Quotes from Theodora Goss

Nature inspires me continually. Today, I can look out my window and see the entire world covered with snow. It's like Narnia under the White Witch.

It happened the way I come up with any story, which is that I took elements of my own life and put them into the story, but in a very mixed-up way.

It's appropriate to have magic in a love story, because magic is a sort of metaphor for what love feels like? When we fall in love, the world feels magical to us. It becomes an enchanted place.

I loved writing something I'd never written before, and I wanted to write not just about "true love" but also a human relationship.

Ah, well, when you explain it like that, it seems obvious, said Mudge. Of course, it always seems obvious once it's been explained.

MARY: Are our readers going to know what the Athena Club is? CATHERINE: They will if they read the first two books! Which they should, and I hope if they are reading this volume and have not read the previous ones, they will go right out and purchase them. Two shillings each, a bargain at the price!

The benefit of growing older is that you make different mistakes.

We don't get into mischief," said Mary indignantly. "It sort of happens to us, or around us, or in our general vicinity.

She had wandered the streets of Vienna and Budapest. No wonder she felt different. Perhaps travel did that to you. Mary had come home, but she was not the same Mary who had left—not quite.

However you feel about maids' uniforms, we don't have time to overthrow the social order today.

One does not have to dress in a way that is unflattering, or even unfashionable, to be rational—and comfortable. How can you expect women to exercise their faculties, nay, their rights, in clothes that confine them? We shall never be men's equals while we lace ourselves into ill health and drape ourselves in fabric until we can scarcely move. Dress reform is almost as important to our cause as the vote.

Your way of not bothering looks exactly like bothering, if you ask me.

JUSTINE: Is the story supposed to be jumping around like that, from Mary's head, to Diana's, to Beatrice's?

as though someone had decided on large and ominous as a decorating style.

And where do you get off calling yourself practical? You're a writer.

Rosy-fingered dawn indeed! This dawn was wearing gray gloves.

Cum mulieribus non est disputandum, as Cicero says.

The two girls hurried down the street into the labyrinth of the London night.

She knew the truth: that Frankenstein had created a female monster, and that the female monster had escaped. And she hid that truth. Knowing of Justine, she did the best she could, for another woman. She erased her from the story.

She had learned long ago that life was difficult. One had to live it with courage

You are all vinegar, my dear Helen. I believe in the judicious application of honey.

And pockets! With pockets women could conquer the world!

First give them beauty. Then give them darkness.

BEATRICE: You make me sound so dramatic, Catherine! CATHERINE: Well, you are dramatic, with your long black hair and the clear olive complexion that marks you a daughter of the sunny south, of Italy, land of poetry and brigands. You would be the perfect romantic heroine, if only you weren't so contrary about it. BEATRICE: But I have no desire to be a romantic heroine. MARY: Brigands? Seriously, Cat, this isn't the eighteenth century. Nowadays Italy is perfectly civilized.