Patricia Meyer Spacks Quotes

United States, Writer
November 17, 1929

Patricia Meyer Spacks born 17 November 1929, San Francisco, California. As an academic writer and professor of English, Patricia Meyer Spacks writes literary criticism on 18th-century authors, the structure of the novel, and women writers; nonfiction that elucidates aspects of mind (or age) such as the imagination, gossip, boredom, and adolescence; and essays on pedagogy and the literary profession.

Also known as Professor

Gossip, even when it avoids the sexual, bears around it a faint flavor of the erotic.

Patricia Meyer Spacks
- Gossip
- Bears
- Flavor
The vanity of men, a constant insult to women, is also the ground for the implicit feminine claim of superior sensitivity and morality.

Patricia Meyer Spacks
- Men
- Women
- Vanity

The pleasure of reading biography, like that of reading letters, derives from the universal hunger to penetrate other lives.

Patricia Meyer Spacks
- Reading
- Pleasure
- Lives
Poring over fragments of other people's lives, peering into their bedrooms when they don't know we're there, we thrill to the glamour and the power of secret knowledge, partly detoxified but also heightened by being shared.

Patricia Meyer Spacks
- People
- Power
- Knowledge
Theories by women about women have only recently begun to appear in print. Theories by men about women are abundant.

Patricia Meyer Spacks
- Men
- Women
- Print
Like the adolescent, the artist is a dreamer and a revolutionary; like the adolescent, he often finds his accomplishment inadequate to his imaginings. But his dream, setting him apart, helps him to escape the burden of the real.

Patricia Meyer Spacks
- Real
- Dream
- Artist
The clich? that women, more consistently than men, turn inward for sustenance seems to mean, in practice, that women have richly defined the ways in which imagination creates possibility; possibility that society denies.

Patricia Meyer Spacks
- Men
- Women
- Society
Women serve as guardians of culture, upholders of society.

Patricia Meyer Spacks
- Women
- Society
- Culture