Welcome to the web’s most comprehensive site of quotations by women. 43,939 quotations are searchable by topic, by author's name, or by keyword. Many of them appear in no other collection. And new ones are added continually.
Search by Topic:
Find quotations by TOPIC (coffee, love, dogs)
or search alphabetically below.
Search by Last Name:
Search by Keyword:
Margaret Anderson
-
“My greatest enemy is reality. I have fought it successfully for thirty years.”
-
“Our talk began with luncheon, reached a climax at tea, and by dinner we were staggering with it. By five o'clock in the morning we were unconscious but still talking.”
-
“I have never been able to accept the two great laws of humanity — that you're always being suppressed if you're inspired and always being pushed into a corner if you're exceptional. I won't be cornered and I won't stay suppressed.”
-
“I was born to be an editor. I always edit everything. I edit my room at least once a week. Hotels are made for me. I can change a hotel room so thoroughly that even its proprietor doesn't recognize it. ... I can't make things. I can only revise what has been made. And it is this eternal revising that has given me my nervous face.”
-
“To one of my intense inter-uterine nature there is no measuring the shock that the loss of a house can cause.”
-
“I disapprove of snobbery in matters of thought as intensely as I approve of it in matters of dress. Good thinking never springs from snobbery — good dressing from little else.”
-
“The meaning of genius is that it doesn't have to work to attain what people without it must labor for — and not attain.”
-
“[Intellectuals] have a preference for learning things rather than experiencing them.”
-
“[On Paris:] ... the city of love, loveliness, liberty and light.”
-
“Order is life to me. I could, if necessary, live in dirt but never in disorder.”
-
“I am always disturbed when someone catches me on the wing and asks me if I don't want to do something. I want to answer: 'I never want to do anything, at any time, except to continue what I am already doing until I have finished it.'”
-
“I have never lived in a room that wasn't a still-life — I couldn't.”
-
“In real love you want the other person's good. In romantic love you want the other person.”
-
“Romantic love has always seemed to me unaccountable, unassailable, unforgettable, and nearly always unattainable. ... I have found it only twice, in all its perfection, yet I feel that I have always been engaged in it — as if it were something that must always reappear, like leaves on trees. I suppose I am among those people who have always been, and rarely are, in love.”
-
“When people told me that I knew nothing of reality I answered that reality was my greatest enemy, that I had fought it — successfully — all my life.”
-
“Life was never life to me unless my heart stood still.”
-
“It is difficult to explain to a person of temperament, of too-strong personality, exactly what you object to in her behavior. ... Such people always carry with them that definite personal-authority bang that disrupts the atmosphere already existing in a room. For them everything must pass through, and be colored by, the color of their personality. But one gets so weary of 'personality.'”
-
“I have always suspected that too much knowledge is a dangerous thing. It is a boon to people who don't have deep feelings; their pleasure comes from what they know about things, and their pride, from showing off what they know.”
-
“No, no, no, I can't, I cannot see new people: even the thought of it makes me so nervous that I can't work. ... The only thing I can do to preserve the little energy I still have is to keep writing, which pleases and excites and keeps me going.”
-
“I have always fought for ideas — until I learned that it isn't ideas but grief, struggle, and flashes of vision which enlighten.”
-
“It is rarely you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.”
Margaret Anderson, U.S. publisher, writer
(1886 - 1973)
Full name: Margaret Carolyn Anderson.