With a new year comes the inevitable wave of resolutions, goal-setting and self-improvement. While it can be great to take some time to focus on your self-development, it’s important to do so in a way that makes you feel empowered rather than a failure. 

What better way to do this than by turning to the best women’s voices in literature for some perspective? Whether reading more books is on your resolution list or not, we’ve condensed some of the best bookish wisdom for you! Here are 20 quotes from woman-identified authors to help you make the best start to 2020:

‘Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. Don’t let the bastards grind you down.’

~ Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

‘It is a common saying that women are delicate creatures, flowers, eggs, anything that might be crushed in a moment’s carelessness. If I had ever believed it, I no longer did.’

~ Madeline Miller, Circe

‘When you’re different, sometimes you don’t see the millions of people who accept you for what you are. All you notice is the person who doesn’t.’

~ Jodi Picoult, Change of Heart

‘Try to be a rainbow in someone’s cloud.’ 

~ Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter

‘There is no greater threat to the critics and cynics and fearmongers than those of us who are willing to fall because we have learned how to rise.’

~ Brené Brown, Rising Strong

‘And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt…let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.’

~ Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

‘Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.’

~ Marthe Troly-Curtin, Phrynette Married

‘When you make loving others the story of your life, there’s never a final chapter, because the legacy continues. You lend your light to one person, and he or she shines it on another and another and another.’

~ Oprah Winfrey, What I Know For Sure

“Things usually work out in the end.”

“What if they don’t?”

“That just means you haven’t come to the end yet.”

~ Jeanette Walls, The Glass Castle

‘You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day.’

~ M.L. Stedman, The Light Between Oceans

‘It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.’

~ J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

‘I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.’

~ Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

‘We can experience nothing but the present moment, live in no other second of time, and to understand this is as close as we can get to eternal life.’

~ P.D. James, The Children of Men

‘Tomorrow is always fresh, with no mistakes in it yet.’

~ L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

‘You are your best thing’

~ Toni Morrison, Beloved

‘The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.’

~ Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

‘It is better to be alone than poorly accompanied.’

~ Catherine Gray, The Unexpected Joy of Being Single

‘None of us really changes over time. We only become more fully what we are.’

~ Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat

‘Maybe that is all any bravery is, a stronger fear of not being brave’

~ Audre Lorde, Zami

‘Well-behaved women seldom make history’

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History

Written by Florence Edwards