Quotes from Susan Glaspell

Mrs. Hale, still leaning against the door, had that sinking feeling of the mother whose child is about to speak a piece. Lewis often wandered along and got things mixed up in a story. She hoped he would tell this straight and plain, and not say unnecessary things that would just make things harder for Minnie Foster.

And keep your eye out, Mrs. Peters, for anything that might be of use. No telling; you women might come upon a clue to the motive—and that's the thing we need." Mr. Hale rubbed his face after the fashion of a show man getting ready for a pleasantry. "But would the women know a clue if they did come upon it?" he said; and, having delivered himself of this, he followed the others through the stair door.

She stopped. It was as if her mind tripped on something. Her eye was caught by a dish-towel in the middle of the kitchen table. Slowly she moved toward the table. One half of it was wiped clean, the other half messy. Her eyes made a slow, almost unwilling turn to the bucket of sugar and the half empty bag beside it. Things begun—and not finished.

Oh, well," said Mrs. Hale's husband, with good-natured superiority, "women are used to worrying over trifles." The two women moved a little closer together.

Then she looked again, and she wasn't so sure; in fact, she hadn't at any time been perfectly sure about Mrs. Peters. She had that shrinking manner, and yet her eyes looked as if they could see a long way into things.

Mrs. Hale had not moved. "If there had been years and years of—nothing, then a bird to sing to you, it would be awful—still—after the bird was still.

I might 'a' known she needed help! I tell you, it's queer, Mrs. Peters. We live close together, and we live far apart. We all go through the same things—it's all just a different kind of the same thing! If it weren't—why do you and I understand? Why do we know—what we know this minute?

We all go through the same things—it's all just a different kind of the same thing!

No, Mrs. Peters doesn't need supervising. For that matter, a sheriff's wife is married to the law.

Oh, I wish I'd come over here once in a while! That was a crime! That was a crime! Who's going to punish that?

Well, women are used to worrying over trifles.

I'd hate to have men coming into my kitchen, snooping around and criticising.

No, Peters, it's all perfectly clear except a reason for doing it. But you know juries when it comes to women.

Seems nothing draws men together like killing other men.

That's the worst of a war--you have to go on hearing about it so long.

Most of the people of this world are coated round and round with self-esteem, and they're afraid to admit any understanding of the things which aren't good.

The only man who knows just what he thinks at the present moment is the man who hasn't done any new thinking in the past ten years.

I am glad I worked on a newspaper because it made me know I had to write whether I felt like it or not.

As I grow older, I think friendship between women is a thing to cherish.

I often think of the different ways Goethe and Darwin got at evolution. Goethe had the poetic conception of it all right; Darwin worked it out step by step. Who's ahead? And which has any business scoffing at the other?

We all have a fight - some an easy one, and some a big one, and if you have formed the idea that there is a kind of dividing line in the world, and that on the one side is the good, and on the other side the bad, why, all I can say is that you have a wrong notion of things.

But mayn't desertion be a brave thing? A fine thing? To desert a thing we've gone beyond - to have the courage to desert it and walk right off from the dead thing to the live thing - ?

I admire Virginia Woolf so much that I wonder why I don't like her more. She makes the inner things real, she does illumine, and she makes relationships realities as well as people. But I remember the intensity, the thrill, with which I read 'Passage to India.' How I would have hated anyone who took the book away from me.

We are living now.We shall not live long.No one should tell us we shall live again.This is our little while.This is our chance.