Top 100 Rita Mae Brown Quotes
#1. Art is moral passion married to entertainment. Moral passion without entertainment is propaganda, and entertainment without moral passion is television.
Rita Mae Brown
#2. All creatures tread across the rubble of ruined civilizations. The trick is to keep moving. No animal ever goes about dispensing shallow compassion.
Rita Mae Brown
#3. Mother believed in enjoying herself. Aunt Mimi believed in enjoying herself, then feeling guilty about it.
Rita Mae Brown
#5. Gambling operates under the premise that greed can be satisfied by luck.
Rita Mae Brown
#6. Consider the "new" woman. She's trying to be Pollyanna Borgia, clearly a conflict of interest. She's supposed to be a ruthless winner at work and a bundle of nurturing sweetness at home.
Rita Mae Brown
#7. Novels, like human beings, usually have their beginnings in the dark.
Rita Mae Brown
#9. Full bloom, the pastures turning an impossible emerald green, she
Rita Mae Brown
#10. 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
#13. 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
#16. I earned two Emmy nominations for writing, and two of the shows I had written were nominated for best in their category.
Rita Mae Brown
#18. American hunting is quite different from English hunting because we don't hunt to kill. Even if I wanted to kill a fox, I couldn't. They're too smart and they have too many ways to escape me, whereas they don't in England.
Rita Mae Brown
#19. Recognition of function always precedes recognition of being.
Rita Mae Brown
#20. Never let anyone or any social attitude stand in the way of your productivity.
Rita Mae Brown
#21. Never measure literature by accounting statistics. A quarter of working authors earn less than $1,000.
Rita Mae Brown
#23. Sex makes monkeys out of all of us. If you don't give in to it, you wind up a cold, unfeeling bastard. If you do, you spend the rest of your life picking up the pieces ...
Rita Mae Brown
#25. Never underestimate the power of self-absorption, including your parents' self-absorption.
Rita Mae Brown
#26. You might say the first American Revolution was against the tyranny of King George. The second American Revolution must be against the tyranny of selfishness." This
Rita Mae Brown
#27. 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
#29. We all want to leave our children the Garden of Eden and we wind up giving them hardscrabble.
Rita Mae Brown
#31. Oh well, maybe the only beauty left in cities is in the oil slicks on the road and maybe there isn't any beauty left in the people who live in these places.
Rita Mae Brown
#32. If you can't raise consciousness, at least raise hell.
Rita Mae Brown
#33. 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
#34. I don't expect executives to be creative but I do expect them to have courage.
Rita Mae Brown
#35. 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
#36. It's an act of faith to be a writer in a post literate world.
Rita Mae Brown
#37. Show me a writer, any writer, who hasn't suffered and I'll show you someone who writes in pastels as opposed to primary colors.
Rita Mae Brown
#38. In America the word revolutionary is used to sell pantyhose.
Rita Mae Brown
#39. Mothers have a habit of proving right except you don't find that out until you're the age your mother was when she gave you the advice.
Rita Mae Brown
#40. Anyone of my generation who trusts government probably has an I.Q. that would make a good golf score.
Rita Mae Brown
#41. I think in the years to come what Reagan will be remembered for is that he had the chance to stop the plague and he chose not to because the 'right people' were dying.
Rita Mae Brown
#42. Monogamy is contrary to nature but necessary for the greater social good.
Rita Mae Brown
#43. I have changed my definition of tragedy. I now think tragedy is not foul deeds done to a person (usually noble in some manner) but rather that tragedy is irresolvable conflict.
Rita Mae Brown
#44. Possession of a secret is no guarantee of its truth.
Rita Mae Brown
#45. Women need to feel loved and men need to feel needed.
Rita Mae Brown
#47. Hollywood called just as I crested thirty. My novels did not and still do not interest them, but my writing ability did.
Rita Mae Brown
#49. 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
#51. I've met many irresponsible people in my life but never an irresponsible cat.
Rita Mae Brown
#52. I think you can judge the level of success for any group of people by the reaction against it.
Rita Mae Brown
#53. I think the reason I choose the comic approach so often is because it's harder, therefore affording me the opportunity to show off.
Rita Mae Brown
#54. I believe in a lively disrespect for most forms of authority.
Rita Mae Brown
#55. The only queer people are those who don't love anybody.
Rita Mae Brown
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. Lesbianism, politically organized, is the greatest threat that exists to male supremacy.
Rita Mae Brown
#59. the further humans move from nature, the crazier they get. In
Rita Mae Brown
#60. 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
#61. I write poetry. It comes naturally to me, but from a technical point of view it forces me to pay close attention to language and to scan.
Rita Mae Brown
#62. Dying's not so bad. At least I won't have to answer the telephone.
Rita Mae Brown
#64. While cats can be infuriating, little old women in fur coats, they make me laugh. Of course, dogs, horses and my highly social chickens are dear to me, too.
Rita Mae Brown
#65. Why marry a woman if you're going to betray her, and if you're going to betray her, why beat her? The fault is not hers ... I sometimes think the worst we do, we do behind closed doors.
Rita Mae Brown
#66. Loving's pretty easy. It's letting someone love you that's hard.
Rita Mae Brown
#67. About all you can do in life is be who you are. Some people will love you for you. Most will love you for what you can do for them, and some won't like you at all.
Rita Mae Brown
#68. Life matters more than any painting, novel, film, or great big diamond.
Rita Mae Brown
#69. In America sex is an obsession. In Europe it's a fact of life.
Rita Mae Brown
#70. I don't think you can ever assess your work. I don't think Turgenev could assess his any more than I can assess mine, and his didn't have a social impact as much as great literary impact.
Rita Mae Brown
#71. All wars are grotesque blasphemies against God's greatest gift: Life. Until
Rita Mae Brown
#73. The process of writing, any form of creativity, is a power intensifying life.
Rita Mae Brown
#74. Dean: Don't you find that somewhat of an aberration? Doesn't this disturb you my dear? After all, it's not normal.
Molly: I know it's not normal for people in this world to be happy, and I'm happy.
Rita Mae Brown
#75. A deadline is negative inspiration. Still, it's better than no inspiration at all.
Rita Mae Brown
#76. One thing Mom taught me, "You're going to be dead a long time, so do it now!"
Rita Mae Brown
#77. If it weren't for the last minute, nothing would get done.
Rita Mae Brown
#78. People are like tea bags; you never know how strong they'll be until they're in hot water. In times of trouble, you not only discover what you truly believe but whether or not you can act on your beliefs.
Rita Mae Brown
#79. I'd never seen men hold each other. I thought the only things they were allowed to do was shake hands or fight.
Rita Mae Brown
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. Humans are fundamentally irrational. They use what precious rationality they have justifying their irrational behavior. A
Rita Mae Brown
#84. Trouble is said to be good for an artist's soul but almost never is.
Rita Mae Brown
#86. For you to be successful, sacrifices must be made. It's better that they are made by others but failing that, you'll have to make them yourself.
Rita Mae Brown
#87. 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
#88. Divorce is the one human tragedy that reduces everything to cash.
Rita Mae Brown
#89. Alcohol is an allergy of the body and an obsession of the mind.
Rita Mae Brown
#90. The dead are the only people to have permanent dwellings.
Rita Mae Brown
#91. 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
#92. Every action is either strong or weak, and when every action is strong we are successful.
Rita Mae Brown
#93. You sell a screenplay like you sell a car. If someone drives it off a cliff, that's it.
Rita Mae Brown
#95. The writer's job is not to write a novel, hold it up and say, "Here I am," but to write a novel, hold it up and say, "Here YOU are.
Rita Mae Brown
#96. Education is a wonderful thing. If you couldn't sign your name you'd have to pay cash.
Rita Mae Brown
#97. You have nothing to fear in life, not you, not anyone, because every bad thing you think can happen will- but not always in the form you imagine
Rita Mae Brown
#98. Two wrongs don't make a right.
No, but three will get you back on the freeway!
Rita Mae Brown
#99. the times had become more ruthlessly commercial. Even
Rita Mae Brown
#100. A peacefulness follows any decision, even the wrong one.
Rita Mae Brown
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