c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
You really love me?" she asked wistfully."The devil!" he exclaimed, looking over his shoulder. "Did I forget to say it? The thing I came to say?
— Mary Balogh, The Temporary Wife
He is a young man with a future of power and opportunity and we are young women destined to be either wives and mothers at the very best, or spinster parasites at the worst.
— Philippa Gregory, The Boleyn Inheritance
Was once lost always lost really true of chastity?
— Thomas Hardy
Darla shook her head, a small smirk on her lips. “You’re such a mom,” she told Katherine.Katherine stared at her, puzzled. “You’re a mom, too,” she said softly.“No, I gave birth. That doesn’t make me a mom. Not like you.”A look passed between the two women like none they had ever shared before. For a split second, Katherine felt a slight connection. “Well, you rest. I’ll check on you later.” She turned and left the room, a funny, unexplainable feeling inside her.
— Deanna Lynn Sletten, Widow, Virgin, Whore
Men, and pigs, are hard on women who sacrifice their virtue, especially for love." Mattis Tannhouser
— Tim Willocks, The Religion
A little white woman, . . . [a] tiny little white woman I could fit in my pocket.’ . . . ‘And I don’t know why I’m surprised. You don’t even notice it – you never notice. You think it’s normal. Everywhere we go, I’m alone in this… this sea of white. I barely know any black folk any more, Howie. My whole life is white. I don’t see any black folk unless they be cleaning under my feet in the fucking café in your fucking college. Or pushing a fucking hospital bed through a corridor . . . ‘I gave up my life for you. I don’t even know who I am any more.’ . . . ‘Could you have found anybody less like me if you’d scoured the earth? . . . My leg weighs more than that woman. What have you made me look like in front of everybody in this town? You married a big black bitch and you run off with a fucking leprechaun?
— Zadie Smith, On Beauty
She looked into Kirsten's eyes and wondered how it is that a soldier fights and a savior suffers, but a woman, in lying down, rules everything.
— Rebecca Coleman, The Kingdom of Childhood
Regardless of the faps in years, place and circumstance, women across the ages have had to negotiate the borders of their identities; in this, we find a common ground.
— Stephanie Staal, Reading Women: How the Great Books of Feminism Changed My Life
Well, cast your mind back to the books he wrote. What is the one theme that keeps recurring from book to book? It is that the woman doesn’t fall in love with the man. The man may or may not love the woman; but the woman never loves the man. What do you think that theme reflects? My guess, my highly informed guess, is that it reflects his life experience. Women didn’t fall for him—not women in their right senses. They inspected him, maybe they even tried him our. Then they moved on.
— J.M. Coetzee, Summertime
Is there a more pitiable spectacle than that of a wife contending with others for that charm in her husband's sight which no philters and no prayers can renew when once it has fled forever?Women are so unwise. Love is like a bird's song beautiful and eloquent when heard in forest freedom, harsh and worthless in repetition when sung from behind prison bars.You cannot secure love by vigilance, by environment, by captivity. What use is it to keep the person of a man beside you if his soul be truant from you?
— Ouida, Wanda, Countess von Szalras.
Cocoa-buttered girls were stretched out on the public beach in apparently random alignments, but maybe if a weather satellite zoomed in on one of those bodies and then zoomed back out, the photos would show the curving beach itself was another woman, a fractal image made up of the particulate sunbathers. All the beaches pressed together might form female landmasses, female continents, female planets and galaxies. No wonder men felt tense.
— Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage
Amy's lecture did Laurie good, though, of course, he did not own it till long afterward. Men seldom do, for when women are the advisers, the lords of creation don't take the advice till they have persuaded themselves that it is just what they intended to do. Then they act upon it, and, if it succeeds, they give the weaker vessel half the credit of it. If it fails, they generously give her the whole.
— Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
A woman who spends her time worrying about pregnancy is a virtual cripple, she'll never go very far.
— Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night
I looked silently at her lips. All women are lips, all lips. Some are pink and firmly round: a ring, a tender guardrail from the whole world. And then there are these ones: a second ago they weren’t here, and just now — like a knife-slit — they are here, still dripping sweet blood.
— Yevgeny Zamyatin, We
But we disposable women have to be realistic in this life, you know. Else we get itchy and discontented and start contemplating the kitchen knife and wondering whether it wouldn't look nicer between someone's shoulder-blades.
— Jude Morgan, The Taste of Sorrow
I harbor ill feelings toward a society, and a clergy, that allows marriage partners to split over the smallest incompatibility, where divorce comes in a multitude of flavors, like Baskin Robbins ice cream, where men and women can blame one another and everything except themselves for matrimony's mess. They look for externals over which they have no control and, fingering them, take no responsibility.
— Robert Dykstra, She Never Said Good-Bye
In Shinear, a woman [is] safe anywhere, any time-except from Trollocs and Myrddraal, of course-and any man [will] die to see it so.
— Robert Jordan, The Fires of Heaven
I don‟t hate men,” she said, giving him a quick glance before returning her attention to keeping her horse in line. “I think you‟re a bit overrated, butthat‟s not hating . Men have ruled women and the world by virtue of their gender for several hundred years.”“Cream always rises to the top,” he replied.“This isn‟t about cream. It‟s about ruling through physical and mental intimidation. We all have strengths and weaknesses. The difference is,most women are willing to discuss both, while most men only want to talk about their strengths.
— Susan Mallery, The Sheik's Arranged Marriage
Our society on a whole is trained to see young women. There are proportionally far more of them on magazine covers, on TV, and in films than int the actual population. As a result, we have a citizenry taught to see the young and ignore the not-so-young. It isn’t conscious; it’s Pavlovian. (13)
— Victoria Moran, Younger by the Day: 365 Ways to Rejuvenate Your Body and Revitalize Your Spirit
[A]s though mindful of the wife of Lot, who looked back from behind him, thou deliveredst me first to the sacred garments and monastic profession before thou gavest thyself to God. And for that in this one thing thou shouldst have had little trust in me I vehemently grieved and was ashamed. For I (God [knows]) would without hesitation precede or follow thee to the Vulcanian fires according to thy word. For not with me was my heart, but with thee. But now, more than ever, if it be not with thee, it is nowhere. For without thee it cannot anywhere exist.
— Héloïse d'Argenteuil, The Letters of Abélard and Héloïse
What did we talk about?I don't remember. We talked so hard and sat so still that I got cramps in my knee. We had too many cups of tea and then didn't want to leave the table to go to the bathroom because we didn't want to stop talking. You will think we talked of revolution but we didn't. Nor did we talk of our own souls. Nor of sewing. Nor of babies. Nor of departmental intrigue. It was political if by politics you mean the laboratory talk that characters in bad movies are perpetually trying to convey (unsuccessfully) when they Wrinkle Their Wee Brows and say (valiantly--dutifully--after all, they didn't write it) "But, Doctor, doesn't that violate Finagle's Constant?" I staggered to the bathroom, released floods of tea, and returned to the kitchen to talk. It was professional talk. It left my grey-faced and with such concentration that I began to develop a headache. We talked about Mary Ann Evans' loss of faith, about Emily Brontë's isolation, about Charlotte Brontë's blinding cloud, about the split in Virginia Woolf's head and the split in her economic condition. We talked about Lady Murasaki, who wrote in a form that no respectable man would touch, Hroswit, a little name whose plays "may perhaps amuse myself," Miss Austen, who had no more expression in society than a firescreen or a poker. They did not all write letters, write memoirs, or go on the stage. Sappho--only an ambiguous, somewhat disagreeable name. Corinna? The teacher of Pindar. Olive Schriener, growing up on the veldt, wrote on book, married happily, and ever wrote another. Kate Chopin wrote a scandalous book and never wrote another. (Jean has written nothing.). There was M-ry Sh-ll-y who wrote you know what and Ch-rl-tt- P-rk-ns G-lm-an, who wrote one superb horror study and lots of sludge (was it sludge?) and Ph-ll-s Wh--tl-y who was black and wrote eighteenth century odes (but it was the eighteenth century) and Mrs. -nn R-dcl-ff- S-thw-rth and Mrs. G--rg- Sh-ld-n and (Miss?) G--rg-tt- H-y-r and B-rb-r- C-rtl-nd and the legion of those, who writing, write not, like the dead Miss B--l-y of the poem who was seduced into bad practices (fudging her endings) and hanged herself in her garter. The sun was going down. I was blind and stiff. It's at this point that the computer (which has run amok and eaten Los Angeles) is defeated by some scientifically transcendent version of pulling the plug; the furniture stood around unknowing (though we had just pulled out the plug) and Lady, who got restless when people talked at suck length because she couldn't understand it, stuck her head out from under the couch, looking for things to herd. We had talked for six hours, from one in the afternoon until seven; I had at that moment an impression of our act of creation so strong, so sharp, so extraordinarily vivid, that I could not believe all our talking hadn't led to something more tangible--mightn't you expect at least a little blue pyramid sitting in the middle of the floor?
— Joanna Russ, On Strike Against God
She had been struck by the figure of a woman's back in a mirror. She stopped and looked. The dress the figure wore was the color called ashes of roses, and Ada stood, held in place by a sharp stitch of envy or th woman's dress and the fine shape of her back and her thick dark hair and the sense of assurance she seemed to evidence in her very posture.Then Ada took a step forward, and the other woman did too, and Ada realized that it was herself she was admiring, the mirror having caught the reflection of an opposite mirror on the wall behind her. The light of the lamps and the tint of the mirrors had conspired to shift colors, bleaching mauve to rose. She climbed the steps to her room and prepared for bed, but she slept poorly that night, for the music went on until dawn. As she lay awake she thought how odd it had felt to win her own endorsement.
— Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain
If Beauty is excuse enough for Being, it sure takes Plainness then to feel the real necessity for—Doing.
— Eleanor Hallowell Abbott, Little Eve Edgarton
‎Women fancy admiration means more than it does.
— Mary Lydon Simonsen, The Perfect Bride for Mr. Darcy
Still, I wonder if more women artists, musicians and writers aren't household names because we don't have enough faith in our own pursuits to give ourselves the time we desperately need to be transformed by a creative vision. Maybe that glass ceiling isn't really made of glass at all, but of sticky little fingers, dishes piled in the sink, and mortgages that demand two incomes.
— Holly Robinson
A Woman who is generous with her money is to be praised; not so, if she is generous with her person
— Marcus Fabius Quintilianus
It’s genius simmering, perhaps. I’ll let it simmer, and see what comes of it,” he said, with a secret suspicion all the while that it wasn’t genius, but something far more common. Whatever it was, it simmered to some purpose, for he grew more and more discontented with his desultory life, began to long for some real and earnest work to go at, soul and body, and finally came to the wise conclusion that everyone who loved music was not a composer.
— Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
Things were different back then. Today if a woman was asked to do the things we did back then, she would revolt, declare that she wasn’t anyone’s slave, wouldn’t be put upon in that fashion. But you have to remember that this was before automatic washers and dishwashers, before blenders and electric knives. If the carpet was going to get cleaned, someone, usually a woman, would have to take a broom to it, or would have to haul it on her shoulders to the yard and beat the dirt out of it. If the wet clothes were going to get dry, someone had to hang them in the yard, take them down from the yard, heat the iron on the fire, press them, and finally fold or hang them. Food was chopped by hand, fires were stoked by hand, water was carried by hand, anything roasted, toasted, broiled, dried, beaten, pressed, packed, or pickled, was done so by hand. Our version of a laborsaving device was called a spouse. If a man had a woman by his side, he didn’t have to clean and cook for himself. If a woman had a man by her side, she didn’t have to go out, earn a living, then come home and wrestle the house to the ground in the evening.
— Susan Lynn Peterson, Clare
Boaz is not diminished, marginalized, or feminized in the slightest by being outnumbered and influenced by Ruth and Naomi. As a matter of fact, he only grows stronger himself through his collaborations with them.
— Carolyn Custis James, The Gospel of Ruth: Loving God Enough to Break the Rules
If you go to the craft market you will see them everywhere. They represent the mix of cultures and races here in the Dominican Republic, that are the result of centuries of international commerce, colonization, conquest, and the slave trade. The facelessness means that there is no 'typical' Dominican woman.
— Sandra Rodriguez Barron, Stay with Me: A Novel
Flowers for me are just things to give to a beatiful woman.
— Blake Lewis
An overwhelming curiosity makes me ask myself what their lives might be like. I want to know what they do, where they're from, their names, what they're thinking about at that moment, what they regret, what they hope for, their past loves, their current dreams ... and if they happen to be women (especially the young ones) then the urge becomes intense.How quickly would you want to see her naked, admit it, and naked through to her heart. How you try to learn where she comes from, where she's going, why she's here and not elsewhere!While letting your eyes wander all over her, you imagine love affairs for her, you ascribe her deep feelings. You think of the bedroom she must have, and a thousand things besides ... right down to the battered slippers into which she must slip her feet when she gets out of bed.
— Gustave Flaubert
Like so many women for whom money has always been provided without their understanding how, she was prepared to be a thorough and irresponsible plunger.
— Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons
Incidentally, I have also learned a bit about the importance of avoiding feminine embarrassment ('Daddy,' wrote Sophia when she enrolled at the New School where I teach, 'people will ask "why is old Christopher Hitchens kissing that girl?"') and shall now cease and desist.
— Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
Such a number of nights,' said the girl, with a touch of woman's tenderness, which communicated something like sweetness of tone, even to her voice; 'such a number of nights as I've been patient with you, nursing and caring for you, as if you had been a child: and this the first that I've seen you like yourself; you wouldn't have served me as you did just now, if you'd thought of that, would you? Come, come; say you wouldn't.
— Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
The United States finds itself with forces of reaction. Do I have to demonstrate this? The Taliban's annihilation of music and culture? The enslavement of women?
— Christopher Hitchens, A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq
But struggling with these better feelings was pride,--the vice of the lowest and most debased creatures no less than of the high and self-assured. The miserable companion of thieves and ruffians, the fallen outcast of low haunts, the associate of the scourings of the jails and hulks, living within the shadow of the gallows itself,--even this degraded being felt too proud to betray a feeble gleam of the womanly feeling which she thought a weakness, but which alone conneced her with that humanity, of which her wasting life had obliterated so many, many traces when a very child.
— Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
Indeed, woman can be a machine run wild, or a machine can be a better, more subjugated, and efficient woman.
— Françoise Meltzer
All women are many women! I'm afraid you've never known very much about women.
— Gabrielle Zevin, Margarettown
In particular, husbands and wives who do poorly at nonverbal communication tend to be dissatisfied with their marriages. Moreover, when such problems occur, it's usually the husband's fault .In the first ingenious study of this sort, Patricia Noller (1980) found thathusbands in unhappy marriages sent more confusing messages and made more decoding errors than happy husbands did. There were no such differences among the wives, so the poorer communication Noller observed in the distressed marriages appeared to be the husbands' fault. Men in troubled marriages were misinterpreting communications from their wives that were clearly legible to total strangers.Even worse, such husbands were completely clueless about their mistakes; they assumed that they were doing a fine job communicating with their wives, and were confident that they understood their wives and that their wives understood them. The men were doing a poor job communicating and didn't know it, and that's why they seemed to be at fault.
— Rowland S. Miller, Intimate Relationships
The photograph, then, becomes a representation of a representation of a disease that represents. In other words, in order to produce the most perfect images of hysteria, the hysteric – a woman whose illness simulates the symptoms of other diseases – was transformed, through hypnosis, into an artificial hysteric who perfectly simulated the simulations of hysteria. The medical photograph becomes a copy of a copy of a copy, a representation so far removed from the original that all duplicitous traits, were easily erased, leaving the deranged and chaotic nature of the original far behind. The photograph succeeded in turning the hysteric into a wholly artificial being, literally a flat, framed, unmoving image.
— Asti Hustvedt, The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-de-Siècle France
Born to love, cursed to feel.
— Samantha King, Born to Love, Cursed to Feel
Although the many virtues that courtesans possessed were employed to defy circumstances, the role they played depended on the same circumstances over which they triumphed- conditions which to, fortunately for modern women, no longer exist.
— Susan Griffin
You’re a fool,” Quinhelm accused. “Any man who would allow himself to be bewitched by a woman needs a good dunking in a cold barrel of water.” (Quinhelm, the wizard, from BRIGGEN)
— Ann B. Keller
women were beyond me.they saw somethingdepraved.there was one waitressa little older thanI, she rather smiled,lingered when shebrought mycoffee.that was plenty for me, that wasenough.- Young in New Orleans
— Charles Bukowski, The Last Night of the Earth Poems
Once upon a time, when women were birds, there was the simple understanding that to sing at dawn and to sing at dusk was to heal the world through joy. The birds still remember what we have forgotten, that the world is meant to be celebrated.
— Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice
I don't know. It's been terribly hard for me. How do I know you won't do it again?''Nobody is ever quite sure of what they will do. You aren't sure what you might do.
— Charles Bukowski, Women
It's my choice to be beautiful. It's my choice to be ugly. And it's my choice to decided what those words actually mean.
— Virginia Petrucci
According to Tobias, women hang around longer because they’re less capable of indignation and better at being humiliated, for what is old age but one long string of indignities? What person of integrity would put up with it?
— Margaret Atwood, Stone Mattress: Nine Tales
Everything that highly educated men can do to obscure a simple truth, to make a woman doubt her feelings, to make her own thoughts a muddle, they do to her. They use their learning as a hurdle to herd her one way and then the other and then finally trap her in contradictions of which she can make no sense.
— Philippa Gregory, The Lady of the Rivers
When women agree with me I always do the other thing
— Charles Bukowski, Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook: Uncollected Stories and Essays, 1944-1990
When there was a choice between love of a woman and hate of a man, her mind could cherish only one emotion, for her love might be a subject for laughter, but no one ever had ever mocked her hatred.
— Graham Greene, Orient Express
My mother? My own mother told my lady governess that if the baby and I were in danger then they should save the baby.
— Philippa Gregory, The Red Queen
There is only two types of women in the world:1. beautiful2. very beautiful
— Gauri Shankar Gupta
Chirren is the most dangerous creatures on the earth, with the exception of young girls between the ages of fifteen and forty-two.
— Walter Mosley, Devil in a Blue Dress
Mother, before God," I say, my voice shaking with tears, "I swear that I have to believe that there is more for me in life than being wife to one man after another, and hoping not to die in childbirth!
— Philippa Gregory, The Red Queen
Be a wife of whom he can make no complaint, Margaret. That is the best advice I can give to you. You will be his wife; that is to be his servant, his possession. He will be your master. You had better please him.
— Philippa Gregory, The Red Queen
A woman should be like water, able to flow over and around anything.
— Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem
Subtle cues in your behavior will set the frame that you are a selective, high-value guy. She will pick up on this and gain interest. She expects that a guy with potential will be selective. Here are some standards worth considering: An attractive woman who takes care of herself A woman who is sociable and has friends A woman who has a real thirst for life A woman who has a great energy and a positive outlook A woman who is not a flake
— Erik Von Markovik, The Mystery Method: How to Get Beautiful Women Into Bed
Although previous studies had suggested that friendship--male and female--could be a powerful antidote to stress, more recent research indicates that broken promises, dashed expectations, and other side effects of friendship gone wrong can actually raise the level of stress in our lives, often to disastrous effect.
— Susan Shapiro Barash, Tripping the Prom Queen: The Truth About Women and Rivalry
It's a fine, warm day,” Henry replied. “I thought a spot of fishing?”“Just the thing!” said Felix. “Will you join us, Lucy?” Lucy felt Kitty and Sophia staring at her. Well-bred ladies, evidently, did not fish. “Oh, no! I assure you, Mr. Crowley-Cumberbatch, I have given up those hoyden pursuits of my youth.” She turned to Toby. “I haven't been fishing in ages. I can't remember the last time.”“Really, Luce?” Toby sounded incredulous. “Henry—is it true?”Henry sawed away at a slice of ham. “If you count six days as ages, then I suppose it's true. But if you can't remember six days back, Lucy, and you've forgotten Felix's Christian name, I'm concerned for you. Perhaps you've been spending too much time with Aunt Matilda.
— Tessa Dare, Goddess of the Hunt
...Mary, fresh with feminist appropriations, has the potential to undergird women’s reformations.
— Sue Monk Kidd
Like almost all girls I don't know the date of my birth: my parents did not trouble to record the day and the time. I only know the year and the season, and I only know the season because my mother had a great desire for asparagus when she was carrying me and swears that she ate it too green and her bellyache brought on my birth.
— Philippa Gregory, The Lady of the Rivers
It is not perhaps a question of truthfulness; it is rather a natural incapacity to think for herself, to take cognizance of herself in her own brain, and not in the eyes and in the lips of others; even when the ingenuously write into little secret diaries, women think of the unknown god reading--perhaps--over their shoulders. With a similar nature, a woman, to be placed in the first ranks of men, would require even higher genius than that of the highest man; that is why, if the conspicuous works of men themselves, the finest works of women are always inferior to the worth of the women who produced them.
— Rémy de Gourmont, The Book of Masks
I'm just an innocent racist who likes to flirt with young adult women And I meet emotionally retarded misfits who are kinky about infants' feet, scheming psychopaths, suicidal emos, brain dead skinheads and mestizos posing as white supremacists.
— Greg Deane
Never would I have a man saying what or who were best for me, and that were all there were to it.
— A.C. Gaughen, Scarlet
Men have committed the greatest crime against women. Insidiously, violently, they have led them to hate women, to be their own enemies, to mobilize their immense strength against themselves, to be the executants of their virile needs.
— Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa
I can hear the roar of women's silence
— Thomas Sankara
You have been having our rights so long, that you think, like a slave-holder, that you own us. I know that it is hard for one who has held the reins for so long to give up; it cuts like a knife. It will feel all the better when it closes up again.
— Sojourner Truth
There are three things, and three things only, that can lift the pain of mortality and ease the ravages of life,” said Spider. “These things are wine, women and song"..."Curry’s nice too" pointed out Fat Charlie
— Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys
Women love the last blow as well as the last word, and when they fight for love they are pitiless as a wounded buffalo.
— H. Rider Haggard, Allan Quatermain
I have always derived indescribable pleasure from leading a decent woman to the edge of sin and leaving her there to live between the temptation and the fear of that sin.
— Edmond de Goncourt
[H]ow was I supposed to get excited about the oppression of females if they couldn't be trusted to stay upright during the final minutes of a desperately close promotion campaign?
— Nick Hornby, Fever Pitch
Men owe us what they imagine they will give us. We must forgive them this debt.
— Simone Weil
Well you know boys, a nuclear reactor is a lot like women. You just have to read the manual and press the right button.
— Matt Groening
[Picasso] loved...women for the sexual, carnivorous impulses they aroused in him. Mixing blood and sperm, he exalted women in his paintings, imposed his violence on them, and sentenced them to death once he felt their mystery had been discharged and the sexual power they instilled in him had dulled... Women were his prey. He was the Minotaur. These were bloody, indecent bullfights from which he always emerged the dazzling victor.
— Marina Picasso
Women have traditionally took secondary roles to men. I want to be the boss not the secretary.
— Bianca Frazier
I came to regard my body in a new light. For the first time I apprehended the little mounds on my chest as teats for the suckling of young, and their physical resemblance to udders on cows or the swinging distensions on lactating hounds was suddenly unavoidable. Funny how even women forget what breasts are for.The cleft between my legs transformed as well. It lost a certain outrageousness, an obscenity, or achieved an obscenity of a different sort. The flaps seemed to open not to a narrow, snug dead end, but to something yawning. The passageway itself became a route to somewhere else, a real place, and not merely to a darkness in my mind. The twist of flesh in front took on a devious aspect, its inclusion overtly ulterior, a tempter, a sweetener for doing the species' heavy lifting, like the lollipops I once got at the dentist.
— Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin
Women are females and men are males. According to gynaecologists, women menstruate every month or so, while men, being male, do not menstruate or suffer during the monthly period. A women, being female, is naturally subject to monthly bleeding. When a women does not menstruate, she is pregnant. If she is pregnant, she becomes, due to pregnancy, less active for about a year.
— Muammar Gaddafi, The Green Book
During my three seasons at Mount Rainier I learned a lot about mountain climbing and rescues, about politics and camaraderie in the mountains, and about what being a woman climber means. Now I know in all certainty when to bring my toothbrush and when to leave it at home, and, all things considered, that kind of confidence is hard to come by. The greatest skill I ever had, though, was the one I started with: being able to suffer for long periods of time and not die. In exchange, I got to see some amazing things.
— Bree Loewen, Pickets and Dead Men: Seasons on Rainier
I feel conscious that I should find no reason to regret abandoning so pleasant a manner of life and such valuable privileges to become a wife of anyone. Beside, marriag is not in my opinion, so exceedingly desirable as some persons think. A woman's career is over when she marries. Once married, all is fixed - certainty takes the place of all her pleasant dreams. For her, no more hopes, no more doubts, no more suspense, no more possibility of anything better. She knows what she is and will be until death. For my part, I like to give free scope to my thoughts.
— Klementyna Tanska Hoffmanowa, The Journal of Countess Francoise Krasinska
Told often enough that they are the source of sin, women may well begin feeling guilty as they accept the necessity for penance. Taught effectively enough that they are irrelevant to the important processes of society, women begin to feel they are living invisibly.
— Sandra M. Gilbert Susan Gubar
I'm a huge supporter of women. What I'm not a supporter of liberalism. Feminism is what I oppose. Feminism has led women astray. I love the women's movement, especially walking behind it.
— Rush Limbaugh
Women are no longer victims. They have become leaders. They are at the forefront of the demonstrations. We will share a role in all aspects of life, side by side with men.
— توكل كرمان
Women should not feel obliged towards any men for eternity. They earned this privilege by gathering berries, digging roots, picking wild rice, and chewing the skin to make it soft for 999 thousand years, while the men were having fun in the open chasing deer and fighting among themselves.
— Vinko Vrbanic
Oleanders have attractive flowers, they decorate nature beautifully, but they are poisonous; and a woman is an oleander; it’s all right to watch her once in a while, but then you must walk away without touching her; if you ever try to taste her even once, you’ll head for hell!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Her [Mrs Croft's] manners were open, easy, and decided, like one who had no distrust of herself, and no doubts of what to do; without any approach to coarseness, however, or any want of good humour. Anne gave her credit, indeed, for feelings of great consideration towards herself, in all that related to Kellynch; and it pleased her.
— Jane Austen, Persuasion
You see only the cat’s paw, Signor Tartini, whereas I see the sharp claws hidden in that paw!.. Women are like fire; they warm you from afar, and when you enter into them they burn you to ashes!
— Mehmet Murat ildan, Award Winning Plays -2
We need grandchildren here,” Pete’s mother said to mewhen we visited. “You don’t get married just to eat and fart.
— Abigal Muchecheti, Married to a Devil
The rules for raising children had gone out with her parents generation of daughters who had lived as Lucy had, in patient silence, acting by standards which had lasted generations, waiting to grow up to make their decisions, following the patterns of their own lives.
— Susan Richards Shreve, You Are the Love of My Life
Men can have an obvious display of heroics or strength or accomplishment, but it is the unsung women throughout all ages of humankind who have endured with superlative strength, beauty and love, often with secret suffering, that deserve absolute respect and acknowlegement. They are the true heroes of humanity. They are the champions who have birthed and nurtured us, who have held us together at the most integral level, when men seemed intent only on tearing apart the fabric of life for irrelevant ideals.
— Red Haircrow
LADY BRACKNELLThirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years. Lady Dumbleton is an instance in point. To my own knowledge she has been thirty-five ever since she arrived at the age of forty, which was many years ago now.
— Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
Speaking very generally, I find that women are spiritually, emotionally, and often physically stronger than men.
— Gary Oldman
Why is it a girl has to be so silly to catch a husband?”“Ah specs it’s kase gempmums doan know whut dey wants. Dey jes’ knows whut dey thinks dey wants. An’ givin’ dem whut dey thinksdey wants saves a pile of mizry an’ bein’ a ole maid. An’ dey thinks dey wants mousy lil gals wid bird’s tastes an’ no sense atall. It doan make a gempmum feel lak mahyin’ a lady ef he suspicions she got mo’ sense dan he has.
— Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
People forget that old women were young once, but d'you think we old women forget? In my heart, I'm still thirty.
— Megan Chance, The Spiritualist
She looked like a character from a video game. One of those improbably busty, impossibly well-armed superchicks who could do acrobatics and hit the kill zone even while firing guns from both hands during a cartwheel. "You look fucking ridiculous," she told herself.
— Jonathan Maberry, Dead of Night
Ah, when love dies, women lose two and a half inches in height.
— M.C. Beaton, Love, Lies and Liquor
On a planet where for thousands of years, even today, a woman's worth has been judged exclusively by the productivity of her womb, what the hell is the point of a barren woman?
— Elissa Stein and Susan Kim
Where I was raised a woman's word was law. I ain't quite outgrowed that yet.
— Zane Grey, Riders of the Purple Sage
They plan and they fix and they do, and then some kitchen-dwelling fiend slips a scorchy, soggy, tasteless mess into their pots and pans…So when the bread didn’t rise, and the fish wasn’t quite done at the bone, and the rice was scorched, he slapped Janie until she had a ringing sound in her ears and told her about her brains before he stalked on back to the store.
— Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Scripture is wrought with a clear message of Jesus’ utter disregard for appearance and social rank. In Judean society, it was a major taboo for a man to even speak to a woman who was not his own wife or daughter; yet Jesus interacted regularly with foreign women, He taught women, ignored ritual impurity laws, and readily accepted women into His inner circle of followers.
— Matt Litton, The Mockingbird Parables: Transforming Lives through the Power of Story
In fact, the mothers of all her girl friends impressed on their daughters the necessity of being helpless, clinging, doe-eyed creatures. Really, it took alot of sense to cultivate and hold such a pose.
— Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
The gravel road widened into a large turnaround where three similar looking and designed brothels sat waiting for customers. They were called Sheila's Front Porch, Tawny's High Five Ranch and Miss Delilah's House of Holies."Nice," Rachel said as we surveyed the scene. "why are these places always named after women -- as if women actually own them?""You got me. I guess Mister Dave's House of Holies wouldn't go over so well with the guys."Rachel smiled."You're right. I guess it's a shrewd move. Name a place of female degradation and slavery after a female and it doesn't sound so bad, does it? It's packaging.
— Michael Connelly, The Narrows
Natasha, in her lilac silk dress trimmed with black lace walked, as women can walk, with the more repose and stateliness the greater the pain and shame in her soul.
— Leo Tolstoy
In terms of language, there were no separate words for female genitalia for thousands of years. That was mostly because women were considered pretty much the same as men, only of course flimsier, more poorly designed, and incapable of writing in the snow.
— Elissa Stein and Susan Kim
Where some one else's welfare is concerned, a young girl becomes as ingenious as a thief. Guileless where she herself is in question, and full of foresight for me,--she is like a heavenly angel forgiving the strange incomprehensible sins of earth.
— Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot
Billy Pilgrim had a theory about diaries.Women were more likely than men to think that their lives had sufficient meaning to require recording on a daily basis. It was not for the most part a God-is-leading-me-on-a-wondrous-journey kind of meaning, but more an I've-gotta-be-me-but-nobody-cares sentimentalism that passed for meaning, and they usually stopped keeping a diary by the time they hit thirty, because by then they didn't want to ponder the meaning of life anymore because it scared the crap out of them.
— Dean Koontz, The Darkest Evening of the Year
On problems finding female ancestors,of any background, remember "I cannot put gas in my car without a note from my husband. The Car, the house, and everything else I think that I own is in his name. When I die, I cannot decide who will receive my personal effects. If he dies first I may be allowed to stay in my own home, or may be given a certain number of days to vacate the premises. Any real estate I inherit from my husband is not mine to sell of devise in a will. All the money I earn belongs to my husband. I cannot operate or engage in business in my own name. If my ancestor is enslaved, I cannot marry, may not be allowed to raise my own children, join a church, travel freely, own property or testify against those who harm me.
— christina kassabian schaefer
He didn't want to puff her up. Puffed-up women are one of the original sources of trouble in the world. If anyone knew that, it was he. He counted it as one of his duties to mankind to keep women from puffing themselves up, though it had been a most monumental duty in his own marriage. A job requiring a hero. It was one of those things that God, being male, questioned you about before you were let into heaven, and he was proud to say that he hadn't neglected it.
— Judith Merkle Riley, In Pursuit of the Green Lion
A fine young man and a fine young felly he always was, except that in the old days, before you began coming in here, Mr. Witherwax, he maybe had too much money and spent too much of it on girls. Take them alone, either one; the money without the women, or a good girl without the money that can be a help to a young felly, and he's fixed for life. But put them together; and often as not, the young felly goes on the booze. ("The Better Mousetrap")
— Fletcher Pratt, Tales From Gavagan's Bar
She thought too that women didn't know what to do with themselves these days which could turn them into harridans. Hardly a female friend she knew wasn't miserable. Either mind dumb with children, or in the married condition married to an earnest toiler, or lonely unmarried in their successful career.
— J.P. Donleavy, The Lady Who Liked Clean Restrooms: The Chronicle Of One Of The Strangest Stories Ever To Be Rumoured About Around New York
That’s what she was, Joanna felt suddenly. That’s what they all were, all the Stepford wives: actresses in commercials, pleased with detergents and floor wax, with cleansers, shampoos, and deodorants. Pretty actresses, big in the bosom but small in the talent, playing housewives unconvincingly, too nicey-nice to be real.
— Ira Levin, The Stepford Wives
I got nervous at bulls and eagles,Trying to figure what shape Zeus might take f
— Ovid, The Erotic Poems
Menfolks listens to somebody because of what he says. Women don't. They don't care what he said. They listens because of what he is.
— William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun
He said, 'They're only whores,' as though their very availability rendered them worthless.
— Ellen Kushner, The Privilege of the Sword
Sometimes in the summer evenings they walked up the hill to watch the afterglow clinging to the tops of the western mountains and to feel the breeze drawn into the valley by the rising day-heated air. Usually they stood silently for a while and breathed in peacefulness. Since both were shy they never talked about themselves. Neither knew about the other at all.
— John Steinbeck, East of Eden
Thus far, our responsibility for how we treat chickens and allow them to be treated in our culture is dismissed with blistering rhetoric designed to silence objection: “How the hell can you compare the feelings of a hen with those of a human being?” One answer is, by looking at her. It does not take special insight or credentials to see that a hen confined in a battery cage is suffering, or to imagine what her feelings must be compared with those of a hen ranging outside in the grass and sunlight. We are told that we humans are capable of knowing just about anything that we want to know—except, ironically, what it feels like to be one of our victims. We are told we are being “emotional” if we care about a chicken and grieve over a chicken’s plight. However, it is not “emotion” that is really under attack, but the vicarious emotions of pity, sympathy, compassion, sorrow, and indignity on behalf of the victim, a fellow creature—emotions that undermine business as usual. By contrast, such “manly” emotions as patriotism, pride, conquest, and mastery are encouraged.
— Karen Davis, Prisoned Chickens Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry
Men didn't understand that you couldn't let yourself be consumed with passion when there were so many people needing your attention, when there was so much work to do. Men didn't understand that there was nothing big enough to exempt you from your obligations, which began as soon as the sun rose over the paper company and ended only after you'd finished the day's chores and fell exhausted into sleep against the background noise of I-94.
— Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage
I never trusted the women i was involved with to tell the truth,because the truth never changes,but as i knew so well,people did.I knew it wasn't everyone,some women did have staying power,but it was impossible to tell which ones they were.Women should have come labelled-it would have made life so much simpler.
— Mike Gayle, My Legendary Girlfriend
I was at a party in 1989 and Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie were sitting on a sofa wondering where the next generation of great British writers would come from. As we talked, it became clear they had never read a word by me.
— Jeanette Winterson
She gathered herself together. No one could describe the scorn of her expression or the contemptuous hatred she put into her answer. "You men! You filthy dirty pigs! You're all the same, all of you. Pigs! Pigs!
— W. Somerset Maugham, The Trembling Of A Leaf
I probably have more female friends than any man I've ever met. What I like about them is that almost always they're generally mentally tougher, and they're better listeners, and they're more capable of surviving things. And most of the women that I like have a haunted quality - they're sort of like women who live in a haunted house all by themselves.
— John Malkovich
At the same time we see the phenomenon of successful women adopting the standards of men with a vengeance. Will women's march to power ascendancy, won against all odds, mean that they too will choose to flaunt their preferences for red meat, animal skin, sport hunting, and even bullfighting? As women are swelling the ranks of biomedical science, many have adopted the practice of animal experimentation. Will animal exploitation become the ultimate symbol of equality with the white male?
— Maria Comninou
The feminist story, she reminded me, is a counternarrative, a narrative of disobedience, a chronicle of battle, nto of surrender. Women who do not fit the mold are too often maneuvered, manipulated, and mangled into some culturally safe archetype. The makers of history transformed perpetua intoa cold, unfeeling mother - a villan of sorts. But who is to say that becoming a mother didn't also push Perpetua to become a martyr, didn't cause her to passionatley uphold her religious ideals because she wanted to offer her son the greatest gift she could - an ideal? Maybe, in the end, Perpetua's maternal instincts were precisely what gave her the strength to confront the burliest Roman gladiator and the to lie down with dignity?
— Stephanie Staal
Were kisses all the joys in bed,/One woman would another wed.
— William Shakespeare
I even made poor Louis take me on Crusade. How's that for blasphemy? I dressed my maids as Amazons and rode bare-breasted halfway to Damascus. Louis had a seizure and I damn near died of windburn... but the troops were dazzled.
— James Goldman, The Lion in Winter
The door of the bar opened, showing him a momentary oblong of true daylight, blankly white. A woman entered. He couldn't see her face as she crossed to the bar in front of the window, but he could see, drawn with exactitude by the light behind her, her legs within a summery white dress. When young he had supposed, without giving it much thought, that women didn't realize that sun behind them revealed them in this way; now he supposes that of course they must, and thinks about it. ("Novelty")
— John Crowley, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940's Until Now
...As marriage was woman's business, unmarried women, though doubtless unfortunate, must simply be considered as business failures: harsh, doubtless, but in tune with the sink-or-swim capitalist times.
— Ruth Brandon, Governess: The Lives and Times of the Real Jane Eyres
Harriet loved her new persona. As Maxine, she was courageous and accomplished, a woman of sophistication equally at home in Cannes or on the Indian subcontinent. As Maxine she didn't walk, she strode; she did not merely see, but beheld. The very air she breathed was bracing. Here was a conqueror of worlds.
— Diane Hammond, Hannah's Dream
She had abruptly flipped from the southern belle and was now putting on the extremely businesslike air of those perfectionist women who'd only worked in the professional world for two or three years before stopping to have children and were now terrified of not being taken seriously.
— Rebecca Makkai, The Borrower
Lanith? Don’t bewitch the Church boys. Their disappointment is a mess to untangle when they follow you home.
— Lita Burke, Wrath, Prequel to Tredan's Bane
I find it strange that practicing law in a comfortable well-heated office is considered too demanding an occupation for women, yet laboring from dawn's first light in crowded, drafty, ill-lit sweatshops is not.
— Shirley Tallman, Murder on Nob Hill
Proper deformity shows not in the fiendSo horrid as in woman.
— William Shakespeare, King Lear
I hear the singing of the lives of women. The clear mystery, the offering, and the pride.
— Muriel Rukeyser
A man's whole life / may be a metaphor - but a woman's lot / is symbol.
— Lorna Dee Cervantes, From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger