“It becomes bars! The outside pattern, I mean, and the women behind it is as plain as can be. I didn't realize for a long time what the thing was that showed behind, that dim sub-pattern, but now I am quite sure it is a woman. By daylight she is subdued, quiet. I fancy it is the pattern that keeps her so still.”
The Yellow Wallpaper (1891)
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman 40
American feminist, writer, commercial artist, lecturer and … 1860–1935Related quotes

The New Divinity (1964)
Context: Eventually the old ideas will no longer serve, the old ideological framework can no longer be tinkered up to bear the weight of the facts, and a radical reconstruction becomes necessary, leading eventually to the emergence of a quite new organisation of thought and belief, just as the emergence of new types of bodily organization was necessary to achieve biological advance. Such major organizations of thought may be necessary in science as much as in religion. The classical example, of course, was the re-patterning of cosmological thought which demoted the earth from its central position and led to the replacement of the geocentric pattern of thought by a heliocentric one. I believe that an equally drastic reorganization of our pattern of religious thought is now becoming necessary, from a god-centered to an evolutionary-centered pattern.

“I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern.”

Interview with The Sunday Telegraph, quoted in the Eugene Register-Guard (27 December 1972) https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1310&dat=19721227&id=OalVAAAAIBAJ&sjid=9-ADAAAAIBAJ&pg=6123,7185434&hl=en

Letter to Robert Bridges (15 February 1879)
Letters, etc

“I am a pattern watcher. (p. 311)”
1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011)

“I just looked at the pattern of my life, decided I didn't like it, and changed.”
Source: Barrel Fever: Stories and Essays

Book Two, Part I “Across the Ring”, Chapter 3 (p. 155)
The Birthgrave (1975)