Finding Margaret Fuller Quotes

“As women, we should feel comfortable expressing ourselves, even disagreeing with others. We are entitled, each one of us, to our own thoughts and opinions. We need not fear that it is unseemly to disagree or hold to a conviction of our own. We must learn to be comfortable in debate and discourse. We must shake off these shackles that are placed upon us by those who say a woman’s only job is to make a man feel respected and affirmed. What of our own self-respect? What of the affirmation of our own thoughts and characters?”
― Allison Pataki, Finding Margaret Fuller

“As I cry out, Giovanni does the same, and I know that from this moment on I will forever be a fallen woman. Why, then, do I feel as though I’m soaring?”
― Allison Pataki, Finding Margaret Fuller

“If a thinking woman is offensive, then yes, I might offend a number of people. And I’ll be happy to do so.”
― Allison Pataki, Finding Margaret Fuller

“I have neither a dead wife’s fortune, like Waldo, nor Bronson’s utter disregard for the practicalities of life.”
― Allison Pataki, Finding Margaret Fuller

“ ‘Therefore am I still / A lover of the meadows and the woods / And mountains; and of all that we behold / From this green earth; of all the mighty world.’ ”
― Allison Pataki, Finding Margaret Fuller

“I would like to meet the man who is meant to be my husband. I would like to find the man who sees and knows my soul. It’s not that I wish to marry simply to be married; it’s that I wish to find a love so overpowering that there’s no choice but to join myself with this other person. Until that happens, I can’t see any reason to become a wife.”
― Allison Pataki, Finding Margaret Fuller

“from”
― Allison Pataki, Finding Margaret Fuller

“effulgence,”
― Allison Pataki, Finding Margaret Fuller

“Welcome”
― Allison Pataki, Finding Margaret Fuller

“…if thirteen weeks in a parlour can bring this much improvement to the confidence of women, how formidable would we ladies be if we were entitled, as men are, to four whole years in the nation’s universities? If only the men would let us in. Why, we’d be unstoppable. But perhaps that’s precisely why we aren’t allowed.”
― Allison Pataki, Finding Margaret Fuller

“our work in The Dial is to be “an antidote to all narrowness.” One of my pieces, which I’ve titled “A Dialogue,” expresses some of my own deep feelings. My yearning to enjoy life, to someday find love, but the pressing need to always be working, creating, providing for myself. It’s written from a safe distance, however, modeled as a conversation between a flower and the sun overhead. A more critical essay of mine takes up the topic of literary critics themselves, and the relationship that a writer or poet has to the tradition of literary criticism.”
― Allison Pataki, Finding Margaret Fuller

“He’s a young man in a sea captain’s hat; he can’t be older than I am, and he is greeting us with a broad, sun-chapped smile.”
― Allison Pataki, Finding Margaret Fuller

“We roll into Salem in the early afternoon. It’s a bustling town that smells of sea brine and milled timber.”
― Allison Pataki, Finding Margaret Fuller

“Bronson Alcott is dressed entirely in black, his clothes simple and, from the looks of it, in need of a good laundering.”
― Allison Pataki, Finding Margaret Fuller

“Perhaps you mean that my outward appearance is not so offensive as to render me entirely unmarriageable.”
― Allison Pataki, Finding Margaret Fuller

“Margaret will be there, Louisa realizes, when the women gather. She will be there when they begin the convention in silence to honor and mourn their founding mother. She will be there as they grow in number, as they debate and they work and they march. When they dare to proclaim that women deserve the rights, same as any man, to vote, to work, to learn, and to lead. Margaret will be there in the mind of every girl who grows bold and asks questions of herself and her world. To become, as Margaret would have said, and as Louisa hears the voice in her mind, she can’t help but smile. Margaret, whose body is lost but whose words will never die. The butterfly who has shown her, and countless others, that it is not only her right, but her sacred obligation, to fly.”
― Allison Pataki, Finding Margaret Fuller

“How, then, can we ever claim that to be passive and meek is the right path for a woman?”
― Allison Pataki, Finding Margaret Fuller

“Women need not be only sentimental, governed solely by feelings. Told that they are the docile and tender helpers of the men in their spheres. Women can think. Why, a woman has a right to judge. Each one of you in here has a right to consult not only your heart, but your mind, as well.”
― Allison Pataki, Finding Margaret Fuller

“that this is a man who just wants others to think. He’s not against learning, not at all. He’s against blind adherence. Ralph Waldo Emerson wants others to study, but also to search for meaning. To read for more than recitation and rote memorization. To think, to dream, and to act.”
― Allison Pataki, Finding Margaret Fuller

“We must think as well as study, and talk as well as recite,”
― Allison Pataki, Finding Margaret Fuller

“What a life this butterfly has made. A life of stories. Stories of travel, of transformation, of sowing and growing. And even though the ocean unfurls before me, even though the shore remains distant still, I know that, in a most meaningful way, I have already arrived. I tuck the butterfly pin deeper into my hair, and the thought flies to my mind: I have grown, I’ve transformed. I have become.”
― Allison Pataki, Finding Margaret Fuller

“This year they plan to hold an inaugural meeting of what they are calling the National Woman’s Rights Convention, the first-ever gathering in America of this kind—and they wish for me to serve as their president. “You are the founding Mother of our movement, Miss Fuller, and thus it is our ardent wish to confide in you the leadership of this assembly.”
― Allison Pataki, Finding Margaret Fuller

“next? Kneeling in the pews of the Duomo, alone at night,”
― Allison Pataki, Finding Margaret Fuller

“Mazzini says, seeming to see my thoughts. Of course he sees my thoughts—he knows people. That’s why he’s the leader Rome needs, even after decades of absence.”
― Allison Pataki, Finding Margaret Fuller

“To advocate for warm relations between the nation of my birth and the nation of my heart, the land that has produced my adored husband, the land in which my son will grow, a free man.”
― Allison Pataki, Finding Margaret Fuller

“And I will be a woman who is free to be not only a writer and a wife, but also a mother.”
― Allison Pataki, Finding Margaret Fuller

“guided by three principles. The first is that I wish to tell the truth. The second, I wish to write what the public needs to know. And finally, I wish to write stories that will help us to bring about a better day for all.”
― Allison Pataki, Finding Margaret Fuller

“The book that takes shape in my hands is in part a travel memoir, in part my journalistic accounting of the places I visited and the people I met. But it’s also much more. It’s a work of female adventure, written by a woman who went on her own into parts unknown. It’s a philosophical pondering of what we carry with us from our own natures, and what we take on from the society around us and the conditioning of our circumstances.”
― Allison Pataki, Finding Margaret Fuller

“There is a problem that occurs in planting, Thoreau has told me. When a plant is placed in a pot of soil and its roots burrow deep, eventually the pot becomes too small and the plant becomes thwarted. The plant needs new earth, and more of it, in order to grow and flourish.”
― Allison Pataki, Finding Margaret Fuller

“Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.”
― Allison Pataki, Finding Margaret Fuller