Quotes from Charlotte Perkins Gilman

It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide—plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.

To swallow and follow, whether old doctrine or new propaganda, is a weakness still dominating the human mind.

This is the woman's century, the first chance for the mother of the world to rise to her full place . . . and the world waits while she powders her nose.

It is the strangest yellow, that wallpaper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw - not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things.

I always lock the door when I creep by daylight.

Woman" in the abstract is young, and, we assume, charming. As they get older they pass off the stage, somehow, into private ownership mostly, or out of it altogether.

We all need one another; much and often. Just as every human creature needs a place to be alone in, a sacred, private "home" of his own, so all human creatures need a place to be together in, from the two who can show each other their souls uninterruptedly, to the largest throng that can throb and stir in unison.

John doesn't know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him. It is getting to be a great effort for me to think straight. Just this nervous weakness I suppose.

Have you no respect for the past? For what was thought and believed by your foremothers?" "Why, no," she said. "Why should we? They are all gone. They knew less than we do. If we are not beyond them, we are unworthy of them—and unworthy of the children who must go beyond us.

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

The women who do the most work get the least money, and the women who have the most money do the least work.

The one predominant duty is to find one's work and do it.

If fifty men did all the work, / And gave the price to five, / And let those five make all the rules - / You'd say the fifty men were fools, / Unfit to be alive.

A concept is stronger than a fact.

There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver.

When all usefulness is over, when one is assured of an unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one.

Death? Why all this fuss about death? Use your imagination, try to visualize a world without death! Death is the essential condition to life, not an evil.

The people people have for friends You common sense appall But the people people marry Are the queerest folk of all.