Great Throughts Treasury

"More than in any other human relationship, overwhelmingly more, motherhood means being instantly interruptible, responsive, responsible."

"And when is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total?"

"Be critical. Women have the right to say: This is surface, this falsifies reality, this degrades."

"I know that I haven't powers enough to divide myself into one who earns and one who creates."

"It is a long Baptism into the seas of humankind, my daughter. Better immersion and in pain than to live untouched. Yet how will you sustain?"

"She would never exchange her solitude for anything. Never again to be forced to move to the rhythms of others."

"The clock talked loud. I threw it away, it scared me what it talked."

"There are worse words than cuss words, there are words that hurt."

"Time granted does not necessarily coincide with time that can be most fully used."

"What in me demanded that goodness in her? And what was the cost, the cost to her of such goodness?"

"Women have the right to say: this is surface, this falsifies reality, this degrades."

"An old man, Elias Caldwell, death already smothering his breast, tries to tell a child something of all he has learned, something of what he would have her live by ? and hears only incoherent words come out. Yet the thoughts revolve, revolve and whirl, a scorching nebula in his breast, sending forth flaming suns that only shatter against the walls and return to chaos. How can it be said? Once I lived in softness and ease and sickened. Once I chose a stern life, turning to people hard, bitter and strong ? obscure people, the smell of soil and sweat about them ? the smell of life?But I failed. I brought them nothing. To die, how bitter when nothing was done with my life. And the nebula whirls and revolves, sending its scorching suns that break in a chaos of inarticulateness about this child with a sound of fear. Nothing of it said."

"But there is more ? to rebel against what will not let life be."

"Literary history and the present are dark with silences . . . I have had special need to learn all I could of this over the years, myself so nearly remaining mute and having to let writing die over and over again in me. These are not natural silences--what Keats called agonie ennuyeuse (the tedious agony)--that necessary time for renewal, lying fallow, gestation, in the natural cycle of creation. The silences I speak of here are unnatural: the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot."

"There are worse words than cuss-words, there are words that hurt."

"Unlike men writers who marry, most will not have the societal equivalent of a wife-- nor (in a society hostile to growing life) anyone but themselves to mother their children."

"Mazie sits with a sense of non-being over her ? of it being someone other than she sitting there timeless, suspended in a dusky room, feeling a voice gathering around her, kind still hands of sound flaring into words meaningless and strange, meaningless when one tries to understand, but meaningful for a fleeting second."