c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Women sometimes allow you to be unfaithful to their love
—  they never allow you to wound their self-esteem.
The more you overthink the less you will understand.
— Habeeb Akande
I know that she deserves the best and purest love the heart of man can offer," said Mrs. Maylie; "I know that the devotion and affection of her nature require no ordinary return, but one that shall be deep and lasting.
— Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
Wine and women make wise men dote and forsake God's law and do wrong." However, the fault is not in the wine, and often not in the woman. The fault is in the one who misuses the wine or the woman or other of God's crations. Even if you get drunk on the wine and through this greed you lapse into lechery, the wine is not to blame but you are, in being unable or unwilling to discipline yourself. And even if you look at a woman and become caught up in her beauty and assent to sin [= adultery; extramarital sex], the woman is not to blame nor is the beauty given her by God to be disparaged: rather, you are to blame for not keeping your heart more clear of wicked thoughts. ... If you feel yourself tempted by the sight of a woman, control your gaze better ... You are free to leave her. Nothing constrains you to commit lechery but your own lecherous heart.
— Anonymous, Dives And Pauper
[Y]ou are not ashamed of your sin [in committing adultery] because so many men commit it. Man's wickedness is now such that men are more ashamed of chastity than of lechery. Murderers, thieves, perjurers, false witnesses, plunderers and fraudsters are detested and hated by people generally, but whoever will sleep with his servant girl in brazen lechery is liked and admired for it, and people make light of the damage to his soul. And if any man has the nerve to say that he is chaste and faithful to his wife and this gets known, he is ashamed to mix with other men, whose behaviour is not like his, for they will mock him and despise him and say he's not a real man; for man's wickedness is now of such proportions that no one is considered a man unless he is overcome by lechery, while one who overcomes lechery and stays chaste is considered unmanly.
— Augustine of Hippo, Sermons 1-19
It is time to effect a revolution in female manners - time to restore to them their lost dignity - and make them, as a part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world. It is time to separate unchangeable morals from local manners.
— Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Brunettes are full of electricity.
— Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, Tomorrow's Eve
[W]hen I see men callously and cheerfully denying women the full use of their bodies, while insisting with sobs and howls on the satisfaction of their own, I simply can't find it heroic, or kind, or anything but pretty rotten and feeble.
— Dorothy L. Sayers, The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers. Vol. 1, 1899-1936: The Making of a Detective Novelist
I try to make my comments like a woman's skirt: long enough to be respectable and short enough to be interesting. 
— Adam Clayton Powell III
Now is the time to become a myth.
— Diane Von Furstenberg
Men do not know what they do not know, and women should not tell them.
— Amy Bloom
I think the best role models for women are people who are fruitfully and confidently themselves, who bring light into the world.
— Meryl Streep
Ladies should also remember that gentlemen look more to the effect of a dress in setting off the figure and countenance of a lady than to its cost. Very few gentlemen have any idea the value of ladies' dresses. This is a subject for female criticism. Beauty of person and elegance of manners in women will always command more admiration from the opposite sex than beauty, elegance or costliness of clothing."The Scholars' Companion and Ball Room Vade MecumThomas Hillgrove, 1857
— Thomas Hillgrove
I deserve better —such a dangerous, mad thought for a woman to entertain.
— Meredith Duran, At Your Pleasure
There's nothing wrong with her except she's completely fucked up.
— Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story
After all, a woman didn't leave much behind in the world to show she'd been there. Even the children she bore and raised got their father's name. But her quilts, now that was something she could pass on.
— Sandra Dallas
Lines don’t make beautiful women less beautiful
— Isabel Wolff, A Vintage Affair
Lucifer will be furious with you for failing, but it's not like he can do anything about it. Women don't always do what you want, even if you're Lord of the Underworld.
— Trinity Faegen, The Redemption of Ajax
One of the most difficult things in the world is to convince a woman that even a bargain costs money.
— E.W. Howe
Women, oh, women! They'll find the baddest meanin' in your words an' hold it up, sayin', Look what you attacked me with!
— David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
Right Jo better be happy old maids than unhappy wives or unmaidenly girls running about to find husbands.
— Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
Woman's fatal weakness is to desire sympathy and comprehension.--"Wanda
— Ouida
If you listen long enough to the whispers, you will hear the truth. Until then, I will tell you this: the world is made safe by a woman. She bound the monster up and cast him out, and the man who was left was saved.
— E.K. Johnston, A Thousand Nights
What was the point in satin and lace if it didn't make a man struggle to speak?
— Alexandra Ivy, Embrace The Darkness
Most bad," the host concluded. "If you ask me, something sinister lurks in men who avoid wine, games, the company of lovely women, and dinnertime conversation. Such people are either gravely ill or secretly detest everyone around them.
— Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
— Dorothy L. Sayers, Clouds of Witness
A woman made of parts is a dangerous thing. You never know when she'll throw away a piece you may need.
— Heidi W. Durrow, The Girl Who Fell from the Sky
Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter, sermons and soda water the day after.
— George Gordon Byron
You are a wise man, Major, and I will consider your advice with great care—and humility." He finished his tea and rose from the table to go to his room. "But I must ask you, do you really understand what it means to be in love with an unsuitable woman?"  "My dear boy," said the Major. "Is there really any other kind?
— Helen Simonson, Major Pettigrew's Last Stand
You may be desperate, but never let anyone see you as anything less than a cultivated woman.
— Lisa See, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
I figured I had kept her from being too depressed after fucking--it's hard for a girl with any force in her and any brains to accept the whole thing of fucking, of being fucked without trying to turn it on its end, so that she does some fucking, or some fucking up; I mean, the mere power of arousing the man so he wants to fuck isn't enough; she wants him to be willing to die in order to fuck. There's a kind of strain or intensity women are bred for, as beasts, for childbearing when childbearing might kill them, and child rearing when the child might die at any moment: it's in women to live under that danger, with that risk, that close to tragedy, with that constant taut or casual courage. They need death and nobility near. To be fucked when there's no drama inherent in it, when you're not going to rise to a level of nobility and courage forever denied the male, is to be cut off from what is inherently female, bestially speaking.
— Harold Brodkey
Up until then I'd thought that white people and colored people getting along was the big aim, but after that I decided everybody being colorless together was a better plan. I thought of that policeman, Eddie Hazelwurst, saying I'd lowered myself to be in this house of colored women, and for the very life of me I couldn't understand how it had turned out this way, how colored women had become the lowest ones on the totem pole. You only had to look at them to see how special they were, like hidden royalty among us. Eddie Hazelwurst. What a shitbucket.
— Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees
Okay, take a deep breath, I told myself. Don't go all hormonal. Get the facts straight. Have a mental doughnut.
— Janet Evanovich, Twelve Sharp
I want a girl because I want to bring her up so that she shan't make the mistakes I've made. When I look back upon the girl I was I hate myself. But I never had a chance. I'm going to bring up my daughter so that she's free and can stand on her own feet. I´m not going to bring a child into the world, and love her, and bring her up, just so that some man may want to sleep with her so much that he's willing to provide her with board and lodging for the rest of her life.
— W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil
I was seducing shepherdesses when you weren't a twinkle in your great-grandcestor's eyes. I think I know what I'm doing.
— Jim Butcher, Storm Front
If there were no Frenchwomen, life wouldn't be worth living.
— Friedrich Engels, Collected Works 38 1844-51
Gods, I wish the world was full of passive women.He thought for a moment longer, then scowled. On second thoughts, what a nightmare that'd be. It's the job of a man to fan the spark into flames, not quench it...
— Steven Erikson, Memories of Ice
With regard to power, women don’t have the vanity men have. They don’t need to make power visible, they only want the power to give them the other things they want. Security. Food. Enjoyment. Revenge. Peace. They are rational, power-seeking planners, who think beyond the battle, beyond the victory celebrations. And because they have an inborn capacity to see weakness in their victims, they know instinctively when and how to strike. And when to stop. You can’t learn that...
— Jo Nesbø, Nemesis
Over time, I have realized that at 20, you can wear too much makeup and people assume you're a slut. Do it at 40 and they think you're a sea witch.
— Melodie Ramone
Look, we say stuff to women all the time. We say we’ll call them, then we don’t. We tell them they’re beautiful, then spend the evening looking at other women. We say we don’t love them when we do, and say we do when we don’t. Christ, if I was a woman, I wouldn’t listen to a goddamn thing any man ever said to me.
— Lani Diane Rich, The Comeback Kiss
This particular strand of feminism is characterized by two tenets: 1. men are jerks, and 2. women should strive by all means to become like them.
— Douglas Wilson
But for I am a woman should I therefore live that I should not tell you the goodness of God?
— Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love
NO MUSE IS GOOD MUSETo be an Artist you need talent, as well as a wifewho washes the socks and the children,and returns phone calls and library books and types.In other words, the reason there are so many moreMen Geniuses than Women Geniuses is not Genius.It is because Hemingway never joined the P.T.A.And Arthur Rubinstein ignored Halloween.Do you think Portnoy's creator sits through children's theatermatinees--on Saturdays?Or that Norman Mailer faced 'driver's ed' failure,chicken pox or chipped teeth?Fitzgerald's night was so tender because the fenderhis teen-ager dented happened when Papa was at a story conference.Since Picasso does the painting, Mrs. Picasso did the toilet training.And if Saul Bellow, National Book Award winner, invited thirty-threefor Thanksgiving Day dinner, I'll bet he had help.I'm sure Henry Moore was never a Cub Scout leader,and Leonard Bernstein never instructed a tricyclerOn becoming a bicycler just before he conducted.Tell me again my anatomy is not necessarily my destiny,tell me my hang-up is a personal and not a universal quandary,and I'll tell you no muse is a good museunless she also helps with the laundry.
— Rochelle Distelheim
Any woman can weep without tears," she answered over her shoulder, "and most can heal with their hands. It depends on the wound. She is a woman, Your Highness, and that's riddle enough
— Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn
I was in the supermarket the other day, and I met a lady in the aisle where they keep the generic brands. Her name was 'woman.
— Steven Wright
You cannot win in a fight against women, cause men have a need to make sense
— Chris Rock
Once she knows how to read there's only one thing you can teach her to believe in and that is herself.
— Virginia Woolf, Monday or Tuesday
The best way to mend a broken heart is time and girlfriends.
— Gwyneth Paltrow
Enough about my beauty," Buttercup said. "Everybody always talks about how beautiful I am. I've got a mind, Westley. Talk about that.
— William Goldman, The Princess Bride
Men who do not forgive women their little faults will never enjoy their great virtues.
— Kahlil Gibran, Sand and Foam
It may be a man's world, but men are easily controlled by women.
— Ashly Lorenzana
We want different things. Men want to have sex with a woman. Then they want to have sex with another woman. And then another. Then they want to eat cornflakes and sleep for a while, and then they want to have sex with another woman, and another, until they die. Women,’ and I thought I’d better pick my words carefully when describing a gender I didn’t belong to, ‘want a relationship. They may not get it, or they may sleep with a lot of men before they do get it, but ultimately that’s what they want. That’s the goal. Men do not have goals. Natural ones. So they invent them, and put them at either end of a football pitch. And then they invent football. Or they pick fights, or try and get rich, or start wars, or come up with any number of daft bloody things to make up for the fact that they have no real goals.’‘Bollocks,’ said Ronnie.‘That, of course, is the other main difference.
— Hugh Laurie, The Gun Seller
The most cursory examination of even the most progressive organs of information reveals a curious inability to recognize women as newsmakers, unless they are young or married to a head of state or naked or pregnant by some triumph of technology or perpetrators or victims of some hideous crime or any combiniation of the above. Women's issues are often disguised as people issues, unless they are relegated to the women's pages which amazingly still suvive. Senior figures are all male; even the few women who are deemed worthy of obituaries are shown in images from their youth, as if the last fourty years of their lives have been without achievement of any kind. If you analyse the by-lines in your morning paper, you will see that the senior editorial staff are all older men, supported by a rabble of junior females, the infinitely replacesable 'hackettes'.
— Germaine Greer, The Whole Woman
the great lack of parity between husbands and wives has always been spawned by the disproportionate degree of self-sacrifice that women are willing to make on behalf of those they love.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
A woman's eyes cut deeper than a knife.
— Robert Jordan
It requires the feminine temperament to repeat the same thing three times with unabated zest.
— W. Somerset Maugham
The obscenities of this country are not girls like you. It is the poverty which is obscene, and the criminal irresponsibility of the leaders who make this poverty a deadening reality. The obscenities in this country are the places of the rich, the new hotels made at the expense of the people, the hospitals where the poor die when they get sick because they don't have the money either for medicines or services. It is only in this light that the real definition of obscenity should be made.
— F. Sionil José, Ermita: A Filipino Novel
Used to be hewas my heart's desire.His forthright gaze,his expert hands:I'd lie on the couch with my eyesclosed just thinking about it.Never about the factthat everything changes,that even this,my best passion,would not be immune.No, I would bask on in aneternal daydream of the handsfinding me, the gaze like a windingstair coaxing me down. . . .Until I caught a glimpseof something in the mirror:silly girl in her lingerie,dancing with the furniture--a hot little bundle, flush withcliches. Into that pairof too-bright eyes I lookedand saw myself. And something
— Deborah Garrison, A Working Girl Can't Win
Do you have a little white dress? I've had this deep-seated nurse fantasy about you, Murphy.
— Jim Butcher, Storm Front
I'm not really silly enough to think that chocolate solves anything. But it calms me. It's a soothing assurance, that this hectic life I have worked myself into is also full of wonderful surprises and unexpected sweetness. It reminds me that a hefty percentage of my "problems" don't really need to be solved at all, just outlasted.
— Emily Watts, Take Two Chocolates and Call Me in the Morning: 12 Semi-Practical Solutions for the Really Busy Woman
I profess not to know how women’s hearts are wooed and won. To me they have always been matters of riddle and admiration. Some seem to have but one vulnerable point, or door of access; while others have a thousand avenues, and may be captured in a thousand different ways. It is a great triumph of skill to gain the former, but a still greater proof of generalship to maintain possession of the latter, for man must battle for his fortress at every door and window. He who wins a thousand common hearts is therefore entitled to some renown; but he who keeps undisputed sway over the heart of a coquette is indeed a hero.
— Washington Irving, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Funny how women are ashamed of their inner fairy whereas men are forever proudly displaying their inner cowboy or fireman
— Dawn French, A Tiny Bit Marvellous
[I]t is not by being richer or more powerful that a man becomes better; one is a matter of fortune, the other of virtue. Nor should she deem herself other than venal who weds a rich man rather than a poor, and desires more things in her husband than himself. Assuredly, whomsoever this concupiscence leads into marriage deserves payment rather than affection.
— Héloïse d'Argenteuil, The Letters of Abélard and Héloïse
It seems to me there's this tyranny that's not accidental or incidental, to make women feel compelled to look like somebody they're not. I think the effort is being made to get us to turn our time and attention to this instead of important political issues.
— Eve Ensler
Really? And what curse befalls the Adams of the world?"Ann opens her mouth and, presumably thinking of nothing to say, closes it again. It is Felicity who answers, eyes steely. "They are weak to temptation. And we are their temptresses.
— Libba Bray, Rebel Angels
Breasts are a scandal because they shatter the border between motherhood and sexuality.
— Iris Marion Young
Gentlemen, be courteous to the old maids, no matter how poor and plain and prim, for the only chivalry worth having is that which is the readiest to to pay deference to the old, protect the feeble, and serve womankind, regardless of rank, age, or color.
— Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
On Stripping Bark from Myself(for Jane, who said trees die from it)Because women are expected to keep silent abouttheir close escapes I will not keep silentand if I am destroyed (naked tree!) someone willpleasemark the spotwhere I fall and know I could not livesilent in my own lieshearing their 'how nice she is!'whose adoration of the retouched imageI so despise.No. I am finished with livingfor what my mother believesfor what my brother and father defendfor what my lover elevatesfor what my sister, blushing, denies or rushesto embrace.I find my ownsmall persona standing selfagainst the worldan equality of willsI finally understand.Besides:My struggle was always againstan inner darkness: I carry within myselfthe only known keysto my death – to unlock life, or close it shutforever. A woman who loves wood grains, the coloryellowand the sun, I am happy to fightall outside murderersas I see I must.
— Alice Walker, Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems 1965-1990 Complete
Be the kind of woman who, when your feet hit the floor each morning, the devil says "Oh, no! She's up.
— Joanne Clancy
Most young women do not welcome promiscuous advances. (Either that, or my luck's terrible.)
— Groucho Marx, Memoirs Of A Mangy Lover
It's only through sheer force and luck that she's yet to take over the world.
— Julia Quinn, Romancing Mister Bridgerton: The Epilogue II
The Devil teaches women what they are – or they would teach it to the Devil if he did not know.
— Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, Le bonheur dans le crime
Gruff,” I said, “I find myself largely clueless about why mortal women do what they do. It will take a wiser man than me to understand what’s in a fae woman’s mind.
— Jim Butcher, Small Favor
Sure he was great, but don't forget that Ginger Rogers did everything [Fred Astaire] did, .. backwards and in high h
— Bob Thaves
She stands and moves within the invisible pentacle of her own virginity. She is an unbroken egg: she is a sealed vessel
—  she has inside her a magic space the entrance to which is shut tight with a plug of membrane
Is a woman a thinking unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer?
— Thomas Hardy
I don't see what women see in other women," I'd told Doctor Nolan in my interview that noon. "What does a woman see in a woman that she can't see in a man?"Doctor Nolan paused. Then she said, "Tenderness.
— Sylvia Plath
It was futile to attack with reason the stout wall of irrational feelings that, as is known, is the stuff of which the female mind is made.
— Milan Kundera, Laughable Loves
Besides, when I look around me at the men, I feel that God never meant us women to be too particular.
— Marie Jenney Howe, An Anti-Suffrage Monologue
my mothersensed awar in herwomb,and so sheraised meto fight.
— hafsa atique birth of a daughter
In my experience, men who understand women seem to rarely want to have anything to do with them.
— Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed
To be a righteous woman during the winding up scenes on this earth, before the second coming of our Savior, is an especially noble calling... She has been placed here to help to enrich, to protect, and to guard the home--which is society's basic and most noble institution.
— Spencer W. Kimball
JB’s mother had taught him early on that appreciated women are happy women.
— Charlaine Harris, Living Dead in Dallas
I love doubt in a woman. It's nearly as sexy as determination.
— Irvine Welsh, Filth
All women are not Helen, I know that, but have Helen in their hearts.
— William Carlos Williams
[T]he definition of 'crazy' in show business is a woman who keeps talking even after no one wants to fuck her anymore.
— Tina Fey, Bossypants
There's a reason why forty, fifty, and sixty don't look the way they used to, and it's not because of feminism, or better living through exercise. It's because of hair dye. In the 1950's only 7 percent of American women dyed their hair; today there are parts of Manhattan and Los Angeles where there are no gray-haired women at all.
— Nora Ephron
Feminism is hated because women are hated. Anti-feminism is a direct expression of misogyny
—  it is the political defense of women hating.
‎Lipstick is really magical. It holds more than a waxy bit of color - it holds the promise of a brilliant smile, a brilliant day, both literally and figuratively.
— Roberta Gately
She could walk through a lightning storm without being touched; grab a bolt of lightning in the palm of her hand; use the heat of lightning to start the kindling going under her medicine pot. She turned the moon into salve, the stars into swaddling cloth, and healed the wounds of every creature walking up on two or down on four.
— Gloria Naylor, Mama Day
We are either going to have a future where women lead the way to make peace with the Earth or we are not going to have a human future at all.
— Vandana Shiva
[T]he more clamour we make about 'the women's point of view', the more we rub it into people that the women's point of view is different, and frankly I do not think it is -- at least in my job. The line I always want to take is, that there is the 'point of view' of the reasonably enlightened human brain, and that this is the aspect of the matter which I am best fitted to uphold.
— Dorothy L. Sayers, The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers. Vol. 1, 1899-1936: The Making of a Detective Novelist
Looking at it, I started crying. Maybe it was knowing that I had to give up the fantasy, the enormous life consuming fantasy , that someone or something was going to do this for me – the fantasy that someone was coming to lead my life, to choose direction, to give me orgasms.
— Eve Ensler, The Vagina Monologues
Why do gentlemen's voices carry so clearly, when women's are so easily stifled?
— Sarah Waters, Affinity
For men, as a rule, love is but an episode which takes place among the other affairs of the day, and the emphasis laid on it in novels gives it an importance which is untrue to life. There are few men to whom it is the most important thing in the world, and they are not the very interesting ones; even women, with whom the subject is of paramount interest, have a contempt for them.
— W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence
Many women say that verbal violence causes more harm than physical violence because it damages self-esteem so deeply. Women have not wanted to hear battered women say that the verbal abuse was as hurtful as the physical abuse: to acknowledge that truth would be tantamount to acknowledging that virtually every woman is a battered woman. It is difficult to keep strong against accusations of being a bitch, stupid, inferior, etc., etc.
— Suzanne Pharr, Homophobia: A Weapon of Sexism
I never could understand why some writers treat women as helpless. Every woman I know is strong in her own unique way.
— Terry Goodkind
A goodlookin horse is like a goodlookin woman, he said. They're always more trouble than what they're worth. What a man needs is just one that will get the job done.
— Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
Cheap jewelry, however, is worse than no jewelry at all, and there are very few things in life than are worse than no jewelry at all.
— Jill Conner Browne, The Sweet Potato Queens' Book of Love
And I was fairly certain that my strong-enough-for-King-Kong-but-made-for-a-woman deodorant had utterly failed. --Doom with a View
— Victoria Laurie
I could have forgiven it if he'd fallen desperately in love with someone and gone off with her. I should have thought that natural. I shouldn't really have blamed him. I should have thought he was led away. Men are so weak, and women are so unscrupulous.
— W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence
You start out happy that you have no hips or boobs. All of a sudden you get them, and it feels sloppy. Then just when you start liking them, they start drooping.
— Cindy Crawford
We think of women at every age: while still children, we fondle with a naïve sensuality the breasts of those grown-up girls kissing us and cuddling us in their arms; at the age of ten, we dream of love; at fifteen, love comes along; at sixty, it is still with us, and if dead men in their tombs have any thought in their heads, it is how to make their way underground to the nearby grave, lift the shroud of the dear departed women, and mingle with her in her sleep
— Gustave Flaubert, November
Never let stress shape your strategy. Most women think better after a brisk walk, a light meal, a massage and a nap.
— Barbara Taylor Bradford, Her Own Rules
We'll never solve the feminization of power until we solve the masculinity of wealth.
— Gloria Steinem
It's easy to make me laugh, you can make me laugh, anyone can make me laugh, but that certainly does not mean you can make me do anything.
— C. JoyBell C.
The man who follows the crowd will usually get no further than the crowd. The man who walks alone is likely to find himself in places no one has ever been.
— Alan Ashley-Pitt
. . . [O]nce we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives.""The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling.""Of course, women so empowered are dangerous. So we are taught to separate the erotic from most vital areas of our lives other than sex.
— Audre Lorde
How unbearable, for women, is the tenderness which a man can give them without love. For men, how bittersweet this is.
— Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942
The difference between men and women is this--if you catch a woman butt-naked, she tries to cover the private parts with her hands. A man will sit there just like you found him even if he doesn't have much to be proud of.
— Deb Baker, Murder Passes the Buck
I've often observed that women can be the weakest link in women's rights.
— Jean Sasson
Surely a pretty woman never looks prettier than when making tea.
— Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley's Secret
Ah! What pleasure it must be to a woman to suffer for the one she loves!
— Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot
Miss Jenkyns wore a cravat, and a little bonnet like a jockey-cap, and altogether had the appearance of a strong-minded woman; although she would have despised the modern idea of women being equal to men. Equal, indeed! she knew they were superior.
— Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford
She says it's really not very flattering to her that the women who fall in love with her husband are so uncommonly second-rate.
— W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil
You know, I've been thinking: all the women in the books you like -- Sartre and Camus and all that -- they don't really exist. Not as people. They're only there to wait for the men. To love them and be loved back or not -- mostly not; to be beaten up or killed; to appear as a face on the wall of Meurseault's cell--
— Ahdaf Soueif, In the Eye of the Sun
Whether it's men, women—it doesn't really matter. The human race is filled with passion and lust. And to coin terms like heterosexuality, homosexuality or even bisexuality makes no sense to me. You are human. You love who you love. You fuck who you fuck. That should be enough—no labels. No stigmas. Nothing. Just be to be.But life isn't that kind. People will always find things to hate.
— Krista Ritchie, Kiss the Sky
She has fought many wars, most internal. The ones that you battle alone, for this, she is remarkable. She is a survivor.
— Nikki Rowe
How many women are there ... who because of their husbands' harshness spend their weary lives in the bond of marriage in greater suffering than if they were slaves among the Saracens?
— Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies
If women were as good as men they'd be a lot better!
— Terry Pratchett
I drove in last night,' he said. 'I couldn't sleep, it was too hot. So I went outside. I was feeling melancholy. Then I danced with a beautiful girl, and I felt better. What's your story?
— Judy Blundell, What I Saw and How I Lied
The hearts of women are like those little pieces of furniture with secret hiding - places, full of drawers fitted into each other; you go to a lot of trouble, break your nails, and in the bottom find some withered flower, a few grains of dust - or emptiness!
— Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education
And in the act of making things, just by living their daily lives, they also make history. Knitting is clothing made in spare moments, or round the fire, whenever women gathered together... It's something to celebrate-clothes made in love and service, something women have always done.
— Anne Bartlett, Knitting
No other woman had that air of spring in January, that ever-bubbling fount of love and hope.
— Rosalind Miles, The Child of the Holy Grail
I expect that Woman will be the last thing civilized by Man.
— George Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel
Where do you get the right to decide our lives? I'll tell you where. From that little hog's gut that hangs between your legs. Well, let me tell you something... you will need more than that. I don't know where you will get it or who will give it to you, but mark my words, you will need more than that.... You are a sad, pitiful, stupid, selfish, hateful man. I hope your little hog's gut stands you in good stead, and you take good care of it, because you don't have anything else.
— Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
Every woman needs secrets,' her mother said with a smile then, her eyes meeting Sally's in the rearview mirror. 'Remember that when you're old like me, pumpkin, because the world has a way of making a woman's life everyone else's business--you have to dig out a little place that's only yours.
— J. Courtney Sullivan, Commencement
Men had no purpose on earth whereas women were gods walking unrecognized among them.
— Kate Atkinson
Everybody must be managed. Queens must be managed. Kings must be managed, for men want managing almost as much as women, and that's saying a good deal.
— Thomas Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree
I'm afraid, Belle, that being a lady is more than proper clothes. It is an attitude. From your...experience, you may know more of business and politics than ladies are supposed to know. Gentlemen are pleased to think ladies are ornamental, and it is an ill-advised ornament who contradicts her gentleman.
— Donald McCaig, Rhett Butler's People
Upon my soul!' Tietjens said to himself, 'that girl down there is the only intelligent living soul I've met for years.' A little pronounced in manner sometimes; faulty in reasoning naturally, but quite intelligent, with a touch of wrong accent now and then. But if she was wanted anywhere, there she'd be! Of good stock, of course: on both sides! But positively, she and Sylvia were the only two human beings he had met for years whom he could respect: the one for sheer efficiency in killing; the other for having the constructive desire and knowing how to set about it. Kill or cure! The two functions of man. If you wanted something killed you'd go to Sylvia Tietjens in sure faith that she would kill it: emotion, hope, ideal; kill it quick and sure. If you wanted something kept alive you'd go to Valentine: she's find something to do for it. . . . The two types of mind: remorseless enemy, sure screen, dagger ... sheath!Perhaps the future of the world then was to women? Why not? He hand't in years met a man that he hadn't to talk down to - as you talk down to a child, as he had talked down to General Campion or to Mr. Waterhouse ... as he always talked down to Macmaster. All good fellows in their way ...
— Ford Madox Ford, Parade's End
So, in the interests of survival, they trained themselves to be agreeing machines instead of thinking machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking, and then they thought that, too.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Breakfast of Champions
There are certain phrases potent to make my blood boil -- improper influence! What old woman's cackle is that?""Are you a young lady?""I am a thousand times better: I am an honest woman, and as such I will be treated.
— Charlotte Brontë, Shirley
...Whenever someone says to me, 'Jerry Lewis says women aren't funny,' or 'Christopher Hitchens says women aren't funny,' or 'Rick Fenderman says women aren't funny... Do you have anything to say to that?'Yes. We don't fucking care if you like it.I don't say it out loud, of course, because Jerry Lewis is a great philanthropist, Hitchens is very sick, and the third guy I made up.
— Tina Fey
You are not permitted to kill a woman who has wronged you, but nothing forbids you to reflect that she is growing older every minute.
— Ambrose Bierce
If art is not to be life-enhancing, what is it to be? Half the world is feminine--why is there resentment at a female-oriented art? Nobody asks The Tale of Genji to be masculine! Women certainly learn a lot from books oriented toward a masculine world. Why is not the reverse also true? Or are men really so afraid of women's creativity (because they are not themselves at the center of creation, cannot bear children) that a woman writer of genius evokes murderous rage, must be brushed aside with a sneer as 'irrelevant'?
— May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude
Modesty answers not the crude how of femininity, but the beautiful why.
— Wendy Shalit, A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue
You can forgive a young cunt anything. A young cunt doesn't have to have brains. They're better without brains. But an old cunt, even if she's brilliant, even if she's the most charming woman in the world, nothing makes any difference. A young cunt is an investment; an old cunt is a dead loss. All they can do for you is buy you things. But that doesn't put meat on their arms or juice between their legs.
— Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
I didn’t hear words that were accurate, much less prideful. For example, I never once heard the word clitoris. It would be years before I learned that females possessed the only organ in the human body with no function than to feel pleasure. (If such an organ were unique to the male body, can you imagine how much we would hear about it—and what it would be used to justify?)
— Gloria Steinem, The Vagina Monologues
There are plenty of images of women in science fiction. There are hardly any women.
— Joanna Russ
What I condemn are our system of values and the men who don't acknowledge how great, difficult, but ultimately beautiful women's share in society is.
— Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl
I do not wish to be a coward like the father of mankind and throw the blame upon a woman.
— Ouida, Wanda, Countess von Szalras.
When a friend of Abigail and John Adams was killed at Bunker Hill, Abigail's response was to write a letter to her husband and include these words, "My bursting heart must find vent at my pen.
— David McCullough, John Adams
I began to understand that there were certain talkers--certain girls--whom people liked to listen to, not because of what they, the girls, had to say, but because of the delight they took in saying it. A delight in themselves, a shine on their faces, a conviction that whatever they were telling about was remarkable and that they themselves could not help but give pleasure. There might be other people--people like me--who didn't concede this, but that was their loss. And people like me would never be the audience these girls were after, anyway.
— Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness
Women are strange little beasts,' he said to Dr. Coutras. 'You can treat them like dogs, you can beat them till your arm aches, and still they love you.' He shrugged his shoulders. 'Of course, it is one of the most absurd illusions of Christianity that they have souls.
— W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence
I do so love my witches and wicked queens. I find myself drawn to feminine archetypes that previous generations have found threatening or dangerous: crones, oracles, madwomen, Amazons, virgins who aren’t helpless, bad mothers. I love to give the vagina dentata voice. It so rarely gets to speak for itself.
— Catherynne M. Valente
I want to read so I can read the Koran read the signs in the street know the number of the bus I'm supposed to take when I one day leave this house.
— Eve Ensler, I am an Emotional Creature
An uncomplicated woman gets complicated when she finally says what she means.
— Kathy Dunnehoff, The Do-Over
I'm sure you could have. Fending off unwanted male attention is a skill every attractive woman must acquire. But you're also a lady who was reluctant to cause a scene.. (Hammond Cross)
— Sandra Brown, The Alibi
With women who do not love us, as with the "dear departed," the knowledge that there is no hope left does not prevent us from continuing to wait.
— Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
Mama Ginger came calling, to set the alarm on my biological clock. Oh, and to remind me that there’s no point to me being a woman if I never have children.”“Well, if that’s true, I wasted a hell of a lot of money on panty hose and lipstick.” Jettie snorted.
— Molly Harper, Nice Girls Don't Date Dead Men
All beautiful women are murderers. You've probably heard it said before.
— Mike  Lester, An Occasional Dream
Men can be relentless," she agrees, "when they think a woman belongs to them.
— Rae Carson, Walk on Earth a Stranger
Why one man rather than another? It was odd. You find yourself involved with a fellow for life just because he was the one that you met when you were nineteen.
— Simone de Beauvoir
Out of the frying pan into the fire! What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many? No different!
— Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus
Nature is woman's best friend,' she [Yasmina] often said. 'If you're having troubles, you just swim in the water, stretch out in a field, or look up at the stars. That's how a woman cures her fears'.
— Fatema Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood
Here is the trap you are in.... And it's not my trap—I haven't trapped you. Because abortions are illegal, women who need and want them have no choice in the matter, and you—because you know how to perform them—have no choice, either. What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman's freedom of choice, too. If abortion was legal, a woman would have a choice—and so would you. You could feel free not to do it because someone else would. But the way it is, you're trapped. Women are trapped. Women are victims, and so are you.
— John Irving, The Cider House Rules
When I was your age...I wish I'd known that I already had everything I needed within myself to be happy, instead of looking for happiness at beauty counters.
— Ilene Beckerman
- You look fine. - Right. I look fine. Except I don't, said Zora, tugging sadly at her man's nightshirt. This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn't be able to protect them from self-disgust. 
— Zadie Smith, On Beauty
I am woman, hear me roar.
— Helen Reddy
Sexuality is not meant to be this way - an honest, consensual expression in which a girl might take an active role when she feels good and ready and not one minute before. No. Sexual desire is meant to sell soap. And cars. And beer. And religion.
— Libba Bray, Beauty Queens
Men are allowed to have passion and commitment for their work ... a woman is allowed that feeling for a man, but not her work.
— Barbra Streisand
...there is a celebrated aphorism insisting that the best way to live is to 'work like you don't need the money, dance like nobody is watching, and love like you've never been hurt.'...After years of hearing and reading these lines I have decided to tell the truth: the original version is wrong. There is a grave error in the wording of this adage. The correct version should go as follows:Love like you don't need the money,Work like nobody is watching,Dance like you've never been hurt.See? Doesn't that make more sense?
— Gina Barreca, It's Not That I'm Bitter . . .: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Visible Panty Lines and Conquered the World
We were still at the age when girls are years older than guy, and the guys grow up by doing their best when the girls need them to.
— Tana French, Faithful Place
On the other couch a women sits with a young boy looking through a picture book about Babar the Elephant. When I find a magazine and I lean back to start reading it, I can see the women watching me out of the corner of her eye. She moves closer to the child and she leans over and kisses his forehead. I know why she does it and i don't blame her.
— James Frey, A Million Little Pieces
A mutual and satisfied sexual act is of great benefit to the average woman, the magnetism of it is health giving. When it is not desired on the part of the woman and she has no response, it should not take place. This is an act of prostitution and is degrading to the woman's finer sensibility, all the marriage certificates on earth to the contrary notwithstanding.
— Margaret Sanger
At heart, he could not abide sense in women: he liked to see them as silly, as light-headed, as vain, as open to ridicule as possible; because they were then in reality what he held them to be, and wished them to be,--inferior: toys to play with, to amuse a vacant hour and to be thrown away.
— Charlotte Brontë, Shirley
This is very simple in the world of chicks: some are hoochies, some are not, and some should never try to be. It's no different from the idea of sports. Now, I can go on my little rowing machine for four times a week, twenty-two minutes a time, and I can feel as if I flirt with the sporting world. Similar to the idea that a woman can put on something cuter for her man, for those moments, and flirt with garments that a hoochie woman might be pushing. But never for one moment should you get confused. My little rowing machine and I cannot consider ourselves athletes. Wearing the same garment does not a hoochie woman make. So if you are a true hoochie woman, may garments below the navel always be in your future. If you are not, then please don't throw away your cotton zippy jacket.
— Tori Amos, Piece by Piece
…on some occasions, women, like dreams, go by contraries.
— Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
Women were gravitating towards him from all directions like a planetary orbit.(Zoe on meeting Justus)
— Dannika Dark, Sterling
Women were like rivers, their banks were unreachable, the night often rang with the cries of the drowned.
— Thomas Bernhard, Frost
She walked with measured steps, draped in striped and fringed cloths, treading the earth proudly, with a slight jingle and flash of barbarous ornaments. She carried her head high; her hair was done in the shape of a helmet; she had brass leggings to the knee, brass wire gauntlets to the elbow, a crimson spot on her tawny cheek, innumerable necklaces of glass beads on her neck; bizarre things, charms, gifts of witch-men, that hung about her, glittered and trembled at every step. She must have had the value of several elephant tusks upon her. She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent; there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate progress. And in the hush that had fallen suddenly upon the whole sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the colossal body of the pensive, as though it had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous and passionate soul.
— Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
The time came to put Iris Duarte back on the plane.It was a morning flight which made it difficult. I wasused to rising at noon; it was a fine cure for hangoversand would add 5 years to my life. I felt no sadnesswhile driving her to L.A. International. The sex hadbeen fine; there had been laughter. I could hardlyremember a more civilized time, neither of us makingany demands, yet there had been warmth, it had notbeen without feeling, dead meat coupled with deadmeat. I detested that type of swinging, the LosAngeles, Hollywood, Bel Air, Malibu, Laguna Beachkind of sex. Strangers when you meet, strangers whenyou part—a gymnasium of bodies namelesslymasturbating each other. People with no morals oftenconsidered themselves more free, but mostly theylacked the ability to feel or to love. So they becameswingers. The dead fucking the dead. There was nogamble or humor in their game—it was corpsefucking corpse. Morals were restrictive, but they weregrounded on human experience down through thecenturies. Some morals tended to keep peopleslaves in factories, in churches and true to the State.Other morals simply made good sense. It was like agarden filled with poisoned fruit and good fruit. Youhad to know which to pick and eat, which to leavealone.
— Charles Bukowski, Women
Recently abandoned women can be complicated.
— Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian
Her one drink had Cecelia giggling and talking and she was explaining that animals had souls too. Nobody challenged her opinion. It was possible, we knew. What we weren't sure of was if we had any.
— Charles Bukowski, Women
A mother does not become pregnant in order to provide employment to medical people. Giving birth is an ecstatic jubilant adventure not available to males. It is a woman's crowning creative experience of a lifetime.
— John Stevenson
While she was in transit, being unattached was exhilarating, but the moment she stopped, so did the high.
— Whitney Otto, Eight Girls Taking Pictures