Quotes from Charlotte Perkins Gilman

I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind.

Most men's eyes, when you look at them critically, are not like that. They may look at you very expressively, but when you look at them, just as features, they are not very nice.

I don't like to look out of the windows even--there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast. I wonder if they all come out of that wallpaper as I did?

To attain happiness in another world we need only to believe something, while to secure it in this world we must do something.

They were inconveniently reasonable, these women.

It is so hard to talk with John about my case, because he is so wise, and because he loves me so.

I often wonder if I could see her out of all the windows at once. But, turn as fast as I can, I can only see out of one at one time. And though I always see her, she may be able to creep faster than I can turn! I have watched her sometimes away off in the open country, creeping as fast as a cloud shadow in a high wind.

If a physician of high standing, and one's own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency—what is one to do? . . . So I take phosphates or phosphites—whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise, and am absolutely forbidden to "work" until I am well again. Personally, I disagree with their ideas . . .

He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction. I have a schedule prescription for each hour in the day; he takes all care from me, and so I feel basely ungrateful not to value it more.

Those "feminine charms" we are so fond of are not feminine at all, but mere reflected masculinity—developed to please us because they had to please us, and in no way essential to the real fulfillment of their great process.

New York - that unnatural city where every one is an exile, none more so than the American

And there was you - your fair self, always delicately dressed, with white firm fingers sure of touch in delicate true work. I loved you then.

But only this-that people who are utterly ignorant will believe anything-which you certainly knew before.

I was madly in love with not so much what was there as with what I supposed to be there.

The front pattern does move—and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!

The most serious injury is done in childhood. Our cruel waste of the nerve force of children is only more pathetic than it is absurd. The mere business of growing up... which should be a process unconscious or full of joy and rich accumulation, is made by our ignorant mishandling a confusing, irritating, exhausting process, often leaving permanent injuries to the machine, as well as waste of power.

This was not life, this was a nightmare.

Those who too patiently serve as props sometimes underrate the possibilities of the vine.

Will you excuse us all," [Jeff] said, "if we admit that we find it hard to believe? There is no such-possibility-in the rest of the world." Have you no kind of life where [asexual reproduction] is possible?" asked Zava. "Why, yes-some low forms, of course." "How low-or how high, rather?

I am, unfortunately, one of those much-berated New England women who have learned to think as well as feel; and to me, at least, marriage means more than a union of hearts and bodies--it must mean minds, too.

And, as I traveled farther and farther, exploring the rich, sweet soul of her, my sense of pleasant friendship became but a broad foundation for such height, such breadth, such interlocked combination of feeling as left me fairly blinded with the wonder of it.

We seemed to think that if there were men we could fight them, and if there were only women—why, they would be no obstacles at all. Jeff, with his gentle romantic old-fashioned notions of women as clinging vines. Terry, with his clear decided practical theories that there were two kinds of women—those he wanted and those he didn't; Desirable and Undesirable was his demarcation. The latter as a large class, but negligible—he had never thought about them at all.

The Yellow Wallpaper] was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.

If a given idea has been held in the human mind for many generations, as almost all our common ideas have, it takes sincere and continued effort to remove it; and if it is one of the oldest we have in stock, one of the big, common, unquestioned world ideas, vast is the labor of those who seek to change it.