Sisterhood Quotes

There is a special place in hell for women who don't help other women." (Keynote speech at Celebrating Inspiration luncheon with the WNBA's All-Decade Team, 2006)

Maybe the truth is, there's a little bit of loser in all of us. Being happy isn't having everything in your life be perfect. Maybe it's about stringing together all the little things.

Parents were the only ones obligated to love you; from the rest of the world you had to earn it.

Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke . . . She will need her sisterhood.

I failed eating, failed drinking, failed not cutting myself into shreds. Failed friendship. Failed sisterhood and daughterhood. Failed mirrors and scales and phone calls. Good thing I'm stable.

Maybe, sometimes, it's easier to be mad at the people you trust because you know they'll always love you, no matter what.

When you feel someone else's pain and joy as powerfully as if it were your own, then you know you really loved them.

Sophia Mercer," Elodie intoned, "we have come to induct you into our sisterhood. Say the five words to begin the ritual." I blinked at her. "Are you freaking kidding me?" Anna gave an exasperated sigh. "No, the five words are 'I accept you offer, sisters.

Today is the tomorrow we worried about yesterday.

When she is happy, she can't stop talking, when she is sad she doesn't say a word.

some people fall in love over and over again while some people can only do it once.

Don't talk to me. I'm tired and grumpy and I'll probably make fun of you.

You couldn't erase the past. You couldn't even change it. But sometimes life offered you the opportunity to put it right.

Try, reach, want, and you may fall. But even if you do, you might be okay anyway. If you don't try, you save nothing, because you might as well be dead.

There are two kinds of people in this world. The kind who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don't.

You know what the secret is? It's so simple. We love one another. We're nice to one another. Do you know how rare that is? - Carmen

Live, laugh, love. When you can feel someone else's pain and joy as if it's your own, thats when you know you really love them - Tina Lowell

When you remembered to forget, you were remembering. It was when you forgot to forget that you forgot.

It’s life. You don’t figure it out. You just climb up on the beast and ride.

I was supposed to write a romantic comedy, but my characters broke up.

Time is what keeps things from happening all at once.

Sisters in battle, I am shield and blade to you. As I breathe, your enemies will know no sanctuary. While I live, your cause is mine.

Never hold resentments for the person who tells you what you need to hear; count them among your truest, most caring, and valuable friends.

Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not.

She thought she was independent and strong, but she got one small taste of love and she was hungrier than anyone. She was ravenous.

We are all equal in the fact that we are all different. We are all the same in the fact that we will never be the same. We are united by the reality that all colours and all cultures are distinct & individual. We are harmonious in the reality that we are all held to this earth by the same gravity. We don't share blood, but we share the air that keeps us alive. I will not blind myself and say that my black brother is not different from me. I will not blind myself and say that my brown sister is not different from me. But my black brother is he as much as I am me. But my brown sister is she as much as I am me.

She knew whose love she doubted. It wasn't her parents' and it wasn't her friends: It was her own.

Maybe you think you’ll be entitled to more happiness later by forgoing all of it now, but it doesn’t work that way. Happiness takes as much practice as unhappiness does. It’s by living that you live more. By waiting you wait more. Every waiting day makes your life a little less. Every lonely day makes you a little smaller. Every day you put off your life makes you less capable of living it.

I know my sister like I know my own mind, you will never find anyone as trusting or as kind.

Why does he have to be my boyfriend? Are you inferior if you don't have a boyfriend? Why does everybody have to be in love with somebody?

Because there’s one thing stronger than magic: sisterhood.

Friends are supposed to act like harbor boats—let you know if you’re off course. But it ain’t always possible…

I love you, I'll never stop.

Women are going to form a chain, a greater sisterhood than the world has ever known.

Wish for what you want, work for what you need. -Carmen's grandmother

You get older and you learn there is one sentence just four worlds long and if you can say it to yourself it offers more comfort than almost any other. It goes like this… Ready ” “Ready.” “At least I tried.

You just have to let people love you in the way they can

She was still waiting for him to come back to her, even though he wasn't going to. She was still holding out for something that wasn't going to happen. She was good at waiting. That seemed like a sad thing to be good at.

She used to cry roughly three times a year. Now she seemed to cry three times before breakfast. Could that be considered progress?

It’s more that I’m afraid of time. And not having enough of it. Time to figure out who I’m supposed to be… to find my place in the world before I have to leave it. I’m afraid of what I’ll miss.

Particularly beautiful people were like particularly funny-looking people, though. Once you know them you mostly forgot about it.

life is short but it is wide. this too shall pass.

She was sad about what happened to Kostos. And someplace under that, she was sad that people like Bee and Kostos, who had lost everything, were still open to love, and she, who'd lost nothing, was not.

We're connected, as women. It's like a spiderweb. If one part of that web vibrates, if there's trouble, we all know it, but most of the time we're just too scared, or selfish, or insecure to help. But if we don't help each other, who will?

Once upon a time, a sister made a vow she didn't know how to break, and it broke her instead. Once upon a time, a girl did the impossible, but she did it just a little too late.

Some women pray for their daughters to marry good husbands. I pray that my girls will find girlfriends half as loyal and true as the Ya-Yas.

She realized all at once the deeper thing that bothered her, the thing that made him not just irritating but intolerable: how he kept loving her blindly when she deserved it so little.

The bittersweet about truth is that nothing could be more hurtful, yet nothing could be more helpful.

As long as women are using class or race power to dominate other women, feminist sisterhood cannot be fully realized.

Maybe happiness didn't have to be about the big, sweeping circumstances, about having everything in your life in place. Maybe it was about stringing together a bunch of small pleasures. Wearing slippers and watching the Miss Universe contest. Eating a brownie with vanilla ice cream. Getting to level seven in Dragon Master and knowing there were twenty more levels to go. Maybe happiness was just a matter of the little upticks- the traffic signal that said "Walk" the second you go there- and downticks- the itch tag at the back of your collar- that happened to every person in the course of the day. Maybe everybody had the same allotted measure of happiness within each day. maybe it didn't matter if you were a world-famous heartthrob or a painful geek. Maybe it didn't matter if your friend was possibly dying. Maybe you just got through it. Maybe that was all you could ask for.

And listen to me love, when a woman risks her place, her very life to speak a truth the world despises? Believe her. Always.

What made you feel that stomach-churning agony for one person and not another? If Bridget were God, she would have made it against the law for you to feel that way about someone without them having to feel it for you right back.

A sister is a gift to the heart, a friend to the spirit, a golden thread to the meaning of life.

You told me once you forget you are a woman, and I understand it now – you think to be a woman is to be weak – you think ours is a sisterhood of suffering! Perhaps so, but doesn’t it take greater strength to walk a mile in pain than seven miles in none? You are a woman, and must begin to live like one. By which I mean: have courage.

What you leave behind is the people you loved. You leave yourself in them.

She'd cried over a broken heart before. She knew what that felt like, and it didn't feel like this. Her heart felt not so much broken as just ... empty. It felt like she was an outline empty in the middle. The outline cried senselessly for the absent middle. The past cried for the present that was nothing.

She had willed her heart to stay small and contained, but it wouldn’t be. Oh, well.

Different people were good at different things, Lena mused. Lena was good at writing thank-you notes, for instance, and Effie was good at being happy.

Maybe there is more truth in how you feel than in what actually happens.

Lena was an introvert. She knew she had trouble connecting with people. She always felt like her looks were fake bait, seeming to offer a bridge to people, which she couldn't easily cross.

Lena knew she had spent too much of her life in a state of passive dread, just waiting for something bad to happen. In a life like that, relief was as close as you got to happiness.

Smoke, drink and never think.

She used to say she could taste sleep and that it was as delicious as a BLT on fresh French bread.

Their friendship was only one aspect of their lives but it seemed to give meaning to all the others.

I have been to the edge and lived to tell the tale..

But who has time to write memoirs? I’m still living my memoirs.

What does my smile look like now? Vivi wondered. Can you reclaim that free-girl smile, or is it like virginity- once you loose it, that's it?

You know how some people, when they're together, they somehow make you feel more hopeful? Make you feel like the world is not the insane place it really is?

I want to lay up like that, to float unstructured, without ambition or anxiety. I want to inhabit my life like a porch.

Love didn't necessarily look the way you expected it to.

If you ever meet a guy and you fall in love with him, but because of some weird genetic mutation he doesn't seem to return the feeling?... Wear that dress.

She existed in her friends; there she was. All the parts of herself she'd forgotten. She knew herself best when she was with them.

We aren't in high school. We aren't really in our families and we aren't in our houses. Those are the places we grew up and the times we spent together, but they aren't us. If we think they are, then we're lost, because times end and places are lost. We aren't any place or any time . . . We are everywhere.

Tibby cried into her soup when it finally came. "I'm scared... ," she told it. The carrots and peas made no reply, but she felt better for having told them.

There is the truth of history, and there is the truth of what a person remembers.

She got tired of herself. She got tired of not being able to say what she wanted or do what she wanted or even want what she wanted.

The word friends doesn't seem to stretch big enough to describe how we feel about each other. We forget where one of us starts and the other one stops.

But all she wanted to do was lie in bed, eat Kraft macaroni and cheese, and hide from the alligators.

I try to believe," she said, "that God doesn't give you more than one little piece of the story at once. You know, the story of your life. Otherwise your heart would crack wider than you could handle. He only cracks it enough so you can still walk, like someone wearing a cast. But you've still got a crack running up your side, big enough for a sapling to grow out of. Only no one sees it. Nobody sees it. Everybody thinks you're one whole piece, and so they treat you maybe not so gentle as they could see that crack.

She wanted him to notice her so much.

Because I miss them. Because I need them. Because I love them.

At the beauty of what she had stumbled onto, at the fear that something terrible would happen because she was not vigilant enough. She cried at the fear of something so good that she would not be brave enough to bear it.

... a full moon shimmered over central Louisiana. This was no rinky-dink moon. This was a moon you had to curtsy to. A big, heavy, mysterious, beautiful, bossy moon. The kind you want to serve things to on a silver platter.

What they don't know is that I went over the edge years ago, and lived to tell the tale.

Ruins stood for what was lost, and yet there were beautiful-peaceful, historic, intellectual. Not tragic or regrettable. Lena tried to keep hers that way too, and she succeeded to some extent. Why not celebrate what you had rather than spend your time mourning its passing? There could be joy in things that ended.

Rule #1: The customer is always right. Rule #2: If the customer is wrong, please refer to rule #1. -Duncan Howe

…the love we most cherish will, of necessity, bring us pain. Because that love is like the setting of a body with broken bones. But I want to stage the setting. I want to direct all scenes.

Her body was a prison, her mind was a prison. Her memories were a prison. The people she loved. She couldn't get away from the hurt of them. She could leave Eric, walk out of her apartment, walk forever if she liked, but she couldn't escape what really hurt. Tonight even the sky felt like a prison.

She longed for porch friendship, for the sticky, hot sensation of familiar female legs thrown over hers in companionship. She pined for the girliness of it all, the unplanned, improvisational laziness. She wanted to soak the words 'time management' out of her lexicon. She wanted to hand over, to yield, to let herself float down the unchartered beautiful fertile musky swamp of life, where creativity and eroticism and deep intelligence dwell.

When Death Comes When death comes like the hungry bear in autumn; when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse to buy me, and snaps the purse shut; when death comes like the measle-pox when death comes like an iceberg between the shoulder blades, I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness? And therefore I look upon everything as a brotherhood and a sisterhood, and I look upon time as no more than an idea, and I consider eternity as another possibility, and I think of each life as a flower, as common as a field daisy, and as singular, and each name a comfortable music in the mouth, tending, as all music does, toward silence, and each body a lion of courage, and something precious to the earth. When it's over, I want to say all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. When it's over, I don't want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real. I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument. I don't want to end up simply having visited this world

you tell me i am not like most girls and learn to kiss me with your eyes closed something about the phrase - something about how i have to be unlike the women i call sisters in order to be wanted makes me want to spit your tongue out like i am supposed to be proud you picked me as if i should be relieved you think i am better than them

How sad it was, Carmen thought, that you acted awful when you were desperately sad and hurt and wanted to be loved. How tragic then, the way everyone avoided you and tiptoed around you when you really needed them. Carmen knew this vicious predicament as well as anyone in the world. How bitter it felt when you acted badly to everyone and ended up hating yourself the most.

Once upon a time there were two sisters. One of them was really, really strong, and one of them wasn't.' You looked at me. 'Your turn.' I rolled my eyes. 'The strong sister went outside into the rain and realized the reason she was strong was because she was made out of iron, but it was raining and she rusted. The end.' No, because the sister who wasn't strong went outside into the rain when it was raining, and hugged her really tight until the sun came out again.

Life is All About How you Handle Plan B Plan A is always my first choice. You know, the one where Everything works out to be Happily ever-after. But more often than not, I find myself dealing with The upside-down, inside-out version -- Where nothing goes as it should. It's at this point that the real Test of my character comes in.. Do I sink, or do I swim? Do I wallow in self pity and play the victim, Or simply shift gears And make the best of the situation? The choice is all mine... Life is all about how you handle Plan B.

A sister is not a friend. Who can explain the urge to take a relationship as primal and complex as a sibling and reduce it to something as replaceable, as banal as a friend? Yet this status is used again and again to connote the highest intimacy. True sisterhood is not the same as friendship. You don't choose each other and there is no furtive period of getting to know each other. You are a part of each other, right from the start. Look at an umbilical cord—tough, sinuous, unlovely, yet essential—and compare it to a friendship bracelet of brightly woven thread. That is the difference between a sister and a friend.

The person who hurt you--who raped you or killed your family--is also here. If you are still angry at that person, if you haven't been able to forgive, you are chained to him. Everyone could feel the emotional truth of that: When someone offends you and you haven't let go, every time you see him, you grow breathless or your heart skips a beat. If the trauma was really severe, you dream of revenge. Above you, is the Mountain of Peace and Prosperity where we all want to go. But when you try to climb that hill, the person you haven't forgiven weighs you down. It's a personal choice whether or not to let go. No one can tell you how long to mourn a death or rage over a rape. But you can't move forward until you break that chain.

I'm writing this down, because it is going to be hard for me to say it. Because this is probably our last time just us. See, I can write that down, but I don't think I can say it. I'm not doing this to say goodbye, though I know that has to be part of it. I'm doing it to thank you for all we have had and done and been for one another, to say I love you for making this life of mine what it is. Leaving you is the hardest thing I have to do. But the thing is, the best parts of me are in you, all three of you. You are who I am, and what I cherish in myself stays on in you.

It was her last breakfast with Bapi, her last morning in Greece. In her frenetic bliss that kept her up till dawn, she’d scripted a whole conversation in Greek for her and Bapi to have as their grand finale of the summer. Now she looked at him contentedly munching on his Rice Krispies, waiting for the right juncture for launchtime. He looked up at her briefly and smiled, and she realized something important. This was how they both liked it. Though most people felt bonded by conversation, Lena and Bapi were two of a kind who didn’t. They bonded by the routine of just eating cereal together. She promptly forgot her script and went back to her cereal. At one point, when she was down to just milk, Bapi reached over and put his hand on hers. ‘You’re my girl,’ he said. And Lena knew she was.

Dad, Please accept this money to fix the broken window. I’m sure it’s already fixed, considering Lydia’s house pride and her phobia about unconditioned air, but Dear Al, I can’t begin to explain my actions at Lydia’s – I mean yours and Lydia’s house. When I get to Charleston, I never imagined that you would have Dear Dad and Lydia, I apologize to both of you for my irrational behavior. I know it’s all my fault, but if you would have listened to ONE THING I had to say, I might not have Dear Dad’s new family, I hope you’ll all be very happy being blond together. May people speak only in inside voices for the rest of your lives. P.S. Lydia, you wedding dress makes your arms look fat.

Lena was suspicious of many things. But she had earned her suspicions about boys. Lena knew boys. They never looked beyond your looks. They pretended to be your friend to get you to trust them, and as soon as you trusted them, they went in for the grope. They pretended to want to work on a history project or volunteer on your blood drive committee to get your attention. But as soon as they got it through their skulls that you didn't want to go out with them, they suddenly weren't interested in time lines or dire blood shortages. Worst of all, on occasion they even went out with one of your best friends to get close to you, and broke that same best friend's heart when the truth came out. Lean preferred plain guys to cute ones, but even the plain ones disappointed her.