Comets Across the Sky
Artwork: Wiseblood
by Helen Redman
Quotable Women
- When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but
often we look so long at the closed door that we do not
see the one which has been opened for us.
- ---Helen Keller
- Find your passion, find your passion from the center of
your heart; if you can dream it, you can fulfill it.
- ---Shirley MacLaine
- I'm a self-made woman.
- --- Sojourner Truth
- I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up
my "real" life again at last. That is what is
strange--that friends, even passionate love, are not my
real life unless there is time alone in which to explore
and to discover what is happening or has happened.
Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this
life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I
am alone here and the house and I resume old
conversations.
- ---May Sarton
- The game of life is a game of boomerangs. Our thoughts,
deeds and words return to us sooner or later with
astounding accuracy.
- ---Florence Scovel Shinn
- Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a
refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe
that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great
artist, knows how difficult it is.
- ---Willa Cather
- From listening to the stories of others, we learn to tell
our own.
- ---Margaret Atwood
- My grandfather once told me that there were two kinds of
people: those who do the work and those who take the
credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there
was much less competition.
- ---Indira Gandhi
- In making theories, always keep a window open so that you
can throw one out if necessary.
- ---Bela Schick
- Fortunately, analysis is not the only way to resolve
inner conflicts. Life itself still remains a very
effective therapist.
- ---Karen Horney
- Science may have found a cure for most evils, but it has
found no remedy for the worst of them all--the apathy of
human beings.
- ---Helen Keller
- For if that which you seek, you find not within yourself,
you will never find it without. For behold, I have been
with you from the beginning, and I am that which is
attained at the end of desire.
- ---Doreen Valiente (The Charge Of The Goddess)
- It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit
around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.
- ---Gertrude Stein
- Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinion of
others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth
for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth.
- ---Katherine Mansfield
- Real life is messier than fiction.
- ---Sophy Burnham
- The cure for anything is saltwater--sweat, tears, or the
sea.
- ---Isak Dinesen
- To others we are not ourselves but a performance in their
lives cast for a part we do not even know we are playing.
- ---Elizabeth Bibesco
- Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright
exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold.
- ---Helen Keller
- When I came to understand that there are mythic patterns
in all our lives, I knew that all of us, often
unbeknownst to ourselves, are engaged in a drama of soul
which we were told was reserved for gods, heroes and
saints.
- ---Deena Metzger
- Prayer is a law of the universe, like gravity.
- ---Sophy Burnham
- Think magic, think delight, think fun, think mystery.
- ---Julia Cameron
- In every woman there is a Queen. Speak to the Queen and
the Queen will answer.
- ---Norwegian proverb
- Life begets life. Energy begets energy. It is by spending
oneself that one becomes rich.
- ---Sarah Bernhardt
- The collector walks with blinders on; he sees nothing but
the prize. In fact, the acquisitive instinct is
incompatible with true appreciation of beauty.
- ---Anne Morrow Lindbergh
- If I had my life to live again, I'd make the same
mistakes, only sooner.
- ---Tallulah Bankhead
- If the world were a logical place, men would ride
sidesaddle.
- ---Rita Mae Brown
- The main difference between men and women is that men are
lunatics and women are idiots.
- ---Rebecca West
- The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to
learn, but to unlearn.
- ---Gloria Steinem
- Trouble is a sieve through which we sift our
acquaintances. Those too big to pass through are our
friends.
- ---Arlene Francis
- The stakes are much too high for government to be a
spectator sport.
- --- Barbara Jordan
- People who don't vote have no line of credit with people
who are elected.
- --- Marian Wright Edelman
- Here, in the first paragraph of the Declaration of
Independence, is the assertion of the natural right of
all to the ballot; for how can "the consent of the
governed" be given, if the right to vote be denied?
- --- Susan B. Anthony
- I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm
looking at, what I see and what it means.
- ---Joan Didion
- Procrastination is a cutting off. It diminishes you.
Waiting is when you are ready in the work and you are
feeding it and being fed by it. Then you can trust the
waiting. Do not use the excuse of "waiting" for
the right idea or story in order to begin. That is
procrastination. Get to work. Know the difference between
the two. Do not fool yourself. Be tough. But be tough the
way a blade of grass is: rooted, willing to lean, and at
peace with what's around it.
- ---Natalie Goldberg
- Words have the power to wound or to heal, to attract or
repel and [I must] think before I speak, weigh my words,
because once spent they can't be retrieved.
- ---Susan L. Taylor
- I do not feel inhibited or bound by what I am. That does
not mean that I have never had bad scenes relating to
being Black and/or a woman, it means that other people's
craziness has not managed to make me crazy.
- ---Lucille Clifton
- I am an ordinary human being who is impelled to write
poetry. I still do feel that a poet has a duty to words,
and that words can do wonderful things, and it's too bad
to just let them lie there without doing anything with
and for them.
- ---Gwendolyn Brooks
- Because I and my reality did not comport with what they
accepted as their reality, I and my reality had to be
reconstructed by the Senate committee members with
assistance from the press and others.
- ---Anita Hill
- I continue to create because writing is a labor of love
and also an act of defiance, a way to light a candle in a
gale wind.
- ---Alice Childress
- You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.
- --- Adrienne Rich
- Words are magical, intellectual banquets, orgies of
ideas.
- ---Anais Nin
- Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our
deeds.
- ---George Eliot
- Charity is an ugly trick. It is a virtue grown by the
rich on the graves of the poor. Unless it is accompanied
by sincere revolt against the present social system, it
is cheap moral swagger.
- ---Rebecca West
- Hold out your hands to feel the luxury of the sunbeams.
- ---Helen Keller
- You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed
if you don't try.
- ---Beverly Sills
- Often we mistake knowledge for truth and forget that the
sun shines on truth from different directions and casts a
different shadow each time. When we look only at high
noon, we miss a lot. If we mistake the shadow for truth
itself, we delude ourselves. Our understanding must shine
from ever-new directions.
- ---Eloise Ristad
Artwork: Wiseblood by Helen Redman
Other pieces in this issue by Donna
Cross:
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