Remarks by Elizabeth Stoddard | V2Melody Quotations

“I wish that I could know your inner life to have your contrasted experiences.”

Seeking intimacy through the exchange of private experience · Letter to Margaret Sweat, November 1851

“I know I am far wiser in soul, though weaker in body, and understand human life—its terrible shortness, the awful mystery as no youth, happily, ever can.”

Claiming the compensating wisdom that comes with physical decline · Letter to Julia C. Dorr, 8 July 1896

“As I have not many good qualities of disposition I feel sure of this, which as many a member of my family have told me, makes me often hateful. My father said once he never saw any human being with such a talent for the disagreeable.”

Acknowledging a sharp, uncompromising temperament with wry self-knowledge · Letter to Elizabeth Akers Allen, December 1873

“Perhaps the terrific the sublime and desolate might symbolize what I feel—Your fair smooth letters by my jagged incoherent scrawls!”

Contrasting her own turbulent expression with a friend’s polished calm · Letter to Margaret Sweat, 4 June 1852

“I am full of pain. It seems only to leave my hands and arms free. I feel fastened in this chair.”

Describing bodily suffering that confines yet leaves the writing hand free · Letter to Margaret Sweat, c. 1853

“I have stronger passionate powers than most women, therefore I run riot in those matters.”

Owning an intensity of feeling that exceeds conventional female restraint · Letter to Margaret Sweat, c. 1853

“The fire no longer burns as of yore on the altar, the passion has died out, and embers have to be blowed up with the bellows.”

Reflecting on the fading intensity of creative energy with age · Letter to Julia C. Dorr, 26 October 1892

“Nothing here to go with me into the depths of myself. The sterile landscape, the wintry wind these gray wailing waters benumb me, or rouse me to deep melancholy.”

Conveying isolation and the failure of surroundings to answer inner needs · Letter to Margaret Sweat, December 1852

“Genius ‘cometh from afar,’ and its ‘trailing clouds of glory’ are not for us to grasp while we are in the prison-house of the commonplace.”

Expressing the unbridgeable distance between ordinary life and true genius · Essay, A Literary Whim (Appleton’s Journal, 1871)

“Recognition is the thing; for praise I labor as well as money.”

Valuing public acknowledgement above mere financial reward · Essay, A Literary Whim (Appleton’s Journal, 1871)

“I pore over my Ms every day, struggle, fight, despair and hope over it.”

Describing the intense, daily labour of composition · Letter to Edmund Clarence Stedman, c. 1861

“You feel as I do about age—I am not old at the core, I wont have it, why do people think so, if they must as I do, see so—I hate my looks absolutely.”

Defying outward ageing while acknowledging the wisdom that comes with years · Letter to Julia C. Dorr, 8 July 1896

“Intellect has no sex.”

Asserting the gender-neutrality of intellectual capacity against patronising praise · Column as Lady Correspondent, Daily Alta California, 30 March 1856

“In reading such books I am reminded of what I have thought my mission was: a crusade against Duty—not the duty that is revealed to every man and woman of us by the circumstances of daily life, but that which is cut and fashioned for us by minds totally ignorant of our idiosyncrasies and necessities.”

Rejecting imposed moral conventions in favour of individual necessity · Column as Lady Correspondent, Daily Alta California, 1856

“Is goodness, then, incompatible with the enjoyment of the senses?”

Challenging the sentimental ideal of female self-denial and passionlessness · Column as Lady Correspondent, Daily Alta California, c. 1856

“Alice, after I am gone take good care of Dick, and, for Heaven’s sake, go out and buy him a couple of new shirts.”

A practical, affectionate instruction that undercuts any solemn deathbed pose · Reported last words, 1902

“I must own that I am coarse by nature. At times I have an overwhelming perception of the back side of truth.”

Acknowledging a preference for unvarnished reality over refined surfaces · Letter to James Russell Lowell, 5 May 1860

“I am never going to do any more housework if I can help it, I am an AUTHOR.”

Claiming professional identity against the demands of domestic labour · Letter to Richard Henry Stoddard, 1861

“There are times when the eternal repose of nature—her unsympathizing fierceness mock and imitate the soul, thus it is now. I wish for my likeness in turbulent souls.”

Expressing a preference for intense, restless affinities over nature’s indifferent calm · Letter to Margaret Sweat, 4 June 1852

“With me, if you start in a friendship, you will have to begin and go on—with entire, perhaps disagreeable truth, candor, sincerity. There is not one particle of ‘nonsense’ about me. I cannot stand blarney, roundaboutedness.”

Insisting on uncompromising honesty as the foundation of true friendship · Letter to Elizabeth Akers Allen, December 1873

“For my part, I believe I shall die an impenetrable secret, even if I should be subjected to the visits of newspaper reporters, desiring to describe my warts and my wens, and to take down my table and my literary talk.”

Asserting the irreducible complexity of the self against public curiosity and partial representations · Essay, A Literary Whim (Appleton’s Journal, 1871)

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