Quotes by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

“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.”

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

“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 comm...”

“Its time we woke up, pursued Gerald, still inwardly urged to unfamiliar speech. Women are pretty much people, seems to me. I know they dress like fools - but whos to blame for that? We invent all t...”

“the human mind was no better than in its earliest period of savagery, only better informed”

“They say women have no conscience about laws, don't they?" Mrs MacAvelly suggested. "Why should we?" answered her friend. "We don't make 'em nor God nor nature. Why on earth should we respect a set...”

“You see, they were Mothers, not in our sense of helpless involuntary fecundity, forced to fill and overfill the land, every land, and then see their children suffer, sin, and die, fighting horribly...”

“And woman should stand beside man as the comrade of his soul, not the servant of his body.”

“[The Yellow Wallpaper] was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.”

“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!...”

“John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.”

“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.”

“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!”

“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.”

“There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver.”

“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.”

“In all our discussions and speculations we had always unconsciously assumed that the women, whatever else they might be, would be young. Most men do think that way, I fancy. "Woman" in the abstract...”

“it is only in social relations that we are human...to be human women must share in the totality of humanity's common life. Women, forced to lead restricted lives, retard all human progress. Growth ...”

“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.”

“Through it [literature] we know the past, govern the present, and influence the future.”