Quotes from Elizabeth Janeway

I have a problem about being nearly sixty: I keep waking up in the morning and thinking I'm thirty-one.

Though we do not have many poets, we certainly have more than we deserve, for we deserve none at all. It is ourselves that we are hurting by our stupidity and ignorance of poetry.

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.

Great writers leave us not just their works, but a way of looking at things.

If every nation gets the government it deserves, every generation writes the history which corresponds with its view of the world.

it is through the ghost [writer] that the great gift of knowledge which the inarticulate have for the world can be made available.

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.

Like their personal lives, women's history is fragmented, interrupted; a shadow history of human beings whose existence has been shaped by the efforts and the demands of others.

I admire people who are suited to the contemplative life. They can sit inside themselves like honey in a jar and just be.

If there's nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come, there is nothing more ubiquitously pervasive than an idea whose time won't go.

those who despair of life are not long for it.

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.

Unless I am what I am and feel what I feel -- as hard as I can and as honestly and truly as I can -- then I am nothing.

We don't get offered crises, they arrive.

Power is the ability not to have to please

The fact that women tend to regard the most important decision of their lives as already made, once they have married, makes them readier than their husbands to settle down and sit still in the situations at which they have arrived. It contributes, that is, to the passivity which is so commonly taken as characteristic of women, and also to the conservatism expected of them.

If history is really relevant in today's world, the proposition doesn't command much respect. Perhaps the past is a different country, but if so no one much wants to travel there.

Humor is an antidote to isolation.

The common impulse is not to sustain a marriage by finding satisfaction elsewhere, but to end the marriage and set up a new one which will provide the comfort lacking in the first.

As long as mixed grills and combination salads are popular, anthologies will undoubtedly continue in favor.

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

Growing up human is uniquely a matter of social relations rather than biology. What we learn from connections within the family takes the place of instincts that program the behavior of animals; which raises the question, how good are these connections?

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 greatest barrier to women's advance in the public world of action has been their acquiescence in the idea that they don't belong out there.