Ellador: What we call God is a Pervading Power, you know, an Indwelling Spirit, something inside of us that we want more of. Is your God a Big Man? Van: Why—yes, to most of us, I think. Of course we call it an Indwelling Spirit just as you do, but we insist…
Book 1915
Herland quotes
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About the book
Three American explorers go looking for a rumored country inhabited only by women, each sure he knows what he will find. What they discover is a peaceful, inventive and highly organized society that has lived without men for two thousand years. As they learn its ways, its people start asking awkward questions about the world the men come from.
6 quotes
Jeff: It is a convention… We assume that motherhood is a sufficient burden—that men should carry all the others. Celis: What a beautiful feeling! Alima: Does it work?
When we say men, man, manly, manhood, and all the other masculine derivatives, we have in the background of our minds a huge vague crowded picture of the world and all its activities. … And when we say women, we think female—the sex. But to these women, in…
These women, whose essential distinction of motherhood was the dominant note of their whole culture, were strikingly deficient in what we call “femininity.” This led me very promptly to the conviction that those “feminine charms” we are so fond of are not…
Why should we? They are all gone. They knew less than we do. If we are not beyond them, we are unworthy of them—and unworthy of the children who must go beyond us.
Terry: Ours is the best country in the world as to poverty… We do not have the wretched paupers and beggars of the older countries, I assure you. Why, European visitors tell us, we don’t know what poverty is. Zava: Neither do we… Won’t you tell us?