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Margaret liked that her daughter knew her own mind and wasn’t afraid to speak it. It was an underappreciated quality in women, one that often faded with age.
Acquaintances abound, but true friendships are rare and worth waiting for.”
Was it so terrible to be different, even eccentric? In Margaret’s book, that was a plus. She was tired of stale conversations, the company of generic women who made her feel like she had to swallow her opinions and camouflage her personality.
“Trust me, he’ll eat it up with a spoon. Men love nothing as much as explaining stuff to women.”
From those to whom much has been given, much is expected.
“Books sprung from an author’s imagination can be just as meaningful as those based on facts, figures, and events, or even more meaningful. Novels force you to think—to make your own conclusions about characters and themes, and decide if they’re valid or relevant or true or good, or the opposite, or maybe somewhere in between. My personal preference is for in between. I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody who was all one thing or the other, have you? Most people are a walking bundle of contradictions.”
Because sometimes a woman needs a good cry. Because sometimes there truly is only one thing that needs to be said, and Charlotte had said it.
What made those men so angry? Why did they feel so threatened? Margaret couldn’t begin to understand it, but she didn’t need to understand it to know it was wrong.
Earlene Jackson was right; no matter how hard she wished it were otherwise, a woman simply cannot be in two places at once.
“Having faith in yourself,” Alice said, “believing you have as much right to be in the room as anybody else, is half the battle.”
There was no question about it; had a writer with talent and drive equal to William’s been born a woman, the world would have been robbed of one of its greatest literary voices.
If women stuck up for one another the way men do, this would be a very different world.”
Why would somebody go so far out of their way to be so nasty just because somebody held a differing opinion?
“You know what Eleanor Roosevelt used to say: ‘A woman is like a tea bag. You never know how strong it is until it’s in hot water.’”
Margaret thought back to the words she’d written months before, that there were a million good and right ways to be a woman, and only two wrong ways. First, to insist that your way was the only way. Second, to allow your unique, square-peg soul to be deformed and misshapen, pounded into the round hole of someone else’s ideal. If that was true for women, shouldn’t it be true for men as well?
