Melvillean Quotes & Sayings

Siddhartha wants liberation, Dante wants Beatrice, Frodo wants to get to Mount Doom - we all want something. Quest is elemental to the human experience. All road narratives are to some extent built on quest. If you're a woman, though, this fundamental possibility of quest is denied. You can't go anywhere if you can't step out onto a road ...
... (T)here is no female counterpart in our culture to Ishmael or Huck Finn. There is no Dean Moriarty, Sal, or even a Fuckhead. It sounds like a doctoral crisis, but it's not. As a fifteen-year-old hitchhiker, my survival depended upon other people's ability to envision a possible future for me. Without a Melvillean or Kerouacian framework, or at least some kind of narrative to spell out a potential beyond death, none of my resourcefulness or curiosity was recognizable, and therefore I was unrecognizable. — Vanessa Veselka

Feminism is not inherently bourgeois, but bourgeois feminism is the only one given voice in our society. That is why women's issues discuss glass ceilings rather than dirt floors. — James Rozoff

Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult. — Charlotte Whitton

Music, even if I ended up doing something different or do end up doing something different in the long run, it's just something that is life blood. If I'm not participating in some way, I feel like I'm wasting my time. — Autre Ne Veut

Stay insane, but behave like normal people. Run the risk of being different, but learn to do so without attracting attention. Concentrate on this flower and allow the real "I" to reveal itself. — Paulo Coelho

One must not put trust in novelists, Beth; they create worlds to fit their own needs and drive their characters mad in doing it. — Mary Robinette Kowal