Quotes by American Authors - Page 54

Rebellion against your handicaps gets you nowhere. Self-pity gets you nowhere. One must have the adventurous daring to accept oneself as a bundle of possibilities and undertake the most interesting game in the world-making the most of one's best.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
Whether it was work marriage or family I've always been a late bloomer.
Sigourney Weaver
There is a solitude which each and every one of us has always carried within. More inaccessible than the ice-cold mountains more profound than the midnight sea: the solitude of self.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
I am because my little dog knows me.
Gertrude Stein
I'm just a person trapped inside a woman's body.
Elayne Boosler
I am not a glutton-I am an explorer of food.
Erma Bombeck
I was not a classic mother. But my kids were never palmed off to boarding school. So I didn't bake cookies. You can buy cookies but you can't buy love.
Raquel Welch
From the first I made my learning what little it was useful every way I could.
Mary McLeod Bethune
I see myself as Rhoda not Mary Tyler Moore.
Rosie O'Donnell
There is not one big cosmic meaning for all there is only the meaning we each give to our life an individual meaning an individual plot like an individual novel a book for each person.
Anaïs Nin
It's this no-nonsense side of women that is pleasant to deal with. They are the real sportsmen.
Phyllis McGinley
To be a housewife is ... a difficult a wrenching sometimes ungrateful job if it's looked on as only a job. Regarded as a profession it is the noblest as it is the most ancient of the catalogue. Let none persuade us differently or the world will be lost indeed.
Phyllis McGinley
God wastes nothing.
Jan Karon
I was once the typical daughter then the easily recognizable wife and then the quintessential mother. I seem always to have reminded people of someone in their family. Perhaps I am just the triumph of Plain Jane.
Helen Hayes
Though I have no productive worth I have a certain value as an indestructible quantity.
Alice James
Some people give time some money some their skills and connections some literally give their life's blood . . . but everyone has something to give.
Barbara Bush
Remember Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did but she did it backwards and in high heels.
Faith Whittlesey
For women there are undoubtedly great difficulties in the path but so much the more to overcome. First no woman would say "I am but a woman!" But a woman! What more can you ask to be?
Maria Mitchell
The sexes in each species of beings . . . are always true equivalents-equals but not identicals.
Antoinette Brown Blackwell
I hear the singing of the lives of women. The clear mystery the offering the pride.
Muriel Rukeyser
We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth as human truth all the maps change. There are new mountains.
Ursula K. LeGuin
There is a potential heroine in every woman.
Jean Shinoda Bolen
Whatever glory belongs to the race for a development unprecedented in history for the given length of time a full share belongs to the womanhood of the race.
Mary McLeod Bethune
We must use what we have to invent what we desire.
Adrienne Rich
The basic experience of everyone is the experience of human limitation.
Flannery O'Connor
I believe that dreams transport us through the underside of our days and that if we wish to become acquainted with the dark side of what we are the signposts are there waiting for us to translate them.
Gail Godwin
I did not lose myself all at once. I rubbed out my face over the years washing away my pain the same way carvings on stone are worn down by water.
Amy Tan
If your head tells you one thing and your heart tells you another before you do anything you should first decide whether you have a better head or a better heart.
Marilyn Vos Savant
I am simple complex generous selfish unattractive beautiful lazy and driven.
Barbra Streisand
Your thorns are the best part of you.
Marianne Moore
Learning too soon our limitations we never learn our powers.
Mignon McLaughlin
A woman of mystique is fully aware of her flaws and weaknesses yet she is strong enough to admit them and not be embarrassed by them.
Jean Lush
Oh I'm so inadequate. And I love myself!
Meg Ryan
I'm a salami writer. I try to write good salami but salami is salami.
Stephen King
Whenever I dwell for any length of time on my own shortcomings they gradually begin to seem mild harmless rather engaging little things not at all like the staring defects in other people's characters.
Margaret Halsey
After my screen test the director clapped his hands gleefully and yelled "She can't talk! She can't act! She's sensational!"
Ava Gardner
To say something nice about themselves this is the hardest thing in the world for people to do.
Nancy Friday
Self-understanding rather than self-condemnation is the way to inner peace and mature conscience.
Joshua L. Liebman
Long tresses down to the floor can be beautiful if you have that but learn to love what you have.
Anita Baker
Sometimes it takes years to really grasp what has happened to your life.
Wilma Rudolph
There are chapters in every life which are seldom read and certainly not aloud.
Carol Shields
Somehow we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Long ago I understood that it wasn't merely my being a woman that was preventing my being welcomed into the world of what I long thought of as my peers. It was that I had succeeded in an undertaking few men have even attempted: I have become myself.
Alice Koller
It is not only the most difficult thing to know oneself but the most inconvenient too.
Josh Billings
You never find yourself until you face the truth.
Pearl Bailey
Sometimes a person has to go back really back-to have a sense an understanding of all that's gone to make them-before they can go forward.
Paule Marshall
Until we see what we are we cannot take steps to become what we should be.
Charlotte P. Gilman
Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves.
Adrienne Rich
You must love and care for yourself because that's when the best comes out.
Tina Turner
What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
Susan Sontag
As simple as it sounds we all must try to be the best person we can: by making the best choices by making the most of the talents we've been given.
Mary Lou Retton
We can't take any credit for our talents. It's how we use them that counts.
Madeleine L'Engle
There is no good reason why we should not develop and change until the last day we live.
Karen Horney
Saying "yes" to yourself means acknowledging what you have that's good and working on the things that aren't.
Patricia Fripp
As it turns out social scientists have established only one fact about single women's mental health: employment improves it.
Susan Faludi
Follow your interests get the best available education and training set your sights high be persistent be flexible keep your options open accept help when offered and be prepared to help others.
Mildred Spiewak Dresselhaus
The deeper interior you have the more you have in your library.
Jacqueline Bisset
I think self-awareness is probably the most important thing towards becoming a champion.
Billie Jean King
To understand is to forgive even oneself.
Alexander Chase
Freedom is knowing who you really are.
Linda Thomson