Charlotte Perkins Gilman > Quotes

“It is the same woman, I know, for she is always creeping, and most women do not creep by daylight.”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories

“There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver.”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics

“But I MUST say what I feel and think in some way — it is such a relief! But the effort is getting to be greater than the relief.”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wall-Paper

“It does not do to trust people too much.”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wall-Paper

“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.”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman

“I cry at nothing, and cry most of the time.”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper

“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.”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman

“There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will.”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories

“Now why should that man have fainted? But he did,and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wall-Paper

“Nobody would believe what an effort it is to do what little I am able, - to dress and entertain, and order things”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wall-Paper

“In a sick society, women who have difficulty fitting in are not ill but demonstrating a healthy and positive response.”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman

“I never saw a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wall-Paper

“As for mother Eve - I wasn't there and can't deny the story, but I will say this. If she brought evil into the world, we men have had the lion's share of keeping it going ever since.”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Writings

“Patriotism, red hot, is compatible with the existence of a neglect of national interests, a dishonesty, a cold indifference to the suffering of millions. Patriotism is largely pride, and very largely combativeness. Patriotism generally has a chip on its shoulder.”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland

“I am glad my case is not serious! But these nervous troubles are dreadfully depressing. John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him.”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wall-Paper

“John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wall-Paper

“You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you. It is like a bad dream.”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper

“Here she comes, running, out of prison and off the pedestal: chains off, crown off, halo off, just a live woman.”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman

“I'm sure I never used to be so sensitive. I think it is due to this nervous condition.”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories

“To swallow and follow, whether old doctrine or new propaganda, is a weakness still dominating the human mind.”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman

“I learned a lot, when I was a child, from novels and stories, even fairytales have some point to them--the good ones. The thing that impressed me most forcibly was this: the villains went to work with their brains and always accomplished something. To be sure they were "foiled" in the end, but that was by some special interposition of Providence, not by any equal exertion of intellect on the part of the good people. The heroes and middle ones were mostly very stupid. If bad things happened, they practised patience, endurance, resignation, and similar virtues; if good things happened they practised modesty and magnanimity and virtues like that, but it never seemed to occur to any of them to make things move their way. Whatever the villains planned for them to do, they did, like sheep. The same old combinations of circumstances would be worked off on them in book after book--and they always tumbled.

It used to worry me as a discord worries a musician. Hadn't they ever read anything? Couldn't they learn anything from what they read--ever? It appeared not. And it seemed to me, even as a very little child, that what we wanted was good people with brains, not just negative, passive, good people, but positive, active ones, who gave their minds to it.

"A good villain. That's what we need!" I said to myself. "Why don't they write about them? Aren't there ever any?"

I never found any in all my beloved story books, or in real life. And gradually, I made up my mind to be one.”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Benigna Machiavelli

“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.”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories

“I always lock the door when I creep by daylight.”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper

“I really have discovered something at last. Through watching so much at night, when it changes so, I have finally found out. The front pattern does move - and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it! Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over. Then in the very ' bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard. And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern - it strangles so:...”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wall-Paper

“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.”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman

“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.”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wall-Paper

“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.”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland

“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.”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wall-Paper

“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.”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland

“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.”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics