Phyllis Rose Quotes

#1. Biographies are a little like marriages: You only have room in your life for one or two.

Phyllis Rose

#2. Every reading is a misreading.

Phyllis Rose

#3. Perhaps that is what love is
the momentary or prolonged refusal to think of another person in terms of power.

Phyllis Rose

#4. One form of loneliness is to have a memory and no one to share it with.

Phyllis Rose

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

Phyllis Rose

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. Libraries make strange bedfellows

Phyllis Rose

#9. 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

#10. The challenge of nonfiction is to marry art and truth.

Phyllis Rose

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

Phyllis Rose

#12. 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

#13. There is no neutrality. There is only greater or lesser awareness of one's bias.

Phyllis Rose