Why all this fuss about death? Use your imagination, try to visualize a world without death! Death is the essential condition to life, not an evil.”

“The first duty of a human being is to assume the right relationship to society -- more briefly, to find your real job, and do it.”

“I'm sure I never used to be so sensitive. I think it is due to this nervous condition.”

“Never in all her life had she imagined that this idolized millinery could look, to those who paid for it, like the decorations of an insane monkey.”

“There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver.”