Every woman needs secrets,' her mother said with a smile then, her eyes meeting Sally's in the rearview mirror. 'Remember that when you're old like me, pumpkin, because the world has a way of making a woman's life everyone else's business--you have to dig out a little place that's only yours.

J. Courtney Sullivan

Categorized in : Mother Eye Mirrors

Women leave their marriages when they can't take any more. Men leave when they find someone new.

J. Courtney Sullivan

marriage inspirational men

She had once said that she believed the women's liberation movement of the sixties and seventies was actually a ploy by men to get women to do more.

J. Courtney Sullivan

liberation said men

Reading poetry gives me a sense of calm, well-being, and love for humanity - the same stuff more flexible women get from yoga.

J. Courtney Sullivan

yoga reading giving

Fiction will always be my greatest love, with poetry close behind.

J. Courtney Sullivan

greatest-love behinds fiction

In high school, during marathon phone conversations, cheap pizza dinners and long suburban car rides, I began to fall for boys because of who they actually were, or at least who I thought they might become.

J. Courtney Sullivan

boys school fall

I read as much poetry as time allows and circumstance dictates: No heartache can pass without a little Dorothy Parker, no thunderstorm without W. H. Auden, no sleepless night without W. B. Yeats.

J. Courtney Sullivan

heartache littles night

This was how the modern working girl behaved. She didn’t hide her femininity or apologize for it, as they did in the old days. She flaunted it and, having been given more than any woman before her, demanded even more than that.

J. Courtney Sullivan

apologizing modern girl

We don't always do the things our parents want us to do, but it is their mistake if they can't find a way to love us anyway.

J. Courtney Sullivan

parent want mistake

I love the smell of a mans skin.

J. Courtney Sullivan

smell skins

I admire the linear and decisive way a certain kind of man thinks, to my curlicue boundless overthinking.

J. Courtney Sullivan

men way thinking

I like dressing up for dates and dissecting a dinner conversation with a new guy to determine if he might be The One.

J. Courtney Sullivan

dressing-up dinner guy

For whatever reason, various outlets and individuals are committed to making the world think that young girls don't talk or care about feminism anymore, that it's totally over. But it's not.

J. Courtney Sullivan

feminism girl thinking

Timing was everything when it came to being a woman—the moment you entered the world could seal your fate.

J. Courtney Sullivan

timing fate world

A kid thinks her mother is just that -- hers. A mother is also a woman, an independent being, who doesn't want to be reminded by anyone, child or otherwise, of her tree-trunk thighs. The world made women's private lives a public affair to people who knew them and even people who didn't.

J. Courtney Sullivan

mother kids children

She thought about him all the time - not so much about Doug the individual, but rather about the nature of love, and the shock of learning how quickly it could disappear.

J. Courtney Sullivan

disappear individual shock

The girls said she was too cynical about love, but how could you not be? On the surface, relations between men and women were all soft kisses and white gowns and hand-holding. But underneath they were a scary, complicated, ugly mess, just waiting to rise to the surface.

J. Courtney Sullivan

kissing girl men

If things had been different, she would be in Carolyn's place right now. She didn't want that sort of existence, but there was something so attractive about the security of feeling like you had stopped moving toward your life, and actually arrived.

J. Courtney Sullivan

different feelings moving

When she was pregnant with Teddy, she feared that she’d give birth to a child who disliked reading. It would be like giving birth to a foreign species.

J. Courtney Sullivan

reading giving children

She remembered how she had felt cleaning out her father's clothes, wanting at once to hold on to every dirty handkerchief and musty page of sheet much, and yet wishing she were anywhere else on earth, free of it all.

J. Courtney Sullivan

clothes father dirty

When I was in fourth grade, a novelist came to talk to my English class. She told us that being an author meant sitting at the kitchen table in pajamas, drinking tea with the dogs at your feet.

J. Courtney Sullivan

dog drinking feet