Lucky 13: Women Writers about Attitude.

"The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy."
- Eudora Welty

"If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude. Don't complain."
- Maya Angelou

"The knowledge that we are responsible for our actions and attitudes does not need to be discouraging, because it also means that we are free to change this destiny. One is not in bondage to the past, which has shaped our feelings, to race, inheritance, background. All this can be altered if we have the courage to examine how it formed us."
- Anaïs Nin

"The only real stumbling block is fear of failure. In cooking you've got to have a what-the-hell attitude."
- Julia Child

"I happen to feel that the degree of a person's intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting attitudes she can bring to bear on the same topic."
- Lisa Alther

"Never be limited by other people's limited imaginations. If you adopt their attitudes, then the possibility won't exist because you'll have already shut it out...You can hear other people's wisdom, but you've got to re-evaluate the world for yourself."
- Mae Jemison

"Don't be a pawn in somebody's game. Find the attitude which gives you the maximum strength and the maximum dignity, no matter what else is going on"
- Anne Rice

"I think the passion for an extraordinary life, and the courage to pursue it, is what makes us special. And I don’t even think of it as an “extraordinary life” anymore so much as simple happiness. It’s rarer than it should be, and I believe it comes from creating a life that fits you perfectly, not taking what’s already there, but making your own from scratch."

- Laini Taylor

"If you can't change your fate, change your attitude."
- Amy Tan

"Reverence is an emotion that we can nurture in our very young children, respect is an attitude that we instill in our children as they become school-agers, and responsibility is an act that we inspire in our children as they grow through the middle years and become adolescents."
- Zoe Weil

"If there's one thing I believe, it's that I don't know anything and anything can happen"
- Amy Lee

"Novels don't contain only exceptional situations, life or death choices, or major ordeals; there are also everyday difficulties, temptations, ordinary disappointments; and, in response, every human attitude, every type of behavior, from the finest to the most wretched. There are books where, as you read, you wonder: What would I have done?"
- Laurence Cossé

"Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"
- Mary Oliver

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Photo 'stare' by Sandra Lara, available under a creative commons license. © 2008, Sandra Lara.

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Lucky 13: Women Writers about Imagination.

“There are two ways to reach me: by way of kisses or by way of the imagination. But there is a hierarchy: the kisses alone don't work.”
- Anaïs Nin (Henry and June)

“When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing the book as well as reading it - or rather, it is like living it.”
- Dodie Smith (I Capture the Castle)

"I have crossed over to a place where I never thought I'd be. I am someone I would have never imagined. A secret. A dream. I am this, body and soul. Burn me. Drown me. Tell me lies. I will still be who I am.”
- Alice Hoffman (Incantation)

“You will recognize your own path when you come upon it because you will suddenly have all the energy and imagination you will ever need.”
- Sara Teasdale

“A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.”
- Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
- Sylvia Plath

“I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.”
- Ursula K. Le Guin (The Language of the Night)

“You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander."
- Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird)

“The imagination needs moodling,--long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering. ”
- Brenda Ueland

“Writing is a job, a talent, but it's also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon.”
- Ann Patchett (Truth and Beauty: A Friendship)

“Imagination is a good servant, and a bad master.”
- Agatha Christie (The Mysterious Affair at Styles)

“Are we all living like this? Two lives, the ideal outer life and the inner imaginative life where we keep our secrets?”
- Jeanette Winterson (Sexing the Cherry)

“Those who fear the imagination condemn it: something childish, they say, something monsterish, misbegotten. Not all of us dream awake. But those of us who do have no choice.”
- Patricia A. McKillip

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Photo 'Reach' by Keith Garner, available under a creative commons license. © 2011, Keith Garner.

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Lucky 13: Women Writers about Inspiration.

“Inspiration usually comes during work rather than before it.”
- Madeleine L'Engle

“I learned...that inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic, energetic striving, but it comes into us slowly and quietly and all the time, though we must regularly and every day give it a little chance to start flowing, prime it with a little solitude and idleness.”
- Brenda Ueland

“We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.” 

- Maya Angelou

“Romance is the glamour which turns the dust of everyday life into a golden haze. ”
- Elinor Glyn

“stand often in the company of dreamers: they tickle your common sense & believe you can achieve things which are impossible.”
- Mary Anne Radmacher

“The inner fire is the most important thing mankind possesses.” 

- Edith Södergran

“Five tender apricots in a blue bowl, a brief and exact promise of things to come.” 

- Frances Mayes (In Tuscany)

“Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager.”
- Susan Sontag

“A deadline is negative inspiration. Still, it's better than no inspiration at all.”
- Rita Mae Brown

“Why must people kneel down to pray? If I really wanted to pray I’ll tell you what I'd do. I'd go out into a great big field all alone or in the deep, deep woods and I'd look up into the sky - up, up, up - into that lovely blue sky that looks as if there was no end to its blueness. And then I'd just feel a prayer.”
- L.M. Montgomery (Anne of Green Gables)

“There is no place for grief in a house which serves the Muse.” 

- Sappho

“I ask not for any crown 

But that which all may win;
Nor try to conquer any world
Except the one within.”
- Louisa May Alcott

“Out of the red and silver and the long cry of alarm to the poet who survives in all human beings, as the child survives in him; to this poet she threw an unexpected ladder in the middle of the city and ordained, 'Climb!”
- Anaïs Nin

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Image: 'Aprikosen / Apricots' by Thomas. Available under a creative commons license. © 2009, Thomas.

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Lucky 13: Women Writers about Character.

“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.”
- Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)

“The sisters and brothers that you meet give you the materials which your character uses to build itself. It is said that some people are born great, others achieve it, some have it thrust upon them. In truth, the ways in which your character is built have to do with all three of those. Those around you, those you choose, and those who choose you.”
- Maya Angelou

“Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands.”
- Anne Frank

“What we call our destiny is truly our character and that character can be altered. The knowledge that we are responsible for our actions and attitudes does not need to be discouraging, because it also means that we are free to change this destiny.”
- Anaïs Nin

“I can't decide whether I'm a good girl wrapped up in a bad girl, or if I'm a bad girl wrapped up in a good girl. And that's how I know I'm a woman!”
- C. JoyBell C.

“Whatever you are physically...male or female, strong or weak, ill or healthy--all those things matter less than what your heart contains. If you have the soul of a warrior, you are a warrior. All those other things, they are the glass that contains the lamp, but you are the light inside.”
- Cassandra Clare (Clockwork Angel)

“But what man does out of despair, is not necessarily a key to his character. I have always thought that the real key is in that which he seeks for his enjoyment.”
- Ayn Rand

“When anyone asks me about the Irish character, I say look at the trees. Maimed, stark and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious.”
- Edna O'Brien

“There is a curious thing that happens with the passage of time: a calcification of character.”
- Jodi Picoult (My Sister's Keeper)

“Her beauty satisfied [his] artistic eye, her peculiarities piqued his curiosity, her vivacity lightened his ennui, and her character interested him by the unconscious hints it gave of power, pride and passion. So entirely natural and unconventional was she that he soon found himself on a familiar footing, asking all manner of unusual questions, and receiving rather piquant replies.”
- Louisa May Alcott (A Long Fatal Love Chase)

“Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved.”
- Helen Keller

“Don't separate the mind from the body. Don't separate even character - you can't. Our unit of existence is a body, a physical, tangible, sensate entity with perceptions and reactions that express it and form it simultaneously."
- Susanna Kaysen

"character--the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life--is the source from which self-respect springs.”
- Joan Didion

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Image: 'where did rachel "gun show" get her guns?' by sean dreilinger. Available under a creative commons license. © 2011, sean dreilinger.

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Lucky 13: Women Writers about Wine.

"Wine is the refined jewel that only a grown woman will prefer to the sparkling trinkets adored by little girls."
- Muriel Barbery (Gourmet Rhapsody)

"Only a fool tries to reconstruct a bunch of grapes from a bottle of wine."
- Jeanette Winterson (Art & Lies)

"Wine talks; ask anyone. The oracle at the street corner; the uninvited guest at the wedding feast; the holy fool. It ventriloquizes. It has a million voices. It unleashes the tongue, teasing out secrets you never meant to tell, secrets you never even knew. It shouts, rants, whispers. It speaks of great plans, tragic loves, and terrible betrayals. It screams with laughter. It chuckles softly to itself. It weeps in front of its own reflection. It revives summers long past and memories best forgotten. Every bottle a whiff of other times, other places, everyone...a humble miracle"
- Joanne Harris

“There are days when solitude is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall.”
- Colette

"What I do, and what I dream include thee, as the wine must taste of its own grapes."
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Sonnets from the Portuguese and Other Poems)

"...and I get refill number three or four and the wine is making my bones loose and it's giving my hair a red sheen and my breasts are blooming and my eyes feel sultry and wise and the dress is water."
- Aimee Bender (Willful Creatures: Stories)

"All Creatures know that some must die
That all the rest may take and eat;
Sooner or later, all transform
Their blood to wine, their flesh to meat."
- Margaret Atwood

"I am a connoisseur of fine irony. 'Tis a bit like fine wine, but it has a better bite."
- Lynn Kurland (Princess of the Sword (Nine Kingdoms, #3))

"Language is wine upon the lips."
- Virginia Woolf

My writing is an overflow of the wine glass of my life, not a basin in which I wash out my ideals and expectations."
- C. JoyBell C

"Your divine should not have used water. It just doesn't hold the attention properly. Wine. Or blood, in a pinch. Some liquid that matters."
- Lois McMaster Bujold

"You are trying to lure us into revealing information you're not entitled to? With chocolate and wine? Are you amateurs?"
- Moira J. Moore (Heroes at Odds)

"I have dreamt in my life, dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they have gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind."
- Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights)

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Image: 'A Glass in The Hand...' by clappstar. Available under a creative commons license. © 2010, clappstar.

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Lucky 13: Women Writers about Courage.

"It takes a lot of courage to show your dreams to someone else."
- Erma Bombeck

"I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what."
- Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)

"Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes courage is the little voice at the end of the day that says I'll try again tomorrow."
- Mary Anne Radmacher

"One isn't necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We cannot be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest."
- Maya Angelou

"Everyone has talent. What's rare is the courage to follow it to the dark places where it leads."
- Erica Jong

"One is not in bondage to the past, which has shaped our feelings, to race, inheritance, background. All this can be altered if we have the courage to examine how it formed us. We can alter the chemistry provided we have the courage to dissect the elements."
- Anaïs Nin

"Why do they always teach us that it's easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It's the hardest thing in the world--to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we really want."
- Ayn Rand

"There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others. My courage always rises at every attempt to intimidate me."
- Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)

"[Responsibility to yourself] means, therefore, the courage to be "different"...The difference between a life lived actively, and a life of passive drifting and dispersal of energies, is an immense difference. Once we begin to feel committed to our lives, responsible to ourselves, we can never again be satisfied with the old, passive way."
- Adrienne Rich

"With enough courage, you can do without a reputation."
- Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind)

"There must be courage; there must be no awe. There must be criticism, for humor, to my mind, is encapsulated in criticism. There must be a disciplined eye and a wild mind...There must be a magnificent disregard of your reader, for if he cannot follow you, there is nothing you can do about it."
- Dorothy Parker

"HELPED are those who find the courage to do at least one small thing each day to help the existence of another--plant, animal, river, or human being. They shall be joined by a multitude of the timid."
- Alice Walker

"I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn."
- Anne Frank

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Photo 'Jumping in the waves' by TheGiantVermin, available under a creative commons license. © 2004, TheGiantVermin.

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Lucky 13: Women Writers about Friendship.

"There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature."
-- Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)

"If all the world hated you and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved of you and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends."
-- Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)

"the world is not a pleasant place to be without someone to hold and be held by."
-- Nikki Giovanni

"Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing. There is a time for silence. A time to let go and allow people to hurl themselves into their own destiny. And a time to prepare to pick up the pieces when it's all over."
-- Gloria Naylor

"Constant use had not worn ragged the fabric of their friendship."
-- Dorothy Parker

"He was the strangest of strangers in that he was also her oldest friend."
-- Ann Brashares

"Like so many plain cups on the shelves. You can reach for them, use them without thinking. Most of them don't matter. Sometimes you lose your grip on one of them and it falls and smashes to piece, and you shrug and say to yourself, what a pity. Then you reach for the cup that you use every day, one that you love and use so often that as you stretch out your hand it is already making the shape that fits its curve. You are certain that yesterday it was in its proper place, but now there is nothing. Just air. You have lost something that was so familiar, so much a part of your life that you were not even looking for it. Just expecting it to be there, as always."
-- Rosie Thomas (Iris and Ruby)

"I am treating you as my friend, asking you to share my present minuses in the hope that I can ask you to share my future plusses."
-- Katherine Mansfield

"This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea."
-- Margaret Atwood (Cat's Eye)

"My mind is a neighborhood I try not to go into alone."
-- Anne Lamott

"It takes much bravery to stand up to our enemies but we need as much bravery to stand up to our friends."              
-- J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone)

"The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away."
-- Barbara Kingsolver

"Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born."
-- Anaïs Nin

(to my friends)

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Photo 'friends' by Ferenc Pohly, available under a creative commons license. © 2006, Ferenc Pohly.

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About Good Girls, Bad Girls and Why We Write.

A few days ago, I read Justine Musk's article '"Well-behaved women seldom make history": redefining what it means to be bad' on her website: Tribal Writer.

It deals with how our culture defines women, how women define themselves, the emphasis on desirability and attractiveness on the one hand, and traditional dictates of quiet, pleasant and unobtrusive behaviour on the other.

I don't agree with everything that is said, and I believe we sometimes confuse personality issues with women's issues, but the article is an interesting piece of writing, with insightful comments by both women and men. If you have some time, I would highly recommend reading it.

These past few days, much of what Justine and her readers wrote has been whirling around in my head. This is a topic close to my heart - and as it happens, to the title of my blog.

Ever since I started writing again, I've been confronted with this good girl / bad girl dichotomy on a daily basis. Writing makes it much harder to ignore or suppress parts of you that 'don't fit in', because it's exactly that wonderful source of 'self' we need to tap into to let our stories take root and to make our characters grow.

I was raised to be a Good Girl, yet trying to be one drained my energy for the bigger part of my life. Along the way I've discovered that I'll never be a Bad Girl either. I might not have many boundaries in my mind, but I keep my behaviour on a short lead, which is probably why I'm still alive and well.

This contrast fuels my writing and much of my life, and I've come to love it. It's hardly ever dull in the borderlands where a wild heart and an exacting mind co-exist.

In her article, Justine writes:

'I once said to someone, “I don’t know if I’m a good girl with a bad streak, or a bad girl with a good streak.” But I was being ironic. My real point was that, like any other woman (or man), I am both and neither.'

I think she hits the nail on the head there: women as well as men are complex and diverse creatures. We live on a planet and in communities that don't necessarily have our individual best interests at heart, and we try to get by and live meaningful lives - whatever that means for us individually.

In living our lives, we need to understand that culture - like statistics - focuses on large numbers and quantifiable majorities. As a result, social norms and widely held views will rarely reflect or respond to minorities' needs.

That does not mean we need to accept this, shrug and keep silent.

To the contrary - we need our role models, our Maya Angelous, our Isabel Allendes and our Margaret Atwoods. We need our Neil Gaimans and Amanda Palmers to fly their freak flags proudly. We need them, not so much to confront majorities with an alternative, but to show those who don't fit in the standard moulds it's okay to be who you are.

I couldn't help wondering if this is partly the reason why so many of us are drawn to being a writer, blogger, photographer, teacher or artist, or why we share our work, our thoughts or emotions on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, ...

I'm sure we first and foremost respond to a need within ourselves to create and to share with others. But could the driving force underneath our work be that we know first-hand what it feels like not to fit in?

Could that be the reason why we want to put our work out there – as beacons that might have given us strength, hope or courage at a given point in our own lives?

If that is the case, it only makes it more important that in our writing or whatever it is we do, we stay true to ourselves, with pride, dignity and confidence - an authentic, living, breathing tribute to our own uniqueness and to human diversity.

We are lucky. We have a voice, energy and an audience, be it big or small. That gives us great opportunities to show how within, underneath and on the side of mainstream culture there are other, valid ways to get by, to do well and to live meaningful, fulfilling and creative lives.


What makes you unique?

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Photo 1: '365:299 Choices' by Jehane, available under a creative commons license. © 2008, Jehane.
Photo 2: '365:140 Fairy Liquid' by Jehane, available under a creative commons license. © 2007, Jehane.
(Check out her wonderful - and brave - photography project: 365 days (of me).

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Lucky 13: Women Writers about Truth.

"There's a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure truth."
- Maya Angelou

"And at last you'll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking."
- Audre Lorde

"With a secret like that, at some point the secret itself becomes irrelevant. The fact that you kept it does not."
- Sara Gruen (Water for Elephants)

"You can tell the deepest truths with the lies of fiction"
- Isabel Allende

"Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in its place?"
- Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

"You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do."
- Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird)

"The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it." 
- Flannery O'Connor

"There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic." 
- Anaïs Nin

"It must have been then that I began to lose faith in reasonable argument as the sole measure of truth." 
- Margaret Atwood (Bluebeard's Egg)

"There is no truth on this island of yours. Rather, there are as many truths as there are stars in the sky; and every one of them different."
- Juliet Marillier

"The truth is not for all men but only for those who seek it."
- Ayn Rand

"Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised or a little mistaken." 
- Jane Austen (Emma)

"A scientist can pretend that his work isn't himself, it's merely the impersonal truth. An artist can't hide behind the truth. He can't hide anywhere."
- Ursula K. Le Guin (The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia)

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Photo 'how sweet it is to be loved by you' by eli santana, available under a creative commons license. © 2009, eli santana.

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They Are Beautiful and So Are You.

'woman's portrait'. © 2007, manu diana. - CC

Some time ago, I posted a list of life questions, and one of them dealt with beauty. A few of the comments struck a chord with me and made me think about how we define 'beauty', and 'being beautiful'.

I find myself surrounded by beautiful people, yet if you would ask most of them if they consider themselves beautiful, they would say no. Too often we confuse beauty with other ideas like 'young', 'skinny', 'curvy', 'desirable', 'wearing make-up', 'dressed up', etc.

Somehow, along the way, we have come to accept this new, narrow definition of beauty. We've even invented phrases like 'being beautiful on the inside', with an unspoken 'instead' underneath.

Yet languages are living entities. The meaning of words evolves over time to suit people's needs. Our needs.

'Portrait of Villager, Jongkhar'.
© 2009, RadioFreeBarton. - CC

I want to play an active part in saving the word 'beautiful' from limited and one-sided interpretation.

Let us reinvent that powerful and uplifting word to suit the needs of real women, of all ages, shapes and colour.

I believe we can give a nudge in the right direction by stopping to play ourselves down and presenting a wider variety of images to the world, showing a richer, more diverse and much more interesting interpretation of 'beauty'.

After all, we are a diverse species, and that's a wonderful thing. What a shame it would be if we and the generations to come would lose the ability to see that.


To illustrate my point, here are a few more photographs of absolutely fabulous, beautiful women:

'mummy'. © 2009, modenaroid. - CC



'Lena, informal portrait, part 2'. © 2007, Max Khokhlov. - CC

'A beautiful old lady'. © 2007, Pedro Ribeiro Simões. - CC



'Alegría'. © 2009, Aprendiz de Amélie. - CC

'Talisman Singer'. © 2009, Elliot Margolies. - CC

'Knowing Smile'. © 2006, Meena Kadri. - CC

'my beautiful wife'. © 2007, Gregory Perez. - CC

'Artist Rosey Edgar'. © 2008, Michelle Richmond. - CC

'Future Doctor'. © 2005, Charlie O'Shields. - CC



'Yadi'. © 2007, Melissa Segal. - CC

'Margaret'. © 2009, Richard. - CC

'Portrait'. © 2007, R Sears. - CC

'Untitled Portrait #2'. © 2008, Roger Moffatt. - CC

'indian old days beautiful woman'. © 2008, LatinaPower2009. - CC



'Ginger and green'. © 2011, ben raynal. - CC



'Sometimes Monika says that she doesn't feel very pretty'. © 2009, Christopher Walker. - CC

'Erin'. © 2005, Caitlin Burke. - CC

'How to Conquer Europe with one smile'. © 2009, Eddy van 3000. - CC

'Portrait'. © 2008, spaceodissey. - CC

'Eyesight In Distance (9FH)'. © 2009, Andy Leddy. - CC

'She is my love'. © 2008, Luigi Anzivino. - CC

'Mum!'. © 2004, Charles Roffey. - CC

'Awa summer'. © 2006, Nicolas Rivet. - CC

'Juste moi !'. © 2007, Jessie Romaneix. - CC

Who is the most beautiful person you know, besides yourself?

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Lucky 13: Women Writers about Life.

"I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it."

- Maya Angelou

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage."

- Anaïs Nin

"Perhaps we are in this world to search for love, find it and lose it, again and again. With each love, we are born anew, and with each love that ends we collect a new wound. I am covered with proud scars."

- Isabel Allende

"That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet."

- Emily Dickinson

"Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swaps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all."

- Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

"I knew it like destiny, and at the same time, I knew it as choice."

- Jeanette Winterson

"What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question."

- Margaret Atwood

"Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining."

- Anne Lamott

"Ah! The terror and the delight of that moment when first we fear
ourselves! Until then we have not lived."

- Willa Cather

"So much working, reading, thinking, living to do! A lifetime is not long enough."

- Sylvia Plath

"I live in my own little world. But it's ok, they know me here."

- Lauren Myracle

"Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away."

- Maya Angelou

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"

- Mary Oliver

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Image : 'Women on holiday' by Sweet Chi. Available under a creative commons license. © 2011, Sweet Chi.

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Lucky 13: Women Writers about Women.

March 8th was International Women's Day, but as one of my gorgeous friends declared, 'Surely, one day is not enough.' Hear, hear!

Therefore, without further ado, here are 13 of my favourite quotes about women, by women writers:


"When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her."
-- Adrienne Rich


"There are women who make things better... simply by showing up. There are women who make things happen. There are women who make their way. There are women who make a difference. And women who make us smile. There are women of wit and wisdom who- through strength and courage- make it through. There are women who change the world everyday... Women like you."
-- Ashley Rice


"How can you be so many women to so many strange people, oh you strange girl?"
-- Sylvia Plath

"It’s the fire in my eyes,
And the flash of my teeth,
The swing in my waist,
And the joy in my feet.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally."
-- Maya Angelou (Phenomenal Woman: Four Poems Celebrating Women)


"Yet if a woman never lets herself go, how will she ever know how far she might have got? If she never takes off her high-heeled shoes, how will she ever know how far she could walk or how fast she could run?"
-- Germaine Greer


"I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman."
-- Anaïs Nin


"We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly."
-- Margaret Atwood


"Even for women without children, trading hours that produce income for hours that produce “only” art seems like a foolish decision. What a loss for the world, though, to have women's voices silenced because art is our last priority."
-- Holly Robinson


"My gran had always told me that a woman--any woman worth her salt--could do whatever she had to."
-- Charlaine Harris (Dead to the World)


"I hate to hear you talk about all women as if they were fine ladies instead of rational creatures. None of us want to be in calm waters all our lives."
-- Jane Austen


"a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is going to write..."
-- Virginia Woolf


"Have you seen this woman?
I am considered harmless.
Armed and dangerous.
But only to me."
-- Sandra Cisneros


"Seize the moment. Remember all those women on the 'Titanic' who waved off the dessert cart."
-- Erma Bombeck


Which one do you like best?

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Photo 'Look into My Eye' by Poe Tatum, available under a creative commons license. © 2008, Poe Tatum.

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Roses, Thorns & International Women's Day.

Yesterday, March 8th, was International Women's Day.

It was also a busy day at work, so even though I'd thought of ways to celebrate me, myself and all other women, by the time I got home there wasn't much time and energy left to do anything besides cooking pasta (with sun-dried tomatoes and goat's cheese, in case you were wondering), pour a glass of the beautiful organic cava we've recently discovered, and toast with my lover, husband and best friend (all in one person) to the good things in life.

Earlier, over a quick laptop lunch, I'd decided to do something small and mildly meaningful in honour of Women's Day: supporting a female author by buying one of her books. What can I say, I love a win-win scenario!

After careful deliberation, I picked The Tapestry of Love by fellow Litopian Rosy Thornton.

I'd read the sample last week and liked it a lot. So far, its atmosphere reminds me of Peter Mayle's Provence novels and Frances Mayes' Tuscan Sun, but set in the Cévennes and with a more personal story woven in.

The Tapestry of Love is the kind of book that deserves to be read outside on a summer's day, when you're curled up in a hammock with a glass of wine by your side. However, in the absence of summer, curled up indoors in front of the fire will have to do. And yes, there will be wine.

How was your (International Women's) day?

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Lucky 13: Women Writers about Writing.

Photo credit: Jim Kuhn

"Write what should not be forgotten."
-- Isabel Allende

"We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect."
-- Anaïs Nin

"Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind."
-- Virginia Woolf

"A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song."
-- Maya Angelou

"Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for."
-- Alice Walker

"A word after a word after a word is power."
-- Margaret Atwood

"Writing is like making love. Don't worry about the orgasm, just concentrate on the process."
-- Isabel Allende

"I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear."
-- Joan Didion

"Every word a woman writes changes the story of the world, revises the official version."
-- Carolyn See

"There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know were they'll take you."
-- Beatrix Potter

"Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls."
-- Ursula K. Le Guin

"If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy."
-- Nikki Giovanni

"Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot."
-- Doris Lessing

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Which of these is your favourite?

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Lucky 13: Favourite Quotes by Women Writers.

Photo credit: Carlie Kiggans.

"The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night."
--Isabel Allende

"When you read a book as a child, it becomes a part of your identity in a way that no other reading in your life does..."
--Nora Ephron

"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."
--Maya Angelou

"If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it."
--Toni Morrison

"You refuse to own yourself, you permit others to do it for you"
--Margaret Atwood

"If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals."
--J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire)

"My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it."
--Ursula K. LeGuin

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage."
--Anaïs Nin

"What the mind doesn't understand, it worships or fears."
--Alice Walker

"That is happiness, to be dissolved into something complete and great."
--Willa Cather

"When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid."
--Audre Lorde

"If you knew it all it would not be creation but dictation."
--Gertrude Stein

"There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors."
--Adrienne Rich

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