Top 100 Rita Mae Brown Quotes
#1. I'm queer. But why would people get so upset about something that feels so good? Me being a queer can't hurt anyone, why should it be such a terrible thing? Makes no sense.
Rita Mae Brown
#2. Small log cabin once stood near the creek, but as the Jones family's fortunes
Rita Mae Brown
#3. I still miss those I loved who are no longer with me but I find I am grateful for having loved them. The gratitude has finally conquered the loss.
Rita Mae Brown
#4. 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
#5. The reward for conformity is that everyone likes you but yourself.
Rita Mae Brown
#6. To love without role, without power plays, is revolution.
Rita Mae Brown
#7. I think the reward for conformity is that everyone likes you except yourself.
Rita Mae Brown
#9. We all want to leave our children the Garden of Eden and we wind up giving them hardscrabble.
Rita Mae Brown
#11. It doesn't matter to me. We're still cousins in our own way. Blood's just something old people talk about to make you feel bad.
Rita Mae Brown
#12. Guilt is a Jewish invention improved upon by Christians for the last two thousand years.
Rita Mae Brown
#13. 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
#14. I hate the telephone. I think the lowest circle of hell is reserved for Alexander Graham Bell.
Rita Mae Brown
#15. 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
#16. Never underestimate the power of self-absorption, including your parents' self-absorption.
Rita Mae Brown
#18. A life of reaction is a life of slavery, intellectually and spiritually. One must fight for a life of action, not reaction.
Rita Mae Brown
#20. [A pariah is] something like a martyr with more suffering and less class.
Rita Mae Brown
#21. 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
#22. The reason for revolution is so the good things in life circulate.
Rita Mae Brown
#23. Cats and dogs believe politicians are like cemetery caregivers; they are on top of everyone, but nobody listens.
Rita Mae Brown
#25. Never measure literature by accounting statistics. A quarter of working authors earn less than $1,000.
Rita Mae Brown
#26. 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
#27. Intuition is a suspension of logic due to impatience.
Rita Mae Brown
#28. Whenever I doubt the existence of God or the Goddess, I look at horses. Only God could have made a horse.
Rita Mae Brown
#29. 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
#30. I'm sorry that our country and the people do not consider the arts as vital to our well-being as, say, medicine. Suffering is unnecessary. It doesn't make you a better artist; it only makes you a hungry one. However, to me the acquisition of the craft of writing was worth any amount of suffering.
Rita Mae Brown
#31. Many lesbians were so far in the closet they were in danger of being mistaken for garment bags.
Rita Mae Brown
#32. Everybody gets married. It's something you have to do, like dying.
Rita Mae Brown
#33. Anyone of my generation who trusts government probably has an I.Q. that would make a good golf score.
Rita Mae Brown
#34. Do not judge. Never presume to judge another human being anyway. That's up to heaven.
Rita Mae Brown
#36. I've got splinters in my nose from the best publishing doors in town.
Rita Mae Brown
#38. You can't be truly rude until you understand good manners.
Rita Mae Brown
#39. I have always been suspicious of romantic love. It looks too much like a narcissism shared by two ...
Rita Mae Brown
#40. If critics want to help me, let them come sit next to me while I'm writing.
Rita Mae Brown
#41. In America the word revolutionary is used to sell pantyhose.
Rita Mae Brown
#42. 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
#43. Content without style is propaganda or adolescence. Style without content is decadence.
Rita Mae Brown
#44. 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
#45. It's an act of faith to be a writer in a post literate world.
Rita Mae Brown
#46. 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
#47. I don't expect executives to be creative but I do expect them to have courage.
Rita Mae Brown
#48. 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
#49. Happiness is pretty simple: someone to love, something to do, something to look forward to.
Rita Mae Brown
#50. If you can't raise consciousness, at least raise hell.
Rita Mae Brown
#52. You know, women used to rule the world until they got men to do it for them.
Rita Mae Brown
#54. Full bloom, the pastures turning an impossible emerald green, she
Rita Mae Brown
#55. We have the ability to be the Athens of modern times as opposed to the militaristic Sparta. I remind you that the Athenians wrote poetry. The Spartans did not.
Rita Mae Brown
#56. I believe our concept of romantic love is irrational, impossible to fulfill and the cause of many broken homes. No human being can maintain that rarefied atmosphere of 'true love'.
Rita Mae Brown
#58. 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
#59. Novels, like human beings, usually have their beginnings in the dark.
Rita Mae Brown
#60. 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
#61. Gambling operates under the premise that greed can be satisfied by luck.
Rita Mae Brown
#64. The tax code will never be simplified in our lifetime because it's not about taxes; it's about congressmen distributing the pork.
Rita Mae Brown
#66. He tried to drown his troubles but they knew how to swim.
Rita Mae Brown
#68. When Mother died I was both freed and abandoned, as are we all at this profound juncture in our lives.
Rita Mae Brown
#69. Mother believed in enjoying herself. Aunt Mimi believed in enjoying herself, then feeling guilty about it.
Rita Mae Brown
#70. Leroy bet me I couldn't find a pot of gold at the end, and I told him that was a stupid bet because the rainbow was enough.
Rita Mae Brown
#71. I became a lesbian because of women, because women are beautiful, strong, and compassionate.
Rita Mae Brown
#72. 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
#73. Youth moves out, leaving no forwarding address. No matter how you try, you can't reach that person again or that place.
Rita Mae Brown
#74. One survey found that ten percent of Americans thought Joan of Arc was Noah's wife.
Rita Mae Brown
#75. I used to think romantic love was a neurosis shared by two, a supreme foolishness. I no longer think that. There's nothing foolish in loving anyone. Thinking you'll be loved in return is what's foolish.
Rita Mae Brown
#76. What's the point of being a lesbian if a woman is going to look and act like an imitation man?
Rita Mae Brown
#77. What's the point of prolonging your life if you don't enjoy it? It's your body. Do whatever you want with it. Better to wear out than rust over.
Rita Mae Brown
#78. Anyway, how did I know the president was for real? I never saw him, just pictures in the paper and they can make those up. How do you know someone is real if you don't see him?
Rita Mae Brown
#79. 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
#80. We animals live life in all its glorious uncertainty. Why do politicians think they can control events?
Rita Mae Brown
#81. 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
#82. Never let anyone or any social attitude stand in the way of your productivity.
Rita Mae Brown
#83. The only merciful thing about drug abuse is the speed with which it devastates you. Alcoholics can take decades to destroy themselves and everyone they touch. The drug addict can accomplish this in a year or two. Of course, suicide is even more efficient.
Rita Mae Brown
#84. Recognition of function always precedes recognition of being.
Rita Mae Brown
#85. Language is decanted and shared. If only one person is left alive speaking a language - the case with some American Indian languages - the language is dead. Language takes two and their multiples.
Rita Mae Brown
#86. 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
#88. No government has the right to tell its citizens when or whom to love
Rita Mae Brown
#89. Art is moral passion married to entertainment. Moral passion without entertainment is propaganda, and entertainment without moral passion is television.
Rita Mae Brown
#90. 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
#91. 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
#94. 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
#96. Creative people do not belong in the university because the process is antithetical to the analytical process so necessary for proper scholarship.
Rita Mae Brown
#97. 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
#98. In school they told us the president was the best man in the whole country but I knew my father was the best man in the whole country; the country didn't know it, that's all.
Rita Mae Brown
#100. 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
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