Phyllis Rose Quotes & Sayings

The literature of women's lives is a tradition of escapees, women who have lived to tell the tale. — Phyllis Rose

The challenge of nonfiction is to marry art and truth. — Phyllis Rose

When you realize how hard it is to know the truth about yourself, you understand that even the most exhaustive and well-meaning autobiography, determined to tell the truth, represents, at best, a guess. There have been times in my life when I felt incredibly happy. Life was full. I seemed productive. Then I thought,"Am I really happy or am I merely masking a deep depression with frantic activity?" If I don't know such basic things about myself, who does? — Phyllis Rose

There is no neutrality. There is only greater or lesser awareness of one's bias. — Phyllis Rose

One form of loneliness is to have a memory and no one to share it with. — Phyllis Rose

The banal advice of writ in teachers is "write what you know," but the truth is, you don't know a place until you write it. "Write what you want to know" is more like it. — Phyllis Rose

These aren't accidents. They are significant choices, like the choice of a totemic animal: something in your spirit aligns with theirs. — Phyllis Rose

More people should visit Antarctica, metaphorically speaking, on their own. That is one of the conclusions I have reached, one of my recommendations: explore something, even if it's just a bookshelf. Make a stab in the dark. Read off the beaten path. Your attention is precious. Be careful of other people trying to direct how you dispense it. Confront your own values. Decide what it is you are looking for an then look for it. Perform connoisseurship. We all need to create our own vocabulary of appreciation, or we are trapped by the vocabulary of others. — Phyllis Rose

I believe we need literature, which, by allowing us to experience more fully, to imagine more fully, enables us to live more freely. — Phyllis Rose

I wanted to make people aware of libraries as an ecosystem that are threatened in the same way as coral reefs. There's a kind of serendipity that occurs in a library that never happens online. Browsing a stack is a unique experience: that feeling of being attracted by a book, by its cover or typography. What makes me melancholy is the thought of books disappearing from libraries. — Phyllis Rose

Some kinds of literature demand to be treated respectfully. The obligation is on the reader to live up to them and not so much on them to entertain the reader. — Phyllis Rose

Every reading is a misreading. — Phyllis Rose

Biographies are a little like marriages: You only have room in your life for one or two. — Phyllis Rose

Perhaps that is what love is
the momentary or prolonged refusal to think of another person in terms of power. — Phyllis Rose

An autobiography held out the promise of hearing truths that only friends confess to one another but are knowledge you need to live. — Phyllis Rose

Reading is almost always subversive. From the time you read the next night's fairy tale under the covers by flashlight when you have already had your bedtime story from Daddy and are supposed to be asleep to the time you are an adult reading junk, hoping no one catches you at it, reading is private; that's the most seductive thing about it. It's you and the book. — Phyllis Rose

Libraries make strange bedfellows — Phyllis Rose

Men seem more bound to the wheel of success than women do. That women are trained to get satisfaction from affiliation rather thanachievement has tended to keep them from great achievement. But it has also freed them from unreasonable expectations about the satisfactions that professional achievement brings. — Phyllis Rose