Top 10 Quotes & Sayings by Rosellen Brown

One of the marvels of personality is its resistance to prediction. One man's paralyzing trauma is another man's invitation to take control of his life; one woman's grounds for insanity is another woman's ground to a dramatic shaping of self.

It’s a job. It’s not a hobby. You don’t write the way you build a model airplane. You have to sit down and work, to schedule your time and stick to it. Even if it’s just for an hour or so each day, you have to get a babysitter and make the time. If you’re going to make writing succeed you have to approach it as a job.

Many of us write because we are readers and have grown up in a long tradition, and we want to be able to add to that extraordinary flow of interpretations of the world.

They are the kind of people who are embarrassed by money, a dead middle-class giveaway. Poor people are not embarrassed by money and are contemptuous of those who are.

When it comes time to do your own life, you either perpetuate your childhood or you stand on it and finally kick it out from under.

If Henry James were still with us, he'd not only approve of Paris, He Said, he could have written it himself, though without his serpentine syntax. It's a delicious treat, studded with wise and beautifully observed detail, that places side by side those perpetually fascinating antagonists, the eager, casual American and the meticulous, pleasure-driven French. Christine Sneed knows everyone's intimate secrets and her book is lively, amusing, and, ultimately, kind to pretty much all of them.

All schoolchildren are hostages to red tape and fiscal insufficiency.

The pity of living only once is that there is no way, ever, to be sure which sorrows are inevitable.

Anne Pitkin's poems have such lyrical sweep, such a sensitive eye for the natural world as it touches the human, that reading Winter Arguments is like seeing a landscape or, better, a richly realized painting of a landscape dotted with figures. But that would leave out their music, which would be a loss. This is a wise and graceful book by a well-traveled woman who knows how to confront deep feeling and frame it to make it all the more intense.

[On book promotion:] The reward for writing well appears to be not to be able to do it for a long time.