21 Quotes by Ruth Franklin

This is long and I will stop. But mostly, I am sad at the ways misogyny is embedded in the literary landscape like the roots of a tree, extending everywhere invisibly below the surface and too often breaking through.

If one is bewildered and unhappy, why not show it, and why will not people explain and comfort? But instead—this pretense at calm satisfaction, where underneath there is all the seething restless desire to be off, away from all this anger at self and others, to where there are other conventions, other thoughts, other passions.

The very nicest thing about being a writer is that you can afford to indulge yourself endlessly with oddness, and nobody can really do anything about it, so long as you keep writing and kind of using it up, as it were. All you have to do—and watch this carefully, please—is keep writing. So long as you write it away regularly nothing can really hurt you.

Constance and Merricat are indeed “two halves of the same person,” together forming one identity, just as a man and a woman are traditionally supposed to do in marriage. Not finding that wholeness in marriage, Jackson sought it elsewhere … Indeed, the novel, in its final version, is not about “two women murdering a man.” It is about two women who metaphorically murder male society and its expectations for them by insisting on living separate from it, governed only by themselves.

Brown, they would later write, had taught them that the goal of reading and criticizing was "to know and understand, not to like or dislike, and the aim of writing was to get down what you wanted to say, not to gesticulate or impress.

The very nicest thing about being a writer is that you can afford to indulge yourself endlessly with oddness, and nobody can really do anything about it, so long as you keep writing and kind of using it up, as it were. All you have to do – and watch this carefully, please – is keep writing. So long as you write it away regularly nothing can really hurt you.

If one is bewildered and unhappy, why not show it, and why will not people explain and comfort? But instead – this pretense at calm satisfaction, where underneath there is all the seething restless desire to be off, away from all this anger at self and others, to where there are other conventions, other thoughts, other passions.

Even President Woodrow Wilson was a devotee: when asked in 1914 whether he would be reelected, Wilson replied, “The Ouija board says yes.

More than once,” Norris writes in her memoir, “I received an engraved invitation to an on-campus orgy; a more perfect expression of debutante wantonness could not be conceived.