68 Quotes by Elizabeth Janeway

what society requires from art ... is that it function as an early warning system.

We older women who know we aren't heroines can offer our younger sisters, at the very least, an honest report of what we have learned and how we have grown.

The idea of power as a possession, whose asset can be banked and drawn on when needed, comes easy to a society whose rules grow out of the methods of finance capitalism.

I admire people who are suited to the contemplative life. They can sit inside themselves like honey in a jar and just be. It's wonderful to have someone like that around, you always feel you can count on them. You can go away and come back, you can change your mind and your hairdo and your politics, and when you get through doing all these upsetting things, you look around and there they are, just the way they were, just being.

We are in a double bind. We are expected to feel inferior not only as women, but because we are old.

We haven't come a long way, we've come a short way. If we hadn't come a short way, no one would be calling us baby.

Such simplicity cannot be taught. But it can be denied and lost.

It seems to me highly improbable that women are going to realize their human potential without alienating men - some men, anyway

In this nadir of poetic repute, when the only verse that most people read from one year's end to the next is what appears on greetings cards, it is well for us to stop and consider our poets. . . . Poets are the leaven in the lump of civilization.