Rita Mae Brown Quotes & Sayings

Do you think it's possible that love multiples? We're taught to think it divides. There's only so much to go around, like diamonds. It multiples. — Rita Mae Brown

Seriousness is the refuge of the shallow. There are events and personal experiences that call forth seriousness but they are fewer than most of us think. — Rita Mae Brown

If you like my novels, I commend your good taste. — Rita Mae Brown

You can love more than one person at a time, and I don't give a damn what the self-help books say. — Rita Mae Brown

I mean, what do people talk about when they're married?" "Their kids, I guess." "Maybe that's all they have in common. — Rita Mae Brown

Morals are private. Decency is public. — Rita Mae Brown

Writers are the moral purifiers of the culture. We may not be pure ourselves but we must tell the truth, which is a purifying act. — Rita Mae Brown

I love literature, the English language and storytelling. I also have thirty horses and seventy foxhounds to feed. — Rita Mae Brown

The reason for revolution is so the good things in life circulate. — Rita Mae Brown

What would happen if she'd open her eyes and see only dark and feel satin from the coffin? That'd scare her enough to kill her all over again. How do they know dead people don't open their eyes and see? they don't know nothing about being dead. — Rita Mae Brown

So often the truth is told with hate, and lies are told with love. — Rita Mae Brown

Money and writing appear to be mutually exclusive. — Rita Mae Brown

No government has the right to tell its citizens when or whom to love — Rita Mae Brown

Whoever heard of a neurotic frog? Where do humans get off thinking they're the pinnacle of evolution? — Rita Mae Brown

I think the reward for conformity is that everyone likes you except yourself. — Rita Mae Brown

The process of writing, any form of creativity, is a power intensifying life. — Rita Mae Brown

I think of birth as the search for a larger apartment. — Rita Mae Brown

Plot involves fragmentary reality, and it might involve composite reality. Fragmentary reality is the view of the individual. Composite reality is the community or state view. Fragmentary reality is always set against composite reality. Virginia Woolf did this by creating fragmentary monologues and for a while this was all the rage in literature. She was a genius. In the hands of the merely talented it came off like gibberish. — Rita Mae Brown

In art as in politics we must deal with people as they are not as we wish them to be. Only by working with the real can you get closer to the ideal. — Rita Mae Brown

People who care for you inevitably become beautiful. — Rita Mae Brown

I always feel bad for those who, in a sense, cede their authority to others, let others make major decisions about their life and actually believe them. When you're tiny, you have no choice. But as soon as your mind starts working, you pretty well figure it out. And you realize you're a hostage until you're old enough to leave. But as long as you have that goal - I will get out of here - you'll be OK. — Rita Mae Brown

Sorrow is how we learn to love. Your heart isn't breaking. It hurts because it's getting larger. The larger it gets, the more love it holds. — Rita Mae Brown

Writers will happen in the best of families. — Rita Mae Brown

I wished I could get up in the morning and look at the day the way I used to when I was a child. I wished I could walk down the streets and not hear those constant, abrasive sounds from the mouths of the opposite sex. Damn, I wished the world would let me be myself. — Rita Mae Brown

Life is too short to be miserable. — Rita Mae Brown

Not until my middle thirties did I consider myself a novelist. — Rita Mae Brown

In America the word revolutionary is used to sell pantyhose. — Rita Mae Brown

Would it upset men if they found out we weren't different? Are we? Aren't we? Damned if I know. — Rita Mae Brown

Guilt is a Jewish invention improved upon by Christians for the last two thousand years. — Rita Mae Brown

To have meaningful work is a tremendous happiness. — Rita Mae Brown

You know, women used to rule the world until they got men to do it for them. — Rita Mae Brown

In America sex is an obsession. In Europe it's a fact of life. — Rita Mae Brown

Why can't peace be a single overriding common purpose: why do we wait for a crisis to pull us together? Let's pull together for peace. — Rita Mae Brown

Whenever I doubt the existence of God or the Goddess, I look at horses. Only God could have made a horse. — Rita Mae Brown

Normal is the average of deviance. — Rita Mae Brown

Humans are fundamentally irrational. They use what precious rationality they have justifying their irrational behavior. A — Rita Mae Brown

Compromise is the work of mature people. — Rita Mae Brown

I'm beginning to feel that the real endangered species on planet earth are not the whales and the elephants but those of us who can laugh at the world and ourselves ... I fear the dry turn of the American mind, this focus on the literal, as much as I fear our capacity for self-destruction. We've become hagridden by facts, obsessed with product instead of process. Where's the energetic wit, the looney outlook, the frivolity, the lightness of comforting laughter? It has become fashionable to know and unfashionable to feel, and you can't really laugh if you can't feel. — Rita Mae Brown

It's an act of faith to be a writer in a post literate world. — Rita Mae Brown

A deadline is negative inspiration. Still, it's better than no inspiration at all. — Rita Mae Brown

Aunt Mimi possessed a horror of silence, which she battled with endless chat. The Typhoid Mary of the Telephone started her calls at 6:30 each morning. — Rita Mae Brown

The last thing I have to say is that ice is the past tense of water. I've always wanted to write that sentence and now I have. — Rita Mae Brown

Two wrongs don't make a right.
No, but three will get you back on the freeway! — Rita Mae Brown

Tennis, imprisoned within fixed boundaries, a patch of an acre, a green rectangle, tries the human soul. A tennis court is like a coffin, only larger. — Rita Mae Brown

No animal on the face of the earth could conceive of taxation. You and I work roughly six months a year to pay our local, state and federal taxes. If nothing else, this should convince you that animals are smarter than people. — Rita Mae Brown

What's the point of being a lesbian if a woman is going to look and act like an imitation man? — Rita Mae Brown

Recognition of function always precedes recognition of being. — Rita Mae Brown

One thing Mom taught me, "You're going to be dead a long time, so do it now!" — Rita Mae Brown

Friendship is love made bearable. — Rita Mae Brown

Carrie, sitting there over your coffee cup in a wasteland of worn-out silver wedding rings, feeding yourself confections of motherhood like the display cakes in the bakery where you worked- all trimming over cardboard. — Rita Mae Brown

The dead are the only people to have permanent dwellings. — Rita Mae Brown

Women need to feel loved and men need to feel needed. — Rita Mae Brown

Femininity and masculinity are social constructs. Female and male are biological. We don't have to learn to be men or women but we do have to learn to be ladies and gentlemen. — Rita Mae Brown

English is weak in describing emotional states or intensities of interpersonal relationships. — Rita Mae Brown

Where there is no faith, devils are a necessity. — Rita Mae Brown

Lesbianism, politically organized, is the greatest threat that exists to male supremacy. — Rita Mae Brown

Intuition is a suspension of logic due to impatience. — Rita Mae Brown

The human animal dances wildest on the edge of the grave. — Rita Mae Brown

You gay?"
"Oh, I wouldn't say I was gay. I'd just say I was enchanted."
"Me too. — Rita Mae Brown

They're walking around in clothing but they're still the same animals who lived in caves, feared the dark, and smashed one another over the head for beans. — Rita Mae Brown

Tennis is physical chess. — Rita Mae Brown

I became a lesbian because of women, because women are beautiful, strong, and compassionate. — Rita Mae Brown

Alcohol is an allergy of the body and an obsession of the mind. — Rita Mae Brown

Odd thing about death ... it reaffirms life. — Rita Mae Brown

If you can't raise consciousness, at least raise hell. — Rita Mae Brown

Dad could charm a dog off a meat wagon. — Rita Mae Brown

Oppression works in such a way that it holds every person responsible for the acts of any wrongdoer of the oppressed group. — Rita Mae Brown

Nothing is unnatural - just untried. — Rita Mae Brown

Anyone of my generation who trusts government probably has an I.Q. that would make a good golf score. — Rita Mae Brown

My voice rings down through thousands of years to coil around your body and give you strength, you who have wept in direct sunlight, who have hungered in invisible chains, tremble to the cadence of my legacy: An army of lovers shall not fail. — Rita Mae Brown

I do think women avoid power. Power assumes responsibility and accountability, and I think many, many women want to have it both ways. — Rita Mae Brown

I believe all literature started as gossip. — Rita Mae Brown

Art is moral passion married to entertainment. Moral passion without entertainment is propaganda, and entertainment without moral passion is television. — Rita Mae Brown

It's still easier to take a blow from outside than it is to be disgusted with myself for not taking a stand. I don't know how people can live and not fight back but apparently millions do. They must hate themselves. — Rita Mae Brown

Happiness is pretty simple: someone to love, something to do, something to look forward to. — Rita Mae Brown

Self-pity is the simplest luxury. — Rita Mae Brown

I believe you are your work. Don't trade the stuff of your life, time, for nothing more than dollars. That's a rotten bargain. — Rita Mae Brown

Women who love women are Lesbians. Men, because they can only think of women in sexual terms, define Lesbian as sex between women. — Rita Mae Brown

Life's too short to try and understand cold-blooded creatures. — Rita Mae Brown

Humor comes from self-confidence. — Rita Mae Brown

I believe in a lively disrespect for most forms of authority. — Rita Mae Brown

One survey found that ten percent of Americans thought Joan of Arc was Noah's wife. — Rita Mae Brown

I don't want to die. I think death is a greatly overrated experience. — Rita Mae Brown

Golf is an expensive way to make yourself miserable. — Rita Mae Brown

Knowing Latin and having two years of Attic Greek gave me the strong foundation upon which I've built a career. I think the classical training, more than anything, has provided me with longevity. — Rita Mae Brown

No one remembers her beginnings. Mothers and aunts tell us about infancy and early childhood, hoping we won't forget the past when they had total control over our lives and secretly praying that because of it, we'll include them in our future. — Rita Mae Brown

There are very few people who are creative and imaginative. Therefore, fiction is difficult for people to embrace. — Rita Mae Brown

I had to learn the image is not the word, which is a jolt for a literary soul. But it has served me well in terms of understanding plot, in terms of watching actors develop characters. — Rita Mae Brown

Novels, like human beings, usually have their beginnings in the dark. — Rita Mae Brown

Virginia Woolf said that writers must be androgynous. I'll go a step further. You must be bisexual. — Rita Mae Brown

If you don't like my book, write your own. If you don't think you can write a novel, that ought to tell you something. If you think you can, do. No excuses. If you still don't like my novels, find a book you do like. — Rita Mae Brown

Funny how people want a return to the good ole days. Of coarse the good ole days of being a rich white plantation owner. Everyone seems to forget the poor white farmer. — Rita Mae Brown

As a woman, I find it very embarrassing to be in a meeting and realize I'm the only one in the room with balls. — Rita Mae Brown

Divorce is the one human tragedy that reduces everything to cash. — Rita Mae Brown

Gambling operates under the premise that greed can be satisfied by luck. — Rita Mae Brown

As for loving woman, I have never understood why some people had a fit. I still don't. It seems fine to me. If an individual is productive responsible, and energetic, why should her choice in a partner make such a fuss? The government is only too happy to take my tax money and yet they uphold legislation that keeps me a second class citizen. Surely, there should be a tax break for those of us who are robbed of full and equal participation and protection in the life of our nation. — Rita Mae Brown

He unzipped his pants and his brains fell out. — Rita Mae Brown

The reward for conformity is that everyone likes you but yourself. — Rita Mae Brown

Life is unjust, people can be cruel, and yet if you harden your heart, you will lose what little love there is in this world. — Rita Mae Brown

Tragedy massages the human ego even as comedy deflates it ... Tragedy pits us against large foes and the trip wire is our own character ... In comedy we fall afoul of one another. Comedy depends on social life, on our behavior in groups. In tragedy you can observe one human against the gods. In comedy it's one human versus other humans and often one man (or woman if I'm writing it) against her own worst impulses. — Rita Mae Brown