Quotes About Courage

I am the woman who lost herself but now is found, the lesbian, outside the law of the church and man, the one who has to love herself or die. If you are not as strong as I am, what will be make together? I am all muscle and wounded desire, and I need to know how strong we both can be.

Anything." I loved the way she said that. Granny's "Christian women" came out like new spit on a dusty morning, pure and precious and deeply satisfying.

In the worst moments of my life, I have told myself that story, the story about a girl who stood up to a monster.

The rage was a good feeling, stronger and purer than the shame that followed, the fear and the sudden urge to run and hide, to deny, to pretend I did not know who I was and what the world would do to me.

The best fiction comes from the place where the terror hides, the edge of our worst stuff. I believe, absolutely, that if you do not break out in that swear of fear when you write, then you have not gone far enough.

Every time I sit down to write, I have a great fear that anything I write will reveal me as the monster I was always told I would be, but that fear is personal, something I must face in everything I do, every act I contemplate.

The things you hesitate to talk about," Bertha repeated in her husky North Carolina accent, "those are the things you should be writing about.

I might not have ever had the courage to write those stories without that experience, that training ground in how to look at one's own life and see it as a story.

As I was finishing the copyediting of Bastard, I found myself thinking about all I had read when Kate Millett published Flying: her stated conviction that telling the truth was what feminist writers were supposed to do. That telling the truth—your side of it anyway, knowing that there were truths other than your own—was a moral act, a courageous act, an act of rebellion that would encourage other such acts.

Yes, somewhere inside me there is a child always eleven years old, a girlchild who holds the world responsible for all the things that terrify and call to me. But inside me too is the teenager who armed herself and fought back, the dyke who did what she had to, the woman who learned to love without giving in to fear.

Shame comes with denial. Fear fattens on lies.

I say, "Talk to me. Tell me who you are, what you want, what you've never had, the story you've always been afraid to tell.

Go away and bleed to death,' said his onetime saviour sharply. 'On behalf of the female sex I feel I may cheer every lesion.

Lion-hearted; her tremors braced with virtue, Philippa trotted on.

Tobie. Unless I'm giving off steam, behave normally. I remember what to do. One foot in front of the other, but not both at the same time unless I'm a robin.

Nine-tenths of every attack is bluff. The art is to know when to call it.

Think for yourselves for a change. You've been pedlars: go and be merchants. You've been mercenaries: go and find something of your own to defend. You've finished teething and there's the world: crack it open if you can.

He was not a figment of daydream or of fantasy. He was the quick-witted man who had raced with her; the man whose strong wrists had pulled her from trouble; whose laughter recognized, more than his own, her buffoonery; whose voice had whispered, sung, exclaimed or cursed, with equal felicity, carefree as birdsong on top of their striving. Whose essence, stripped by necessity was, it now seemed, warm and joyous and of great generosity.

We'll do it,' said Will Scott comfortably, shouting over the tumult. 'If it's no more than an hour, we'll do it.' 'Christ, I believe you're sorry, you flaming maniac,' said Lymond. 'Don't I keep telling you that this is bloody childishness, and don't you keep agreeing?

You've got one hero too many already. Stand on your own feet, Brother. It's good for the soul.

If they place the sun in my right hand and the moon in my left and ask me to give up my mission, I will not give it up until the truth prevails or I myself perish in the attempt.

I am here, Brethren in Christ, to lead you, every man, woman and little child of the Faith, to freedom. God in His mercy be praised.' 'Then God in His mercy has arranged that we should lead them from the rear,' said Jerott Blyth thinly from the window. 'The entire garrison of Tripoli has just marched away.

I'm sorry,' said Jerott, his eyes elsewhere. What was the attraction here, in God's name? Not the little woman in the stained gown, surely? Or the plain fourteen-year-old who had been so courageous the night Trotty died?

No. I won't. I won't bend my knee, or kiss your charming shoes either. I may possibly fall flat on my face, but that will be quite inadvertent.