Charlotte Perkins Gilman quotes - page 2

Through it [literature] we know the past, govern the present, and influence the future. (Charlotte Perkins Gilman)
Audiences are always better pleased with a smart retort, some joke or epigram, than with any amount of reasoning.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Through watching so much at night, when it changes so, I have finally found out. The front pattern does move-and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
I'm getting really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper. Perhaps because of the wallpaper.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
You think you have mastered it [the wallpaper pattern], but just as you get well under way in following, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
This wallpaper has a kind of sub-pattern in a different shade, a particularly irritating one, for you can only see it in certain lights, and not clearly then.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The color is repellent, almost revolting: a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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!
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
I'm sure I never used to be so sensitive. I think it is due to this nervous condition. (Charlotte Perkins Gilman)
To attain happiness in another world we need only to believe something, while to secure it in this world we must do something.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Eternity is not something that begins after you are dead. It is going on all the time.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
But reason has no power against feeling, and feeling older than history is no light matter.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
When the mother of the race is free, we shall have a better world, by the easy right of birth and by the calm, slow, friendly forces of evolution.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The female of genus homo is economically dependent on the male. He is her food supply.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Exciting literature after supper is not the best digestive.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Many years later I was told that the great specialist had admitted to friends of his that he had altered his treatment of neurasthenia since reading The Yellow Wallpaper.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Let us revere, let us worship, but erect and open-eyed, the highest, not the lowest; the future, not the past!
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
It does not do to trust people too much.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Here she comes, running, out of prison and off the pedestal: chains off, crown off, halo off, just a live woman. (Charlotte Perkins Gilman)
I never saw a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The one predominant duty is to find one's work and do it.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
New York - that unnatural city where every one is an exile, none more so than the American.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman