Charlotte Perkins Gilman

"The latest and highest form of Feminism has great promise for the world. It postulates womanhood free, strong, clean and conscious of its power and duty."

"For many years I suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia — and beyond. During about the third year of this trouble I went, in devout faith and some faint stir of hope, to a noted specialist in nervous diseases, the best known in the country. This wise man put me to bed and applied the rest cure, to which a still-good physique responded so promptly that he concluded there was nothing much the matter with me, and sent me home with solemn advice to "live as domestic a life as far as possible," to "have but two hours intellectual life a day," and "never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again" as long as I lived. This was in 1887. I went home and obeyed those directions for some three months, and came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over. Then, using the remnants of intelligence that remained, and helped by a wise friend, I cast the noted specialists advice to the winds and went to work again — work, the normal life of every human being; work, in which is joy and growth and service, without which one is a pauper and a parasite — ultimately recovering some measure of power. Being naturally moved to rejoicing by this narrow escape, I wrote The Yellow Wallpaper, with its embellishments and additions, to carry out the ideal (I never had hallucinations or objections to my mural decorations) and sent a copy to the physician who so nearly drove me mad. He never acknowledged it."

"Many years later I was told that the great specialist had admitted to friends of his that he had altered his treatment of neurasthenia since reading The Yellow Wallpaper. It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked."

"This wallpaper has a kind of sub-pattern in a different shade, a particularly irritating one, for you can only see it in certain lights, and not clearly then."

"There are things in that wallpaper that nobody knows about but me, or ever will."

"The color is repellent, almost revolting: a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight."

"Im getting really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper. Perhaps because of the wallpaper."

"You think you have mastered it [the wallpaper pattern], but just as you get well under way in following, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you."

"It becomes bars! The outside pattern, I mean, and the women behind it is as plain as can be. I didnt realize for a long time what the thing was that showed behind, that dim sub-pattern, but now I am quite sure it is a woman. By daylight she is subdued, quiet. I fancy it is the pattern that keeps her so still."

"A million million worlds that move in peace; A million mighty laws that never cease; And one small ant-heap, hidden by small weeds, Rich with eggs, slaves and store of millet-seeds. They sleep beneath the sod And trust in God."

"There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver."

"Where young boys plan for what they will achieve and attain, young girls plan for whom they will achieve and attain."