c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
A woman must wait for her ovaries to die before she can get her rightful personality back. Post-menstrual is the same as pre-menstrual; I am once again what I was before the age of twelve: a female human being who knows that a month has thirty day, not twenty-five, and who can spend every one of them free of the shackles of that defect of body and mind known as femininity.
— Florence King
I want a man with nuclear power.
— Carla Bruni
...to speak of them out loud, to speak of their hunger and pain and loneliness and humour, to make them visible so that can not be ravaged in the dark without great consequence.
— Eve Ensler, The Vagina Monologues
Perhaps all women are part faerie, for what woman can deny her faerie blood when the portals to her own land are open; when the full moon sings its insistent song; when sorrow and passion and rage pulse through her body at moon times. This is why women are the chosen ones of Faerie, pat of the vibrant, fluid, emotional soul of the world…
— Brian Froud, Brian Froud’s World of Faerie
Real women don't love the richest guy in the world they love the guy who can make their world the richest.
— Jazz Feylynn
I'll say it: I want to see an ugly woman as a spokeswoman for a women's network. Ugly men are out there all the time – look at Larry King, for God's sake. He looks like someone's talking underwear. Why not give America a spokeswoman who ain't much to look at but is competent as Hell? If accomplishments actually count for women, this ought to be a no-brainer.
— John Scalzi, Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded: A Decade of Whatever, 1998-2008
bitch power is the juice, the sweat, the blood that keeps pop music going. Rick James helped me understand the lesson of the eighth-grade dance: Bitch power rules the world. If the girls don't like the music, they sit down and stop the show. You gotta have a crowd if you wanna have a show. And the girls are the show. We're talking absolute monarchy, with no rules of succession. Bitch power. She must be obeyed. She must be feared.
— Rob Sheffield, Love Is a Mix Tape
A person didn’t need to be beautiful, they just needed to be loved. But I couldn’t help wanting it. If that was the way I could be loved, to be beautiful, I’d take it
— Janet Fitch, White Oleander
There was something rather blousy about roses in full bloom, something shallow and raucous, like women with untidy hair
— Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca
I'll tell ye, Sassenach; if ever I feel the need to change my manner of employment, I dinna think I'll take up attacking women - it's a bloody hard way to make a living.
— Diana Gabaldon, Dragonfly in Amber
Waiting turns men into bears in a barn, and women into cats in a sack.
— Robert Jordan, The Fires of Heaven
The clue to everything a man should love and fear in her was there right from the start in the ironic smile that primed and swelled the archery of her full lips. There was pride in that smile and confidence in the set of her fine nose. Without understanding why I knew beyond question that a lot of people would mistake her pride for arrogance and confuse her confidence with impassivity. I didn't make that mistake. My eyes were lost swimming floating free in the shimmering lagoon of her steady even stare. Her eyes were large and spectacularly green. It was the green that trees are in vivid dreams. It was the green that the sea would be if the sea were perfect.
— Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram
Her soul is Alive. And we are drawn to her.
— Stasi Eldredge, Captivating: Unveiling the Mystery of a Woman's Soul
She respected her husband in the same way as she respected the General Post Office, as something large, secure and fixed: and though she knew the small number of his talents she appreciated his abstract value as a male.
— James Joyce, Dubliners
Women have a passion for mathematics. They divide their age in half, double the price of their clothes, and always add at least five years to the age of their best friend.
— Marcel Achard
the lost womenI need to know their namesthose women I would have walked with,jauntily the way men go in groupsswinging their arms, and the onesthose sweating women whom I would have joinedAfter a hard game to chew the fatwhat would we have called each other laughingjoking into our beer? where are my gangs,my teams, my mislaid sisters?all the women who could have known me,where in the world are their names?
— Lucille Clifton
I was admonished to adopt feminine clothes; I refused, and still refuse. As for other avocations of women, there are plenty of other women to perform them.
— Jeanne d'Arc
It is so demanding to be born into a house full of women, where everyone loves you so overwhelmingly that they end up suffocating with their love; a house where you, as the only child, have to be more mature than all the adults around....But the problem is that they want me to become everything they themselves couldn't accomplish in life.....As a result, I had to work my butt off to fulfill all their dreams at the same time.
— Elif Shafak, The Bastard of Istanbul
I need a timeout do to deal with my timeout! that's how messed up I'm.
— Kristen Ashley, The Gamble
Because women can do nothing except love, they've given it a ridiculous importance. They want to persuade us that it's the whole of life. It's an insignificant part.
— W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence
Laundry, liturgy and women's work all serve to ground us in the world, and they need not grind us down. Our daily tasks, whether we perceive them as drudgery or essential, life-supporting work, do not define who we are as women or as human beings.
— Kathleen Norris, The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and Women's Work
Last year, when Zora was a freshman, sophomores had seemed altogether a different kind of human: so very definite in their tastes and opinions, in ther loves and ideas. Zora woke up this morning hopeful that a transformation of this kind might have visited her in the night, but, finding it hadn't, she did what girls generally do when they don't feel the part: she dressed it instead.
— Zadie Smith, On Beauty
Man is a play station whereas a woman will always remain at an emotion station.
— Santosh Kalwar, Adventus
The man raised his glass, 'To you!'Can't you think of a wittier t
— Milan Kundera, Laughable Loves
The priestess of Artemis took hold of her almost with the violence of a lover, and whisked her away into a languid ecstasy of reverie. She communicated her own enthusiasm to the girl, and kept her mind occupied with dreams, faery-fervid, of uncharted seas of glory on which her galleon might sail, undiscovered countries of spice and sweetness, Eldorado and Utopia and the City of God.
— Aleister Crowley, Moonchild
And I withdrew into myself when I understood that they wanted to extract every thought in my head, one by one, like decayed teeth.
— Alia Mamdouh
Yes: but aren't love and marriage notoriously synonymous in the minds of most women? Certainly very few men get the first without promising the second: love, that is--if it's just a matter of spreading her legs, almost any woman will do that for nothing.
— Truman Capote, Summer Crossing
My Lady, you certainly tell me about wonderful constancy, strength and virtue and firmness of women, so can one say the same thing about men? (...)Response [by Lady Rectitude]: "Fair sweet friend, have you not yet heard the saying that the fool sees well enough a small cut in the face of his neighbour, but he disregards the great gaping one above his own eye? I will show you the great contradiction in what the men say about the changeability and inconstancy of women. It is true that they all generally insist that women are very frail [= fickle] by nature. And since they accuse women of frailty, one would suppose that they themselves take care to maintain a reputation for constancy, or at the very least, that the women are indeed less so than they are themselves. And yet, it is obvious that they demand of women greater constancy than they themselves have, for they who claim to be of this strong and noble condition cannot refrain from a whole number of very great defects and sins, and not out of ignorance, either, but out of pure malice, knowing well how badly they are misbehaving. But all this they excuse in themselves and say that it is in the nature of man to sin, yet if it so happens that any women stray into any misdeed (of which they themselves are the cause by their great power and longhandedness), then it's suddenly all frailty and inconstancy, they claim. But it seems to me that since they do call women frail, they should not support that frailty, and not ascribe to them as a great crime what in themselves they merely consider a little defect.
— Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies
Women are not just waiting to be filled up with resources-they're waiting to put their resources on the table to be able to lead towards a different world
— Kavita Ramdya
A woman's sense of self and power should come not from the number of heads she can turn, but rather from the minds and hearts she can turn.
— Tziporah Heller, Our Bodies, Our Souls: A Jewish Perspective on Feminine Spirituality
Women lose their lives not knowing they can do something different..." from Two or Three Things i Know For Sure
— Dorothy Allison
Gabby couldn't believe what he had just said. Her mouth gaped open and a flirty smile came over her. She slowly peeled her half wet white t-shirt over her head and then slowly shimmied out of her shorts. What had gotten into her? She had never acted like this before, but she suddenly felt playful, fun and daring. If he wanted to play, so could she.
— J.B. McGee, Broken
She did not think it was true that women fell in love all at once, but rather, that they fell in love through repitition, just the way someone became brave.
— Tatjana Soli, The Lotus Eaters
Man does not control his own fate. The women in his life do that for him.
— Groucho Marx
Plain women are always jealous of their husbands. Beautiful women never are. They are always so occupied with being jealous of other women's husbands.
— Oscar Wilde
Nancy Astor: "Sir, if you were my husband, I'd poison your tea."Winston Churchill: "Madame,i f you were my wife, I'd drink it!"(Exchange with Winston Churchill)
— Nancy Astor the Viscountess Astor
I could not resist the temptation of mystifying him a bit, I suppose it is some taste of the original apple that remains still in our mouths.
— Bram Stoker, Dracula
Variability is one of the virtues of a woman. It avoids the crude requirement of polygamy. So long as you have one good wife you are sure to have a spiritual harem".
— G.K. Chesterton
Curiosity is one of the forms of feminine bravery.
— Victor Hugo, Ninety-Three
Any rapist would feel pretty dang upset to see his car packed full with rotting fish heads and limburger cheese...Also, if the 542 women responsible were crowded onto the street where he lived, insisting that he move himself and his stinky car to another locale.Nobody likes to be pelted with 2060 bloody tampons.
— Inga Muscio, Cunt: A Declaration of Independence
..by honouring the demands of our bleeding, our blood gives us something in return. The crazed bitch from irritation hell recedes. In her place arises a side of ourselves with whom we may not-at first- be comfortable. She is a vulnerable, highly perceptive genius who can ponder a given issue and take her world by storm. When we're quiet and bleeding, we stumble upon solutions to dilemmas that've been bugging us all month. Inspiration hits and moments of epiphany rumba 'cross de tundra of our senses. In this mode of existence one does not feel antipathy towards a bodily ritual that so profoundly and reinforces our cuntpower. 
— Inga Muscio, Cunt: A Declaration of Independence
…proved that woman isn't a half but a whole human being, and can stand alone.
— Louisa May Alcott, Jo's Boys
The true republic: men, their rights and nothing more: women, their rights and nothing less.
— Susan B. Anthony
Gradually my whole concept of time changed until I thought of a month as having twenty-five days of humanness and five others when I might just as well have been an animal in a steel trap.
— Florence King
In short, we would discover, as we should already, that logic is in the eye of the logician. (For instance, here's an idea for theorists and logicians: if women are supposed to be less rational and more emotional at the beginning of our menstrual cycle when the female hormone is at its lowest level, then why isn't it logical to say that, in those few days, women behave the most like the way men behave all month long? I leave further improvisation up to you.)
— Gloria Steinem
My grandmother and my two aunts were an exhibition in resilience and resourcefulness and black womanhood. They rarely talked about the unfairness of the world with the words that I use now with my social justice friends, words like "intersectionality" and "equality", "oppression", and "discrimination". They didn't discuss those things because they were too busy living it, navigating it, surviving it.
— Janet Mock, Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love  So Much More
It's easier to love a woman when you can't understand a word she's saying.
— Ann Patchett, Bel Canto
I saw the movie," he said. "I know what it's about. Listen to this. When girls get to be about twelve or so"—he leaned toward us—"their tits bleed.
— Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides
Make the doors upon a woman's wit,and it will out at the casement;shut that, and 'twill out at the key-hole;stop that, 'twill fly with the smoke out at the chimney.
— William Shakespeare
She blushed. It is a beautiful thing when a woman blushes; at that instant her body no longer belongs to her; she doesn't control it; she is at its mercy; oh, can there be anything more beautiful than the sight of a woman violated by her own body!
— Milan Kundera, Immortality
Mrs. MacAndrew shared the common opinion of her sex that a man is always a brute to leave a woman who is attached to him, but that a woman is much to blame if he does.
— W. Somerset Maugham
As far as I'm concerned, men like you were put on this world to entertain women like me.
— Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Fancy Pants
Ah women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent.
— Susan Andersen, Bending the Rules
Well, but you affirm that virtue is only elicited by temptation; - and you think that a woman cannot be too little exposed to temptation, or too little acquainted with vice, or anything connected therewith – It must be, either, that you think she is essentially so vicious, or so feeble-minded that she cannot withstand temptation, - and though she may be pure and innocent as long as she is kept in ignorance and restraint, yet, being destitute of real virtue, to teach her how to sin is at once to make her a sinner...
— Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
There was something factitious and brittle and thereby utterly feminine about her charm which made me want to crush her, even to crunch her. She had a slight cast in one eye which gives her gaze a strange concentrated intensity. Her eyes sparkle, almost as if they were actually emitting sparks. She is electric. And she could run faster in very high-heeled shoes than any girl I ever met.
— Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea
A girl is different. They want things. They need things on a regular schedule. Why, a girl's got purposes you and me can't even imagine. They got ideas in their heads you and me can't even suppose.
— Kent Haruf, Plainsong
It's an odd thing- the softer and more easily hurt a woman is the better she can screw herself up to do what has to be done.
— E. Nesbit, The Railway Children
A lot of people think if they’re shouting the loudest, they’ll be heard, but most people lose respect for you when you lose your cool. You have to maintain everyone’s respect, especially as a woman in a position of power. It’s terrible to be at that kind of disadvantage, where if you yell, people will talk about you behind your back more than if you were a man. Because of those social injustices we face as women, you have to make sure that no one can call you a crazy bitch.
— Taylor Swift
There's not a place in the whole world where everyone isn't willing--no, eager--to give a girl up to a man.
— Rae Carson, Walk on Earth a Stranger
The way you think about yourself determines your reality. You are not being hurt by the way people think about you. Many of those people are a reflection of how you think about yourself.
— Shannon L. Alder
From women's eyes this doctrine I derive:They sparkle still the right Promethean fire;They are the books, the arts, the academes,That show, contain and nourish all the world.
— William Shakespeare, Love's Labour's Lost
Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics.
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
She wanted to be herself again, to recover all that she had been obliged to give up in half a century of servitude that had doubtless made her happy but which, once her husband was dead, did not leave her even the vestiges of her identity.
— Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
I don't think he was ever happy unless someone was in love with him, responding to him like filings to a magnet, helping him to explain himself, promising him something. What it was I do not know. Perhaps they promised that there would always be women in the world who would spend their brightest, freshest, rarest hours to nurse and protect that superiority he cherished in his heart.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Short Stories
For we think back through our mothers if we are women.
— Virginia Woolf
I believe a woman, in order to be a good wife, must be (among other things) both sensual and maternal.
— Elisabeth Elliot, Let Me be a Woman
Some women I talk to are so frightened of growing old. I sense their desperation. They say things like I m not going to live to be old I m not going to live to be dependent. The message young women get from youth culture is that it s wonderful to be young and terrible to grow old. If you think about it it s an impossible dilemma how can you make a good start in life if you are being told at the same time how terrible the finish is Because of ageism many women don t fully commit themselves to living life until they can no longer pass as young. They live their lives with one foot in life and one foot outside it. With age you resolve that. I know the value of each day and I m living with both feet in life. I m living much more fully... The power of the old woman is that because she s outside the system she can attack. And I am determined to attack it. One of the ways in which I am particularly conscious of this stance is when I go down the street. People expect me to move over which means to step on the grass or off the curb. I just woke up one day to the fact that I was moving over. I have no idea how many years I ve been doing that. Now I never move over. I simply keep walking. And we hit full force because the other person is so sure that I am going to move over that he isn t even paying any attention and we simply ram each other. If it s a man with a woman he shows embarrassment because he s just knocked down a five foot seventy year old woman and so he quickly apologises. But he s startled he doesn t understand why I didn t move over he doesn t even know how I got there where I came from. I am invisible to him despite the fact that I am on my own side of the street simply refusing to give him that space he assumes is his
— Barbara MacDonald
I sat down on the edge of a deep soft chair and looked at Mrs Regan. She was worth a stare. She was trouble.
— Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
It is important for women to do something about what they see.
— Roma Tearne, Mosquito
The only deep emotion I occasionally felt in these affairs was gratitude, when all was going well and I was left, not only peace, but freedom to come and go--never kinder and gayer with one woman than when I had just left another's bed, as if I extended to all others the debt I had just contracted toward one of them.
— Albert Camus, The Fall
What did you spend so much time talking about with Ila? If you weren’t dancing with that long-legged fellow, you were talking to her like it was some kind of secret.”“Ila was giving me advice on being a woman,” Egwene replied absently. He began laughing, and she gave him a hooded, dangerous look that he failed to see.“Advice! Nobody tells us how to be men. We just are.”“That,” Egwene said, “is probably why you make such a bad job of it.
— Robert Jordan, The Eye of the World
The self-esteem of western women is founded on physical being (body mass index, youth, beauty). This creates a tricky emphasis on image, but the internalized locus of self-worth saves lives. Western men are very different. In externalizing the source of their self-esteem, they surrender all emotional independence. (Conquest requires two parties, after all.) A man cannot feel like a man without a partner, corporation, team. Manhood is a game played on the terrain of opposites. It thus follows that male sense of self disintegrates when the Other is absent.
— Antonella Gambotto-Burke, The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide
Fresh from a costume fitting, where I had been posing in front of the mirror assuming what I thought was a strong position - arms folded, butch-looking...you know - I met with the woman in charge of Holloway police station. She gave me the most invaluable advice: never let them see you cry, and never cross your arms. When I asked why, she said 'because it is a defensive action and therefore weak.
— Helen Mirren
A society without the authentic and vibrant influence of women is a society that is not fully alive. A culture lacking the vital creativity of women is disadvantaged. Without the bearing of women on world affairs, humanity's already tenuous grip on peace is made even less sure. When women are barred, whether by law, cultural prejudice, or political ideology, from developing their full potential and offering their unique gifts, it is an injustice to women themselves and to humanity as a whole.
— Stephen Catanzarite, Achtung Baby
Did I not feel that the time has come for the questions of women's wrongs to be laid before the public? Did I not believe that women herself must do this work, for women alone understand the height, the depth, the breadth of her degradation. - Seneca Falls Convention, 1848
— Elizabeth Cady Stanton
The best I can say, it's like this. A man's in his skin, see, like a nut in its shell ... It's hard and strong, that shell, and it's all full of him. Full of grand man-meat, man-self. And that's all. That's all there is.A woman's a different thing entirely. Who knows where a woman begins and ends? Listen mistress, I have roots, I have roots deeper than this island. Deeper than the sea, older than the raising of the lands. I go back into the dark ... I go back into the dark! Before the moon I am, what a woman is, a woman of power, a woman's power, deeper than the roots of trees, deeper than the roots of islands, older than the Making, older than the moon. Who dares ask questions of the dark? Who'll ask the dark its name?
— Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu
Women are the nourishing power of the Universe. Whoever has deep respect for women of the world, will remain free from diseases.
— Amit Ray
She had not character enough to take to drinking, and moaned about, slip-shod and in curl-papers, all day.
— William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair
Independence is a complex word in a foreign tongue. To resist occupation, whether you're a nation or merely a woman, you must understand the language of your enemy. Conquest and liberation and democrac and divorce are words that mean squat, basically, when you have hungry children and clothes to get out on the line and it looks like rain.
— Barbara Kingsolver
If you women continue to demand your choice to work, you will so upset the economy of this country that the time will come when you will not have a choice. You will have to work.
— Helen B. Andelin
Maybe that was the root of my dislike for her: she had what I wanted, which earned her my jealousy, and since I was ashamed of myself for wanting it, my scorn, as well.
— Nenia Campbell, Bleeds My Desire
It comes down to this. Some one must wash the dishes. Now, would you expect man, man made in the image of God, to roll up his sleeves and wash the dishes? Why, it would be blasphemy. I know that I am but a rib and so I wash the dishes.
— Marie Jenney Howe, An Anti-Suffrage Monologue
The power of the harasser, the abuser, the rapist depends above all on the silence of women.
— Ursula K. Le Guin
I told Mama and Savannah about Ruben's proposal. That got us to talking about marriage and we laughed and cried some, and missed Papa, and it felt good to belong to each other. I don't feel as lonely today as I have in months. At least I know there are other women around me. 
— Nancy E. Turner, These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901
In the nineteenth century, the central moral challenge was slavery. In the twentieth century, it was the battle against totalitarianism. We believe that in this century the paramount moral challenge will be the struggle for gender equality around the world.
— Nicholas D. Kristof, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
Only a woman can make you feel wrong for doing something right.
— Chris Rock
No: I shall not marry Samuel Fawthrop Wynne.""I ask why? I must have a reason. In all respects he is more than worthy of you."She stood on the hearth; she was pale as the white marble slab and cornice behind her; her eyes flashed large, dilated, unsm
— Charlotte Brontë, Shirley
Sybil’s female forebears had valiantly backed up their husbands as distant embassies were besieged, had given birth on a camel or in the shade of a stricken elephant, had handed around the little gold chocolates while trolls were trying to break into the compound, or had merely stayed at home and nursed such bits of husbands and sons as made it back from endless little wars.  The result was a species of woman who, when duty called, turned into solid steel.
— Terry Pratchett, Thud!
Women who disapprove of men - and there's plenty to disapprove of - should remember how we started out, and how far we had to travel.
— Nick Hornby, High Fidelity
A check girl in peach-bloom Chinese pajamas came over to take my hat and disapprove of my clothes. She had eyes like strange sins.
— Raymond Chandler, The High Window
When I say that we must establish values with originate in sisterhood, I mean to say that we must not accept, even for a moment, male notions of what non-violence is. These notions have never condemned the systematic violence against us. The men who hold these notions have never renounced the male behaviours, privileges, values and conceits which are in and of themselves acts of violence against us.
— Andrea Dworkin
[In 16th century European society] Marriage was the triumphal arch through which women, almost without exception, had to pass in order to reach the public eye. And after marriage followed, in theory, the total self-abnegation of the woman.
— Antonia Fraser, The Wives of Henry VIII
She liked me because she said that we both hated everything and knew that friendship was an act of desperation. She said that for a man I was alright. She said that people were half-way and if it was up to her a lot of people would get killed and a lot of men would be walking around without their balls. She said that they should go on sale for women to hang off their rearview mirrors.
— Henry Rollins, Black Coffee Blues
The less we love her when we woo her,The more we draw a woman in,
— Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin
Some women seem so voluptuous in every sense, richly bountiful and fertile with generous gifts of plenty, sensual and confident in their female strength that they are called "earth mot
— Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the most sweeping civil rights legislation of its day, and included women's rights as part of its reforms. Ironically, the section on women's rights was added by a senator from Virginia who opposed the whole thing and was said to be sure that if he stuck something about womens' rights into it, it would never pass. The bill passed anyway, though, much to the chagrin of a certain wiener from Virginia.
— Adam Selzer, The Smart Aleck's Guide to American History
I would advise a stupid woman always to follow her hsuband - however, a smart woman should rely on her own instincts.
— Peter Prange, The Philosopher's Kiss
So you see, the most vital question then becomes, what type of woman will conquer our hero? If she be of poor quality, he’ll become a slave. But if she be great, then her greatness will elevate the man to greater heights than he could ever have attained on his own.
— Bryan M. Litfin, The Sword
So I'm back again to the eternal question, the one that has plagued me all my life: How Do Other People Do It? How come they were given life's rule book and I missed out? Where was I when God was dispensing capability and cop on? Looking at shoes, probably.
— Marian Keyes, Further Under the Duvet
Catholics are frequently criticised because of the prominence and respect given to the Virgin Mary while simultaneously condemned for not giving enough prominence and respect to women.
— Michael Coren, Why Catholics are Right
It is back to basics here,’ Jason said. ‘What women seek to find in a man is dictated by evolution and the role of the man as a hunter gatherer. Women want a bad boy who will treat them well but not so well that they will have nothing to bitch about to their female friends. Bitching about the male of the species is how females bond with each other…another one of evolutions little jokes.
— J.D. Gallagher
I'm a woman; in so many ways I've been programmed to please. I took the job and spent time hunkered over figures, budgets, charts, and fiscal-year projections. I tried, but I hated it."Working at a job you don't like is the same as going to prison every day," my father used to say. He was right. I felt imprisoned by an impressive title, travel, perks, and a good salary. On the inside, I was miserable and lonely, and I felt as if I was losing myself. I spent weekends working on reports no one read, and I gave presentations that I didn't care about. It made me feel like a sellout and, worse, a fraud.Now set free, like any inmate I had to figure out what to do with the rest of my life.
— Kathleen Flinn, The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry: Love, Laughter, and Tears at the World's Most Famous Cooking School
Goddammit! How does the world keep spinning with women on the planet?"Ian St. John in THE POMPEII SCROLL
— Jacqueline LaTourrette
Most women are more into real estate than sex. They want to own you.
— Stephen Dobyns, Eating Naked: Stories
Women do not become exhausted they only exhaust others.
— Robert Jordan, Lord of Chaos
The woman who makes a sweet, beautiful home, filling it with love and prayer and purity, is doing something better than anything else her hands could find to do beneath the skies.
— J.R.    Miller, Home-Making
DON PEDROCome, lady, come; you have lost the heart of Signior Benedick.BEATRICEIndeed, my lord, he lent it me awhile; and I gave him use for it, a double heart for his single one: marry, once before he won it of me with false dice, therefore your grace may well say I have lost it.DON PEDROYou have put him down, lady, you have put him down.BEATRICESo I would not he should do me, my lord, lest I should prove the mother of fools.
— William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing
Rumours voiced by women come to nothing.
— Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Civilized Man says: I am Self, I am Master, all the rest is other--outside, below, underneath, subservient. I own, I use, I explore, I exploit, I control. What I do is what matters. What I want is what matter is for. I am that I am, and the rest is women & wilderness, to be used as I see fit.
— Ursula K. Le Guin
I discovered that seventeen-year-old girls have such huge verbal energy that their brain drives them to expend it every twenty seconds. On the third day I decided I had to find her a boyfriend -- if possible, a deaf one.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game
Even the most powerful woman needs a place to unwind.
— Barbara Taylor Bradford, Being Elizabeth
Woman" in the abstract is young, and, we assume, charming. As they get older they pass off the stage, somehow, into private ownership mostly, or out of it altogether.
— Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland
And while you and the rest of your kind are battling together—year after year—for this special privilege of being 'bored to death,' the 'real girl' that you're asking about, the marvelous girl, the girl with the big, beautiful, unspoken thoughts in her head, the girl with the big, brave, undone deeds in her heart, the girl that stories are made of, the girl whom you call 'improbable'—is moping off alone in some dark, cold corner—or sitting forlornly partnerless against the bleak wall of the ballroom—or hiding shyly up in the dressing-room—waiting to be discovered!
— Eleanor Hallowell Abbott, Little Eve Edgarton
He found Luciana sitting alone at a table in the Allied officers' night club, where the drunken Anzac major who had brought her there had been stupid enough to desert her for the ribald company of some singing comrades at the bar."All right, I'll dance with you," she said, before Yossarian could even speak. "But I won't let you sleep with me.""Who asked you?" Yossarian asked her."You don't want to sleep with me?" she exclaimed with surprise."I don't want to dance with you.
— Joseph Heller, Catch-22
how lacking in intuition men could be in persuading themselves that mending some stranger's socks, and attending to his comfort, could content a woman...
— Daphne du Maurier, The Glass-Blowers
This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.
— Virginia Woolf
Are you listening, Jasper? Sometimes you'll be walking in the city late at night, and a woman walking in front of you will spin her head around and then cross the street simply because some members of your gender rape women and molest children!
— Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole
When I was extremely young and shockingly stupid, I thought you weren't supposed to ever get angry at anybody you cared about (lest you suspect I'm exaggerating the "shockingly stupid" part, I also thought Mount Rushmore was a natural phenomenon). I honestly believed that people who were truly in love would never dream of having a good, old-fashioned, knock-down, drag-out fight. I guess when you're the type of girl who walks around thinking that the wind just sort of sculpted Teddy Roosevelt into the side of a mountain, the concept of a fairy-tale relationship makes total sense.
— Lisa Kogan, Someone Will Be with You Shortly: Notes from a Perfectly Imperfect Life
Papa, I'm ashamed that you think women are so simple. We can make decisions for ourselves too, you know. I'm not a child or a baby anymore, so I'm allowed to speak my mind. And if you don't wish to hear it, just tell me so and I'll go into another room-but I'll speak it anyway. I want this for myself as much as I've never wanted the diplomatic corps and I'm going to get it-even if I have to do it alone. Excuse me.
— Steve Kluger
Now that I think about it, maybe he is a werewolf. I can picture him lunging over the moors in hot pursuit of his prey, and I'm certain that he wouldn't think twice about eating an innocent bystander. I'll watch him closely at the next full moon. He's asked me to go dancing tomorrow--perhaps I should wear a high collar. Oh, that's vampires, isn't it? I think I am a little giddy. (After meeting Mr. Markham V. Reynolds, Jr.)
— Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
It seems to Henry, as he takes his seat in his usual middle pew, that women are far braver than men
— Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge
Magdalena pulls me away by the arm. “I am the stronger one of Titus and I,” she says over the marketplace din. “Woman are always the stronger sex.” She smiles to herself. “The trick is not appearing to be so.
— Lynn Cullen, I am Rembrandt's Daughter
Few beautiful women were willing to indicate in public that they belonged to someone. I had known enough women to realize this. I accepted them for what they were and love came hard and very seldom. When it did it was usually for the wrong reasons. One simply became tired of holding back love and let it go because it needed some place to go. Then, usually, there was trouble.
— Charles Bukowski, Women
Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh find out. Maybe it's some place way off in de ocean where de black man is in power, but we don't know nothin' but what we see. 
— Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
And oh, how she pitched herself into things. She would draw pictures all day long for weeks on end, then throw out the pencils and never draw another thing. Then it was embroidery with her, she had to learn it, and she'd make the most beautiful thing, fussing at herself for the least little mistake, then throw down the needles and be done with that forevermore. I never saw a child so changeable. It was as though she was looking for something to which she could give herself, and she never found it. Least ways not while she was a little girl.
— Anne Rice, The Witching Hour
Woman's virtue is man's greatest invention.
— Cornelia Otis Skinner
It is not Atlas who carries the world on his shoulders, but woman; and sometimes she plays with it as with a ball.
— Henryk Sienkiewicz
I have periods now, like normal girls; I too am among the knowing, I too can sit out volleyball games and go to the nurse's for aspirin and waddle along the halls with a pad like a flattened rabbit tail wadded between my legs, sopping with liver-colored blood.
— Margaret Atwood, CAT'S EYE.
Only in hindsight can we see that out fears and worries were unwarranted, that insecurities and doubts were just illussions, or that we should have taken a risk or dared something new sooner.
— Ellyn Spragins
Why, why, her mind stuttered, I believe women could manage everything in the world without men’s help--except having babies, and God knows, no woman in her right mind would have babies if she could help it.
— Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
Men, some to business take, some to pleasure take; but every woman is at heart a rake
— Alexander Pope, Moral Essays
God, this is why I can never live with women. They go off into corners and think, maybe it’s this, maybe it’s that. Ask, woman. Ask.
— Sophie Page, To Marry a Prince
Since men are not equals in white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal class structure, which men do women want to be equal to?
— bell hooks
It simply isn’t a woman’s nature to be silent for prolonged periods of time.
— Maya Banks, In Bed with a Highlander
You're the most unknown famous man I ever met
— Charles Bukowski, Women
Imagine a great net spread across the universe. Each juncture is a “being,” and if we imagine that consciousness as a drop of dew, we can see that in each shining drop resides the reflection of every other drop on the net.
— Sandy Boucher, Opening the Lotus: A Woman's Guide to Buddhism
The anti-feminism bacllash has been set off not by women's achievement of full equality but by the increased possibility that they might win it. It is a pre-emptive strike that stops women long before they reach the finishing line.
— Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women
Women were the reason I became a monk - and, ah, the reason I switched back.
— Chris Avellone
That was what it meant to be a woman: to live in an unbearable agony hidden for a time behind smoke and mirrors.
— Mary Pauline Lowry, The Earthquake Machine
There's too much coldness in the world," I told her. "If people would only talk things out together it would help.
— Charles Bukowski
Fashion is neither moral or immoral, but it is for rebuilding the morale.
— Karl Lagerfeld
I am tempted to think that to be despised by her sex is a very great compliment to a woman.
— Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad
For men, the softer emotions are always intertwined with power and pride. That was why Karna waited for me to plead with him though he could have stopped my suffering with a single world. That was why he turned on me when I refused to ask for his pity. That was why he incited Dussasan to an action that was against the code of honor by which he lived his life. He knew he would regret it—in his fierce smile there had already been a glint of pain.But was a woman's heart any purer, in the end?That was the final truth I learned. All this time I'd thought myself better than my father, better than all those men who inflicted harm on a thousand innocents in order to punish the one man who had wronged them. I'd thought myself above the cravings that drove him. But I, too, was tainted with them, vengeance encoded into my blood. When the moment came I couldn't resist it, no more than a dog can resist chewing a bone that, splintering, makes his mouth bleed.Already I was storing these lessons inside me. I would use them over the long years of exile to gain what I wanted, no matter what its price.But Krishna, the slippery one, the one who had offered me a different solace, Krishna with his disappointed eyes—what was the lesson he'd tried to teach?
— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions
So,” Wanda cried, “a woman in furs is nothing more than a large cat, a charged electric battery?
— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs
The happiness of man is: I will. The happiness of woman is: he wills. ‘Behold, just now the world became perfect!’—thus thinks every woman when she obeys out of entire love. And women must obey and find a depth for her surface. Surface is the disposition of woman: a mobile, stormy film over shallow water. Man’s disposition, however, is deep; his river roars in subterranean caves: woman feels his strength but does not comprehend it.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
‎Does anyone truly understand females? ...Their behavior is opposite of everything in the natural order and flies in the face of logic.
— Mary Lydon Simonsen, The Perfect Bride for Mr. Darcy
Sometimes by a woodland stream he watched the water rush over the pebbled bed, its tiny modulations of bounce and flow. A woman's body was like that. If you watched it carefully enough you could see how it moved to the rhythm of the world, the deep rhythm, the music below the music, the truth below the truth. He believed in this hidden truth the way other men believed in God or love, believed that truth was in fact always hidden, that the apparent, the overt, was invariably a kind of lie.
— Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence
I, a woman, find wearing high heels agreeable only on the very rare occasion that (1) I will be ferried between destinations upon a palanquin or (2) I am going to a cocktail party and, at five feet two, don't want to spend the evening discussing the latest movies with somebody's nipples.
— Lauren Collins
UN studies conducted in more than forty developing countries show that the birth rate falls as women gain equality... I believe income-earning opportunities that empower poor women ... will have more impact on curbing population growth that the current system of "encouraging" family planning practices through intimidation tactics.. Family planning should be left to the family.
— Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty
The participation if women in some armies in the world is in reality only symbolic. The talk about the role of Zionist women in fighting with the combat units of the enemy in the war of 5 June 1967 was intended more as propaganda than anything real or substantial. It was calculated to intensify and compound the adverse psychological effects of the war by exploiting the backward outlook of large sections of Arab society and their role in the community. The intention was to achieve adverse psychological effects by saying to Arabs that they were defeated, in 1967, by women.
— Saddam Hussein, The Revolution and Woman in Iraq
Women aren't very bright," Rip says. "Studies have been done.
— Bret Easton Ellis, Imperial Bedrooms
Seated by her side in the narrow cabin, pressing cold compresses to her forehead and holding her while she vomited, he felt profoundly happy....
— Isabel Allende
I became known as Lily Casey, the mustang-breaking, poker-playing, horse-race-winning schoolmarm of Coconino County, and it wasn't half bad to be in place where no one had a problem with a woman having a moniker like that.
— Jeannette Walls, Half Broke Horses
She carried a thousand lights inside her heart, and a thousand lights carried her.
— Vatsal Surti, 20
We [-women and men-] are all equal in our creaturehood, whatever our sex, color, age, background, or abilities. But we are all different in the functions we were created to perform, as different as water from stones, and engineering from imaginative fiction.
— Mary McDermott Shideler
The last words he said to me when I bade him good-night were:Tell Amy it's no good coming after me. Anyhow, I shall change my hotel, so she wouldn't be able to find me.'My own impression is that she's well rid of you,' I said.My dear fellow, I only hope you'll be able to make her see it. But women are very unintelligent.
— W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence
You'll want to read books - novels, because ladies are frivolous; poetry because ladies are sentimental; and sermons, because we are pious. If you must read essays, Mr. Emerson might be best. Your gentleman may have a nodding acquaintance with his works.
— Donald McCaig
If one can know how good a city is by its smell, one should know how good a society is by the women's status.
— Santosh Kalwar
Well, the lion is a big ol’ coward, mostly. If you want trouble, you want to tangle with the lioness. They’re killers, and they hunt together. It’s the same everywhere. If you want big grief, look to the ladies.
— Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment
Where did all the women come from? The supply was endless. Each one of them was individual, different. Their pussies were different, their kisses were different, their breasts were different, but no man could drink them all, there were too many of them, crossing their legs, driving men mad. What a feast!
— Charles Bukowski, Women
Well, in the first place girls never marry the men they flirt with. Girls don't think it right.
— Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
There were no judgments to be made, yet out of necessity one had to select. Beyond good and evil was all right in theory, but to go on living one had to select: some were kinder than others, some were simply more interested in you, and sometimes the outwardly beautiful and inwardly cold were necessary. The kinder ones fucked better, really, and after you were around them a while they seemed beautiful because they were.
— Charles Bukowski, Women
There is a latent fairy in all women, but look how carefully we have to secrete her in order to be taken seriously. And fairies come in all shapes, colours, sizes and types, they don't have to be fluffy. They can be demanding and furious if hey like. They do, however, have to wear a tiara. That much is compulsory.
— Dawn French, A Tiny Bit Marvellous
People who start a sentence with personally (and they're always women) ought to be thrown to the lions. It's a repulsive habit.
— Georgette Heyer, Death in the Stocks
There is the vanity training, the obedience training, the self-effacement training, the deference training, the dependency training, the passivity training, the rivalry training, the stupidity training, the placation training. How am I to put this together with my human life, my intellectual life, my solitude, my transcendence, my brains, and my fearful, fearful ambition? I failed miserably and thought it was my own fault. You can't unite woman and human any more than you can unite matter and anti-matter; they are designed to not to be stable together and they make just as big an explosion inside the head of the unfortunate girl who believes in both.
— Joanna Russ, The Female Man