J. Courtney Sullivan Quotes

I read as much poetry as time allows and circumstance dictates: No heartache can pass without a little Dorothy Parker, no thunderstorm without W. H. Auden, no sleepless night without W. B. Yeats.

Women leave their marriages when they can't take any more. Men leave when they find someone new.

I admire the linear and decisive way a certain kind of man thinks, to my curlicue boundless overthinking.

When I was in fourth grade, a novelist came to talk to my English class. She told us that being an author meant sitting at the kitchen table in pajamas, drinking tea with the dogs at your feet.

She had once said that she believed the women's liberation movement of the sixties and seventies was actually a ploy by men to get women to do more.

I like dressing up for dates and dissecting a dinner conversation with a new guy to determine if he might be The One.

For whatever reason, various outlets and individuals are committed to making the world think that young girls don't talk or care about feminism anymore, that it's totally over. But it's not.

Reading poetry gives me a sense of calm, well-being, and love for humanity - the same stuff more flexible women get from yoga.

We don't always do the things our parents want us to do, but it is their mistake if they can't find a way to love us anyway.

When she was pregnant with Teddy, she feared that she’d give birth to a child who disliked reading. It would be like giving birth to a foreign species.

There were so many ways to be twenty-six years old.

Timing was everything when it came to being a woman—the moment you entered the world could seal your fate.

I love the smell of a mans skin.

She thought about him all the time - not so much about Doug the individual, but rather about the nature of love, and the shock of learning how quickly it could disappear.

Fiction will always be my greatest love, with poetry close behind.

One of life's contradictions: how human beings were at once entirely resilient and impossibly fragile. One decision could stay with you forever, and yet you could live through almost anything.

It was amazing that you did not become your grief entirely, and walk about leaking it everywhere.

She had learned over time that to know anything was bearable. It was secrecy that could not be borne.

Now she saw that marriage was like being in a three-legged race with the same person for the rest of your life. Your hopes, your happiness, your luck, your moods, all yoked to his.

The moment a woman was born determined so much of who she was allowed to become.

And anyway, once you allowed yourself to picture such a scenario, it couldn't happen. That was just the way life went.

With the Smithies, it was different. There was sometimes no telling where one of them began and the others left off.

Someone could save your life without you ever knowing it. It happened more than most people realized.

How could a person have and do all these stupid things--clip coupons and double lock the front door--and then one day just cease to exist?