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Rita Mae Brown Quotes

Rita Mae Brown

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When I got [my] library card, that was when my life began.
- Rita Mae Brown
Collection: Reading
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If you can't raise consciousness, at least raise hell.
- Rita Mae Brown
Collection: Consciousness
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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
Collection: Writing
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He unzipped his pants and his brains fell out.
- Rita Mae Brown
Collection: Brain
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About all you can do in life is be who you are.
- Rita Mae Brown
Collection: Being Yourself
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Class is much more than Marx's definition of relationship to the means of production. Class involved your behavior, your basic assumptions, how you are taught to behave, what you expect from yourself and from others, your concept of a future, how you understand problems and solve them, how you think, feel, act.
- Rita Mae Brown
Collection: Mean
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Mother believed in enjoying herself. Aunt Mimi believed in enjoying herself, then feeling guilty about it.
- Rita Mae Brown
Collection: Mother
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I believe all literature started as gossip.
- Rita Mae Brown
Collection: Believe
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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
Collection: People
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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
Collection: Humor
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The human animal varies from class to class, culture to culture. In one way we are consistent: We are irrational.
- Rita Mae Brown
Collection: Animal
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I'm beginning to feel that the real endangered species on planet earth are not the whales and the elephants but those of us who can laugh at the world and ourselves. ... I fear the dry turn of the American mind, this focus on the literal, as much as I fear our capacity for self-destruction. We've become hagridden by facts, obsessed with product instead of process. Where's the energetic wit, the looney outlook, the frivolity, the lightness of comforting laughter? It has become fashionable to know and unfashionable to feel, and you can't really laugh if you can't feel.
- Rita Mae Brown
Collection: Laughter
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Don't hope more than you're willing to work.
- Rita Mae Brown
Collection: Willing
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Unfortunately, Susan didn't remember what Jane Fulton once said, 'Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.
- Rita Mae Brown
Collection: Insanity
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In America the word revolutionary is used to sell pantyhose.
- Rita Mae Brown
Collection: America
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Whoever heard of a neurotic frog? Where do humans get off thinking they're the pinnacle of evolution?
- Rita Mae Brown
Collection: Thinking
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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
Collection: Love
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Life matters more than any painting, novel, film, or great big diamond.
- Rita Mae Brown
Collection: Life
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When God made man she was practicing.
- Rita Mae Brown
Collection: Men
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If Michaelangelo were a heterosexual, the Sistine Chapel would have been painted basic white and with a roller.
- Rita Mae Brown
Collection: White
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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
Collection: Responsibility
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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
Collection: Character
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I love literature, the English language and storytelling. I also have thirty horses and seventy foxhounds to feed.
- Rita Mae Brown
Collection: Horse
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I always feel bad for those who, in a sense, cede their authority to others, let others make major decisions about their life and actually believe them. When you're tiny, you have no choice. But as soon as your mind starts working, you pretty well figure it out. And you realize you're a hostage until you're old enough to leave. But as long as you have that goal - I will get out of here - you'll be OK.
- Rita Mae Brown
Collection: Believe
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Familiarity breeds consent.
- Rita Mae Brown
Collection: Consent
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It's a big jump from smart to motherwit.
- Rita Mae Brown
Collection: Smart
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No government has the right to tell its citizens when or whom to love
- Rita Mae Brown
Collection: Gay
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Content without style is propaganda or adolescence. Style without content is decadence.
- Rita Mae Brown
Collection: Style
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whoever said progress was a positive thing has never been to Florida or California.
- Rita Mae Brown
Collection: Florida
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Sport strips away personality, letting the white bone of character shine through. Sport gives players an opportunity to know and test themselves. The great difference between sport and art is that sport, like a sonnet, forces beauty within its own system. Art, on the other hand, cyclically destroys boundaries and breaks free.
- Rita Mae Brown
Collection: Sports
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many lesbians were so far in the closet they were in danger of being mistaken for garment bags.
- Rita Mae Brown
Collection: Bags
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Never let anyone or any social attitude stand in the way of your productivity.
- Rita Mae Brown
Collection: Attitude
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I think the reason I choose the comic approach so often is because it's harder, therefore affording me the opportunity to show off. Also, a comic vision is my natural world view, but I've grown up in spite of myself and I can pass the comic twist if it detracts from what the characters need. Yes, the life of a saint is hard.
- Rita Mae Brown
Collection: Character
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English is weak in describing emotional states or intensities of interpersonal relationships.
- Rita Mae Brown
Collection: Emotional
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Gossip is irresponsible communication. Irresponsible because it is at the expense of another person who is not there to defend herself. Irresponsible because it is not constructive: it helps no one, least of all the person being gossiped about.
- Rita Mae Brown
Collection: Communication
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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
Collection: Thinking
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Computer dating? It's terrific if you're a computer!
- Rita Mae Brown
Collection: Dating
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There are more differences between poor people than between middle-class people.
- Rita Mae Brown
Collection: Class
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Never let money control you. I'd rather see someone spend every red cent and relish his/her life than scrimp, obsess, and pinch the pennies. There's something repugnant about a person who centers his life around money.
- Rita Mae Brown
Collection: Red
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Never measure literature by accounting statistics. A quarter of working authors earn less than $1,000.
- Rita Mae Brown
Collection: Literature
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Never underestimate the power of self-absorption, including your parents' self-absorption.
- Rita Mae Brown
Collection: Self
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I don't expect executives to be creative but I do expect them to have courage.
- Rita Mae Brown
Collection: Creative
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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
Collection: Tennis
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Plot involves fragmentary reality, and it might involve composite reality. Fragmentary reality is the view of the individual. Composite reality is the community or state view. Fragmentary reality is always set against composite reality. Virginia Woolf did this by creating fragmentary monologues and for a while this was all the rage in literature. She was a genius. In the hands of the merely talented it came off like gibberish.
- Rita Mae Brown
Collection: Reality
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Would it upset men if they found out we weren't different? Are we? Aren't we? Damned if I know.
- Rita Mae Brown
Collection: Men
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Monogamy is contrary to nature but necessary for the greater social good.
- Rita Mae Brown
Collection: Monogamy
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Armies are dependent on youthful male ignorance.
- Rita Mae Brown
Collection: Ignorance
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The only people are those who don't love anybody.
- Rita Mae Brown
Collection: Gay
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the reason for revolution is so the good things in life circulate.
- Rita Mae Brown
Collection: Things In Life

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