Janet > Janet's Quotes

“1883. Third Month 16

Some moments set my heart on fire, and that’s when language seems the smallest. Yet precisely these bursts of feeling make me long to write. I sit now in a high-walled courtyard, amid the green smells and slanted light of early spring, with that familiar burning in my heart. I’ll need to destroy these pages before returning home, but no matter; for the first time since Mother’s death, words come to me.”
― Janet Benton, Lilli de Jong

“Here's the thing, say Shug. The thing I believe. God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. And some-times it just manifest itself even if you not looking, or don't know what you looking for l. Trouble do it for most folks, I think. Sorrow, Lord. Feeling like shit.”
― Alice Walker, The Color Purple

“People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.”
― Alice Walker, The Color Purple

“When someone calls me madam, I think they mean my mother.”
― Janet Benton, Lilli de Jong

“We can pursue our true wants, Mill writes, only when doing so harms no one to whom we are obliged.”
― Janet Benton, Lilli de Jong

“How is it that shame affixes itself to the violated, and not to the violator?”
― Janet Benton, Lilli de Jong

“So little is permissible for a woman—yet on her back every human climbs to adulthood.”
― Janet Benton, Lilli de Jong

“As if passion alone explained our predicaments. Our being female and unlucky—and, in my case, a near idiot in the ways of amorous men—must be added to that.”
― Janet Benton, Lilli de Jong

“Bitterness is poison, yes, but I hold a flask of it to my lips and drink.”
― Janet Benton, Lilli de Jong

“Why had I failed, when all my aims were good?”
― Janet Benton, Lilli de Jong

“When I gardened at home, I often considered how the growth of plants resembles the gradual growth of the spirit. And seeing life make its way from seed to plant does bring one a glorious hope. All through the plant’s movement toward maturity, it is beautiful: adorable in its seedling state, full of promise as it sends its stalks up and out, then gorgeously fulfilled as it offers its yearly profit. Yet this no longer”
― Janet Benton, Lilli de Jong