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Rosellen Brown Quotes

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.

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.

Rosellen Brown
Life, Childhood, Your Children
Rosellen Brown (1998). “Civil Wars”, Delta

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

Rosellen Brown
Sorrow, Way, Pity

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.

Rosellen Brown
Writing, Long, Want

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.

Rosellen Brown
Men, Self, Insanity

All schoolchildren are hostages to red tape and fiscal insufficiency.

Rosellen Brown
Education, Children, Tape
Rosellen Brown (1998). “Civil Wars”, Delta

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.

Rosellen Brown
Wise, Book, Reading

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

Rosellen Brown
Book, Writing, Long

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.

Rosellen Brown
Jobs, Writing, Airplane

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.

Rosellen Brown
Money, Class, People
Rosellen Brown (1998). “Civil Wars”, Delta

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.

Rosellen Brown
Wise, Book, Paris

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