Mary Lee Quotes & Sayings

Stop shining your lantern in my face."
"It's such a lovely face. — Y.S. Lee

Anyone who has a choice and doesn't choose to write is a fool. The work is hard, the perks are few, the pay is terrible, and the product, when it's finally finished, is pure joy. — Mary Lee Settle

I only wanted Uncle Vernon standing by his own car (a Hudson) on a clear day, I got him and the car. Ialso got a bit of Aunt Mary's laundry and Beau Jack, the dog, peeing on the fence, and a row of potted tuberous begonias on the porch and 78 trees and a million pebbles in the driveway and more. It's a generous medium, photography. — Lee Friedlander

Somerset Maugham said that it took at least six human beings to make one fictional character. That is true of landscape as well, I think. We have to make our landscapes, change streets, create new turnings, rebuild or tear down, change time, and even nature, if need be. — Mary Lee Settle

The bright bite in Mary Lee Kortes' voice [has] the high-mountain sunshine of Dolly Parton, with a sweet-iron undercoat of Chrissie Hynde. — David Fricke

Having watched herself in the speckled mirror ... she was already shocked beyond surprise at what the flat hand of age could do. — Mary Lee Settle

The first time you are reconciled to the terrible unfairness of disappointment, you are getting old. — Mary Lee Settle

When I'm working on a serious and solid book ... I read about a detective novel a day. It's the best legal dope in the world. It makes you feel good until the next morning you can work again. — Mary Lee Settle

Mary Webster was on the blower. Her advance agents saw Hank and me swimming in the middle of the river last night with no clothes on.
H'rm, said Atticus. He touched his glasses. I hope you weren't doing the backstroke. — Harper Lee

She trained the girls in her Girl Scout troop to believe that they could be anything, and she went to lengths to prevent negative stereotypes of their race from shaping their internal views of themselves and other Negroes. It was difficult enough to rise above the silent reminders of Colored signs on the bathroom doors and cafeteria tables. But to be confronted with the prejudice so blatantly, there in that temple to intellectual excellence and rational thought, by something so mundane, so ridiculous, so universal as having to go to the bathroom...In the moment when the white women laughed at her, Mary had been demoted from professional mathematician to a second-class human being, reminded that she was a black girl whose piss wasn't good enough for the white pot. — Margot Lee Shetterly

For Mary Jackson, life was a long process of raising one's expectations. — Margot Lee Shetterly

Questions are an under-used piece of communication in our culture. — Mary Lee LaBay

I knew that the show was coming and they wanted me to have a co-host. And so I asked Mary Hart and she was one of the first. Before that it was Sarah Purcell then Cindy Garvey. Then Mary Hart, then Cindy Garvey again here in New York, then Anne Abernathy and then Kathy Lee, who stayed 15 years. And now Kelly has been there eight. — Regis Philbin

He looked at her for a moment, amazed. "How did you know that? How can a servant girl like you understand so much?"
Because self-absorbed man-children are common as weeds, thought Mary. But she said, "I don't know, sir. I only guessed. — Y.S. Lee

For several moments, Mary couldn't hear anything over the violent pounding of her pulse. — Y.S. Lee

If Mary had applied for a job as janitor, the doors to the school would swing wide open. As a professional engineer-in-training with a plan to occupy the building for the nefarious purpose of advancing her education, she needed to petition the city of Hampton for "special permission" to attend classes in the whites-only school. Mary — Margot Lee Shetterly

The community certainly included black English professors, like my mother, as well as black doctors and dentists, black mechanics, janitors, and contractors, black cobblers, wedding planners, real estate agents, and undertakers, several black lawyers, and a handful of black Mary Kay salespeople. As a child, however, I knew so many African Americans working in science, math, and engineering that I thought that's just what black folks did. — Margot Lee Shetterly

Don't people know that it's the hardest work in the world? Joseph Conrad said that he had loaded hundredweights of coal all day long on a ship in Amsterdam in the wintertime, and that is was nothing to the energy demanded for a day's work writing. — Mary Lee Settle

[The inspiration that comes to authors of fiction] is not an act of intelligence. — Mary Lee Settle

I love writers all across the board, but one who influenced me very directly at the beginning was Mary Renault. — Tanith Lee

There's something I want to say in this space, but it's an emptiness where there's usually a hug. - Colin Morton to Mary Lee Bragg, 1972 — David Eso

Recorded history is wrong. It's wrong because the voiceless have no voice in it. — Mary Lee Settle