Charlotte Perkins Gilman

"To-day there is hardly a woman of intelligence in all America, to say nothing of other countries, who is not definitely and actively concerned in some social interest, who does not recognize some duty…"

"You think you have mastered it , 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 didn't realize for a long time what the thing was that showed behind, that dim sub-pattern, but now I am …"

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

"The stony-minded orthodox were right in fearing the first movement of new knowledge and free thought. It has gone on, and will go on, irresistibly, until some day we shall have no respect for an alleg…"

"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."

"Only as we live, think, feel, and work outside the home, do we become humanly developed, civilized, socialized."

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