Charlotte Perkins Gilman citations

“It is the same woman, I know, for she is always creeping, and most women do not creep by daylight.”

“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.”

“There are things in that wallpaper that nobody knows about but me, or ever will.”

“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.”

“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!”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“I'm sure I never used to be so sensitive. I think it is due to this nervous condition.”

“It does not do to trust people too much.”

“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.”

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

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

“The first duty of a human being is to assume the right relationship to society -- more briefly, to find your real job, and do it.”

“I never saw a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.”

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

“A man's honor always seems to want to kill a woman to satisfy it.”

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

“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.”

“The stony-minded orthodox were right in fearing the first movement of new knowledge and free thought. It has gone on, and will go on, irresistibly, until some day we shall have no respect for an alleged "truth" which cannot stand the full blaze of knowledge, the full force of active thought.”

“Only as we live, think, feel, and work outside the home, do we become humanly developed, civilized, socialized.”

“The mother as a social servant instead of a home servant will not lack in true mother duty…. From her work, loved and honored though it is, she will return to her home life, the child life, with an eager, ceaseless pleasure, cleansed of all the fret and fraction and weariness that so mar it now.”

“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!”

“I'm getting really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper. Perhaps because of the wallpaper.”

“A normal feminine influence in recasting our religious assumptions will do more than any other one thing to improve the world.”

“A million million worlds that move in peace;
A million mighty laws that never cease;
And one small ant-heap, hidden by small weeds,
Rich with eggs, slaves and store of millet-seeds.
They sleep beneath the sod
And trust in God.”

“Said I, in scorn all burning hot,
In rage and anger high,
"You ignominious idiot,
Those wings are made to fly!"”

“The labor of women in the house, certainly, enables men to produce more wealth than they otherwise could; and in this way women are economic factors in society. But so are horses.”

“I do not want to be a fly,
I want to be a worm!”