Quotes by Catherine Lowell, The Madwoman Upstairs

“An imagination left alone in the dark can be a terrible thing.”

“More than anything, I began to hate women writers. Frances Burney, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Browning, Mary Shelley, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf. Bronte, Bronte, and Bronte. I began to resent Emily, ...”

“I call that creativity," Orville said. "The purpose of literature is to teach you how to THINK, not how to be practical. Learning to discover the connective tissue between seemingly unrelated event...”

“Isn't there some truth in all fiction?" "There's some fiction in all truth too.”

“Are there any leading men in your life?""Several, but they're all fictional.”

“I realized that my life of late had consisted of far too much dialogue and not enough exposition. I imagined an angry, bespectacled English teacher slashing his pen through the transcript of my lif...”

“My father used to say that all protagonists were versions of the author who wrote themeven if it meant the author had to acknowledge a side of himself that he did not know existed. It just required...”

“The great reward given to intelligent people is that they can invent all the rules and equate any dissent with stupidity.”

“You'd be amazed to discover all the tangible things that can come out of dreams." "Like drool?”

“Usually, meaning tends to find you, in the middle of the night, and when you least expect it.”

“This was not a novel. It was a force of nature. Here, in my hands, was the collective imagination of a million teenage girls. Jane Eyre was one of the most famous novels ever written . . . It was t...”

“A new adaptation of Jane Eyre came out every year, and every year it was exactly the same. An unknown actress would play Jane, and she was usually prettier than she should have been. A very handsom...”

“The curtains were blood-red and drawn. This was not an office. It was a small library, two storeys high, with thin ladders and impractical balconies and an expansive ceiling featuring a gaggle of n...”