From Jone Johnson Lewis,
Your Guide to Women's History.
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Part of the Transcendentalist circle in Concord, Massachusetts, Louisa May Alcott was guided as a writer by her father, Bronson Alcott, as well as by her teacher, Henry David Thoreau, and friends Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker. Louisa May Alcott began writing for a living to help support her family. She also briefly served as a nurse during the Civil War.

Selected Louisa May Alcott Quotations

• Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead.

• Love is the only thing that we can carry with us when we go, and it makes the end so easy.

• Help one another is part of the religion of our sisterhood.

• Many argue; not many converse.

• Resolve to take fate by the throat and shake a living out of her.

• I believe that it is as much a right and duty for women to do something with their lives as for men and we are not going to be satisfied with such frivolous parts as you give us.

• "Stay" is a charming word in a friend's vocabulary.

• I asked for bread, and I got a stone in the shape of a pedestal.

• Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents.

• It takes people a long time to learn the difference between talent and genius, especially ambitious young men and women.

• I put in my list all the busy, useful independent spinsters I know, for liberty is a better husband than love to many of us.

• Housekeeping ain't no joke!

• I am angry nearly every day of my life, but I have learned not to show it; and I still try to hope not to feel it, though it may take me another forty years to do it.

• I like to help women help themselves, as that is, in my opinion, the best way to settle the woman question. Whatever we can do and do well we have a right to, and I don't think any one will deny us.

• People don't have fortunes left them -- nowadays; men have to work, and women to marry for money. It's a dreadfully unjust world....

• Now we are expected to be as wise as men who have had generations of all the help there is, and we scarcely anything.

• Now I am beginning to live a little and feel less like a sick oyster at low tide.

• I'm not afraid of storms, for I'm learning how to sail my ship.