c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
[…] and the only reason he came out at all, during that period after he left Frankie, when he wanted to go away and hide forever, was the crazy compulsion with which we resolved all the tangled impulses of our lives—the need to dance.
— Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance
Temujin watched Borte's ballet, her elegance on the fulcrum of her hips.
— Bryn  Hammond, Amgalant One: The Old Ideal
I dance with hopes and sing along with possibilities.
— Debasish Mridha
There are different forms of seduction, and the kind I have witnessed in Persian dancers is so unique, such a mixture of subtlety and brazenness, I cannot find a Western equivalent to compare it to. I have seen women of vastly different backgrounds take on that same expression: a hazy, lazy, flirtatious look in their eyes. . . . This sort of seduction is elusive; it is sinewy and tactile. It twists, twirls, winds and unwinds. Hands curl and uncurl while the waist seems to coil and recoil. . . . It is openly seductive but not surrendering.
— Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran
Failure is always louder than success. But there is an accumulation of all the things you don’t do wrong, and that becomes your confidence. You can even get to the point where that confidence lasts longer than the dance. Seconds at first. Then minutes. Then maybe it’ll be there when you’re walking into a party, or meeting people after a show. You know you have something desirable, and you know you can move.
— David Levithan, How They Met, and Other Stories
Emma was horrified and transfixed at the same time. She was watching Jonah Kinlock doing what he did best. There was a certain macabre beauty in watching form and function wedded together. In Jonah's case, a dance of beauty and death.
— Cinda Williams Chima, The Sorcerer Heir
Music is the most abstract of the arts; dance, the most concrete.
— Marty Rubin
My dance teacher said "you are not a real dancer until your toes bleed from pointing all day" so I did just that. At that time when I went back to her she said "bravo. You have learned to live with pain. You are a real dancer.
— Dancer
When you dance, you measure distance as if it’s a solid thing; you make precise judgments every time two bodies exist in relation to each other. So I knew right away the definition of the space between us.
— David Levithan, How They Met, and Other Stories
If you’re not already at practice after watching BC One, you’re fucking up.
— Mohammed iro
He dances all night, utterly naked and composed of nothing but six and a half feet of pale sinew. He could dance to a field of crickets, to the sound of rain on a tin roof, to a stampede.
— Thomm Quackenbush, Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft
I have worked like a dog all my life, honey. Dancing, as Fred Astaire said, is next to ditch-digging. You sweat and you slave and the audience doesn’t think you have a brain in your head.
— Ann Miller
You are a good dancer in your soul. Let's release it!
— Lie Kjeldsen
The beautiful wooden board on a stand in my father’s study. The gleaming ivory pieces. The stern king. The haughty queen. The noble knight. The pious bishop. And the game itself, the way each piece contributed its individual power to the whole. It was simple. It was complex. It was savage; it was elegant. It was a dance; it was a war. It was finite and eternal. It was life.
— Rick Yancey, The Infinite Sea
Come dance with me," he says, taking my hand, and someday I'll explain to him that I already am.
— Erin McCahan, Love and Other Foreign Words
Be like a peacock and dance with all of your beauty.
— Debasish Mridha
Learn to dance in the storm so when life hands you a stormy weather, you just glide through it
— Ikechukwu Izuakor
Truth be told, you gotta dance barefoot if you really want to feel the earth move.
— Edward R Hackemer
Love loves anarchy. It loves to wreak havoc. It loves to dance atop the ruins.
— Paul Russell, The Coming Storm
For the company to assemble at a late hour and engage in unusual, exciting and severe exercise throughout the entire night, is often too great a tax upon the physical system. To dress too thinly, and in a state of perspiration to be exposed, as ladies at the ball frequently are, to draughts of cold, is oftentimes to plant the seeds of a disease from which they never recover. Again, to come in contact, as ladies are liable to, more especially at the public ball, with disreputable men, is sometimes to form alliances that will make a lifetime of sorrow.' —Thomas E. Hill, Evils of the Ball, 1883
— Alice  Simpson, Ballroom
This was different. It had synths droning and sending saltwater waves under my feet. It had drumbeats bursting like fireworks, rumbling the furniture out of place, and then a crazy, irregular, disharmonious, spiral crescendo of pure electric noise, like a typhoon dragging our bodies into it. It featured brass orchestras and choirs of mermaids and a piano in Iceland, all of them right there, visible, touchable, in Axton House. It shook us, fucked us, suspended us far above the reach of Help bouncing on his hind legs. It spoke of magenta sunsets and plastic patio chairs growing moss under summer storms rolling on caterpillar tracks. It sprinkled a bokeh of car lights rushing through night highways and slapped our faces like the wind at a hundred and twenty miles an hour. It pictured Niamh playing guitar, washed up naked on a beach in Fiji.
— Edgar Cantero, The Supernatural Enhancements
I think what creates a winner is a person who can connect with their partner - another human being.. connect with their soul
— Patrick Swayze
Dancing is to music what a beloved wife is to her husband. Both of them are so in love, you can't separate them.
— Paul Bamikole
Do you dance? Or are you strictly a prop-up-the-wall-with-a-beer kind of guy?""I dance. But I don't shag."She laughed. "I think we've just established that you do"."Not Austin Powers shagging. It's A Carolina thing. A dance.
— Virginia Kantra, Carolina Blues
I think inspiration is strongest when I find a balance between observation and participation. You can’t write about what it means to dance by watching from the bleachers.
— Chelsey Philpot
Growing up in NYC,The broken sidewalks, graffiti filled subways, and humid Laundromats, did not offer solace. I found solace in the strings of my violin, in my ballet slippers at the studio, and while gazing at frescoes in the halls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was always in the Arts that my soul was replenished.
— Susan Anne Russell
No matter how unfamiliar my world becomes, I can always find my way home when I dance.
— Marquita Burke-DeJesus, Radically Ordinary
Life is the muse which perfectly rhymes,Plays with the words and fills empty lines.For some, life is battle for others, it’s danceFor rich it is a party for the poor it is chance.For lovers, it’s dizziness, it’s a dream, it’s romanceFor Artist it’s drop of the rain on his hands.For a writer, it’s a story for an actor it’s stageFor painter it’s a canvas for thief, it’s the cage.For you it might be the money you blewFor someone the entire life could be you!
— Nino Varsimashvili
Music was not so very different from mathematics. It was all just patterns and sequences. The only difference was that they hung in the air instead of on a piece of paper. Dancing was a grand equation. One side was sound, the other movement. The dancer's job was to make them equal.
— Julia Quinn, The Sum of All Kisses
Into each dance must be packed the panic and ecstasy of her last moment of life, for underneath was death.
— Edna St. Vincent Millay
A light like the glint of water on dewy grass flashed from under her feet as she danced.
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
If you get all tangled up, just tango on.
— Al Pacino in Scent of Woman
Fly high, feel the music, and forever dance free
— Phoenix Z Courtney
The Golds dance in pairs,Obsidians in threes, Grays in dozens. We dance alone, because only alone do Helldivers drill.~Uncle Narol
— Pierce Brown
No one is born beneath this dance. This dance gives birth to you.
— Holly Lynn Payne, DAMASCENA - The Tale of Roses and Rumi
Watching dance isn't about picking up moves. It's about noting the relationships between motion and space and rhythm to absorb a greater concept
— Kathryn Craft, The Art of Falling
This maze is laid out such that should you step through the correct path, by its end you will have learned the most extraordinary dance, such that any coronation would be proud to see you at the height of its feast, such that any holy dervish would weep and call you his devotion.""I think that is very strange—""All things are strange which are worth knowing.
— Catherynne M. Valente, In the Cities of Coin and Spice
Without any music, I started to dance. I wanted the music to be inside me, or at least for it to appear that way. I imagined myself the lead with an audience here to see me perform in a famous ballet. In my fantasy, there was no panic attack. I was free to dance. Free to be me.
— Lesa Howard, Phantom's Dance
We danced forever, and not nearly long enough. Now that I faced him, I could touch him, too, rather than self-consciously drip through his fingers. I explored his back, fingertips discovering ridges of his spine, muscles, a place below his left shoulder blade that made him writhe, as if struggling not to laugh. I tickled him again, devouring the sensation of his chest against my cheek.
— Jodi Meadows, Incarnate
Dance is not dance, if you don't do it from your heart.
— Maha
It was so much more. You allowed your feelings to spill onto the stage in a way everyone in that room could relate to. Angela inspired it, perhaps, but the specifics you chose made a universal statement. That is the art of choreography.
— Kathryn Craft, The Art of Falling
Nature paces its change in gradual steps, and in this time of renewal, I danced in sync to the rhythm of life.
— Lynn C. Tolson, Beyond the Tears: A True Survivor's Story
Nature [provides] with the excitement of the dance in the interest of the reproduction of the species.
— Pitigrilli, Cocaine
Love songs or poetry?Ambrose: Love songs–you get the best of both, poetry set to music.And you can't dance to poetry.
— Amy Harmon, Making Faces
I wish to live a life that causes my soul to dance inside my body.
— Dele Olanubi via bealightinthedark
Dancing can be addictive if you like it.
— J. Lynn, Wait for You
You're not allowed to have legs and not use them.Dance.
— Dianna Hardy, Heart Of The Wolf
May I see your dance card?”“Don’t you believe me?” She presented it to him with a flourish.He ran his fingers down the list of names.“Hmm . . . Waterburn? Bastard. D’Andre. Definitely a worthless bastard. Lord Camber, a thoroughgoing bastard. Lord Michaelson? Bastard. Peter Cheswick? Bast—”She snatched it from him, laughing.“I wouldn’t dance a waltz with you, anyway, Lord Dryden.”“No?”“You might accidentally lock eyes with Lisbeth Redmond, stumble, and fling me across the room to avoid crushing my feet.
— Julie Anne Long, How the Marquess Was Won
Women, as well as men, in all ages and in all places, have danced on the earth, danced the life dance, danced joy, danced grief, danced despair, and danced hope. Literally and metaphorically, by their very lives.
— Margaret Laurence, Dance on the Earth: a Memoir
The waltz was the only way a young couple could touch one another, and even through gloves I could feel the heat of your grandfather's touch,'she'd tell Luc, with a wicked glimmer in her eye.
— Fiona McIntosh, The Lavender Keeper
Get your dance on today...move some energy around...visualize everything as you want it to be...Fullness, Completeness...You!
— Sereda Aleta Dailey, The Oracle of Poetic Wisdom
For when Iwaltzed with Chris, I'd made him someone else.
— V.C. Andrews, Flowers in the Attic
Against a set of desolate scenery, amid spectral crags and livid mountains of ash, beneath the funereal daylight of slopes illuminated in blue, she personified the spirit of the witches' sabbat. Morbid and voluptuous, sometimes with extenuated grace and infinite lassitude, she seemed to carry the burden of a criminal beauty, a beauty charged with all the sins cf the multitude. She fell again and again upon her pliant legs, and as she outlined the symbolic gestures of her two beautiful dead arms she seemed to be towing them behind her. Then, the vertigo of the abyss took hold of her again, and like one possessed she stood on point, holding herself fully erect from top to toe, like a spike of flesh and shadows. Her arms, weighed down just a few moments earlier, became menacing, demoniac, and audacious. Twisting like a screw, she whirled around, like a winnowing-machine - no, like a great lily stirred by a storm-wind. Clownish and macabre, a nacreous gleam showed between her lips... oh, that cruel and sardonic smile, and the two deep pools of her terrible eyes!Ize Kranile!
— Jean Lorrain, Monsieur De Phocas
Chris was in the rocker, fully clothed, and was strumming idly onCory's guitar. "Dance, ballerina, dance," he softly chanted, and hissinging voice wasn't bad at all. Maybe we could work as musicians---atrio -if Carrie ever recovered enough to want a voice again.
— V.C. Andrews, Flowers in the Attic
Is this the part where i'm gonna dance.?
— Ingrid Dizon
Dance Like A Pronunciation
— Gagan Khiwani
I made the sympathetic face, and the interested face, and even the impressed face. I did not say, 'In the name of all that is holy, cease this incessant drivel, you pretentious ass.
— Meg Howrey, The Cranes Dance
They had met at a club fifteen years before, Etta and Magnus. He had convinced her to dance with him, and she said she had been in love by the end of the song. He told her he had been in love before the beginning.
— Cassandra Clare, Saving Raphael Santiago
I should have danced more when I had no fear of falling.
— Kim Cormack
Most dancers find their confidence in dancing. Right is mere millimeters away from wrong. Failure is always louder than success. But there is an accumulation of all the things you don’t do wrong, and it becomes your confidence. You can even get to the point where confidence lasts longer than the dance. Seconds at first. Then minutes. Then maybe it’ll be there when you’re walking into a party, or meeting people after a show. You know you have something desirable, and you know you can move.
— David Levithan, How They Met, and Other Stories
Beck behaved himself, though it was really difficult, especially during the slow dances when they were so tantalizingly close. He savoured the feel of her against his body, the light scent of her perfume, the in her eyes that told him he was the center of her universe. It was a new and totally overwhelming experience.
— Jana Oliver, Foretold
Individuals who have learned to endure and persevere through the storms of hardships are those who can dance in the rain during a storm.
— Ellen J. Barrier
Dancers churned around them like storm tossed flowers, their heads held to either side as they whirled with abandonment.“Look at them,” he whispered, his voice in her ear. “Have you ever seen anything like it? They have everything, don’t they? Everything except a single care to dwell on.
— Kelly Creagh, Nevermore
The dense fog manifests ever-living gravestones, the tunes of decadence, the hearts that were doomed to dance alone. Here lies untouched beauty, a brittle dream, an unseen sea-born nightmare, an isolated acheirous harf, fishbones without flesh, a face without letters, the hypnotic power o Apollonian destruction. Ashes kiss the grapefruit essential oil skin, the soul beats with eaten sons and daughters, soaking wet serpents with cuspid tongues lollop for legendary goddesses.
— Laura Gentile, Seraphic Addiction
He seems to be supporting her tenderly. But what holds them together is difficult to pin down.In her memoir, she wrote that he once dropped her on her hip very painfully, and she had the distinct impression he’d done it on purpose.What really goes on between two people is very difficult to say.
— Barbara Browning, I'm Trying to Reach You
All dancers are creator,and all dancers are creats own world,to produce with music or rythm".
— Avani pagar
You may make love in dancing as well as sitting.
— Aphra Behn, The Emperor of the Moon: A Dialogue-Pantomime; With Alterations, and the Addition of Several Airs, Duets, and Choruses, Selected
There was some rhythm, some ecstasy in this dance of flight that expressed the fact that happiness which touches depths and rises beyond physical confines is as old as consciousness, yet ever renewed, and is like the glorying flight of the birds
— Elyne Mitchell, On the Trail of the Silver Brumby
Hey wedding DJ, there is no way in hell I'm paying you $1,000 when all you're doing is plugging your iPod into the sound system #AHOLE
— A.O. Storm, An A-Hole Gets Married
Blood cannot be without dancing. There is no dancing without blood.
— Cameron Conaway, Bonemeal
A man whose eyes love opens risks his soul -His dancing breaks beyond the mind's control.
— Farid ud-Din Attar, The Conference of the Birds
When you step from the wings onto the stage you go from total blackness to a blinding hot glare. After a moment you adjust, but there is that moment. like being inside lightning.
— Meg Howrey, The Cranes Dance
I like the way he danced. And then I like the way we danced together.
— Anita Diamant, Good Harbor
He danced the way he made love, with passion and tenderness and spirit, communicating with hands and eyes the most subtle messages, tenderly making up for Lila's awkwardness. In his lashes and his hair, mist clung in tiny diamond drops. She could not take her eyes from him.
— Ruth Wind, Light of Day
You consider me for a moment, perhaps balancing the weight of your fear against the loneliness you will later feel in your room if you do not speak now
— Guy Mankowski, Letters From Yelena
Yatho Hasta thatho Drishti, Yatho Drishti thatho ManahYatho Manah thatho Bhaava, Yatho Bhaava thatho Rasa
— Natyashastra
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,How can we know the dancer from the dance?
— W.B. Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
Dance comes naturally to us when we're little but fades when we get older. Too many people let the stresses of life get them wound up. I think there's something to be said for cutting loose and having a good time. And hey, people even danced in Bible days.
— Janice  Thompson, Picture Perfect
So what, you assumed you’d show up before the dance and I’d magically be ready to go? I need warning to get beautiful.
— S.M. Reine, Long Night Moon
I am love, I am music, she thinks. Let’s dance.
— Paulo Coelho
Those are big collisions, Hally. They make for a lot of bruises. People get hurt in all that bumping, and we're sick and tired of it now. It's been going on for too long. Are we never going to get it right?...Learn to dance life like champions instead of always being just a bunch of beginners at it?
— Athol Fugard, Master Harold...and the boys
We act as a conduit for the observers’ unexpressed desires, the silent appreciation they may contain for anything; a lover, a river, a building even
— Guy Mankowski
So just bust a move!
— Ava J. Abramowitz
There is no one Reality,There is only one's Perception.Love Never Fails.keep doing The Happy Dance
— Silvina Faiella Miller
Jim Crow, moreover, was seen executing his world-renowned dance, in gingerbread.
— Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables
Show me slowly what I onlyknow the limits ofDance me to the end of love
— Leonard Cohen, Leonard Cohen: Poems and Songs
Dance with me, Death, I am ready.
— Terry Goodkind, Stone of Tears
The Argentine tango isn't here to play nicely with the other children. The Argentine tango is here to seduce your women, spill things on your rug, and sneak out your bedroom window in the middle of the night.
— Seanan McGuire, Discount Armageddon
My advice for life: dance and sing your song while the party is still on.
— Rasheed Ogunlaru
Dance is the only art of which we ourselves are the stuff of which it is made.
— Ted Shawn
Fabulous" Jack said, reaching down and plucking a crimson flower. A small scream sounded from it as he severed the stem. He smiled maliciously, then started stomping with abandon through the beds of blossoms, a chorus of tinny, shrill screams punctuating every step.
— Kiersten White, Endlessly
Life is a dance of nature.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
Talk about dance? Dance is not something to talk about. Dance is to dance.
— Peter Saint James
It's a pelvis thrust, not a pelvic wiggle.
— Jessica Verday, Enthralled: Paranormal Diversions
I am grateful to those who are keepers of the groove. The babies and the grandmas who hang on to it and help us remember when we forget that any kind of dancing is better than no dancing at all.
— Linda Barry
What I have to tell you is this: I am resolved that dancing is to be my path. I know that to be a dancer is to be considered in our world little more than a prostitute. But you cannot imagine what is happening here in Berlin. It is different back home, but in Europe dance is being reborn as something more than cheap entertainment by loose women.
— Wendy Buonaventura, Midnight Rose: a life of Maud Allan
And yet if I drew my thoughts back from him, what life would I have? I would be like a dancer who had practiced since childhood for a performance she would never give.
— Arthur Golden
Any earthly production would have been cancelled at the slightest suggestion of rain, but this was William’s Stage—it was William’s call—and if the children danced and the congregation remained transfixed, the show would go on.
— Jake Vander-Ark, The Brandywine Prophet
Labour is blossoming or dancing whereThe body is not bruised to pleasure soul.
— W.B. Yeats, The Tower
Hema thought of Shiva, her personal deity, and how the only sensible response to the madness of life . . . was to cultivate a kind of madness within, to perform the mad dance of Shiva, . . . to rock and sway and flap six arms and six legs to an inner tune. Hema moved gently . . . she danced as if her minimalist gestures were shorthand for a much larger, fuller, reckless dance, one that held the whole world together, kept it from extinction.
— Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone
How inappropriate,’ Lila said coldly. ‘Who’d ever dream of showing up at a dance in a wheelchair? What does she think she’s going to do all night?
— Francine Pascal, Crash Landing!
Let us fly, Madam Harpy Queen. Show me how you dance on the wind.
— Lita Burke, Ephraim's Curious Device
As he stood up and gathered his attaché case and notebook, I reminded him that it had already been three weeks -- and counting.
— Jevon L. Mack, Love, Song & Dance
I danced frightening things. They were frightened of me and therefore thought that I wanted to kill them. I did not want to kill anyone. I loved everyone, but no one loved me, and therefore I became nervous.
— Vaslav Nijinsky, The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky
In answer to a question you asked me not a long ago, a question I didn’t answer at the time…it is worth it. Love is a perilous dance too, you see. And if we stop dancing, we’ll die.Don’t ever stop dancing.
— Kate Avery Ellison, Frost
How did she do it, I'd always wondered. Dancing with Q., I understood. Once in a while the pain falls asleep on the job, and the experienced sufferer knows enough to seize such moments swiftly and without thought - for when we realize we're actually dancing, the jolt of joy wakens the pain.Laura Acosta
— Lynne Sharon Schwartz
I was not ladylike, nor was I manly. I was something else altogether. There were so many different ways to be beautiful.
— Michael Cunningham, A Home at the End of the World
It's a good thing I was born a girl, otherwise I'd be a drag queen.
— Dolly Parton
Different though the sexes are, they inter-mix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above. 
— Virginia Woolf
Once upon a time there was a woman who was just like all women. And she married a man who was just like all men. And they had some children who were just like all children. And it rained all day.The woman had to skewer the hole in the kitchen sink, when it was blocked up.The man went to the pub every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. The other nights he mended his broken bicycle, did the pool coupons, and longed for money and power.The woman read love stories and longed for things to be different.The children fought and yelled and played and had scabs on their knees.In the end they all died.
— Elizabeth Smart, The Assumption of Rogues and Rascals
As far as I was concerned men were something you had around the place, not particularly interesting, but quite harmless. I had never shown the slightest feeling for them, and apart from my never wearing a skirt, saw nothing else in common between us.
— Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are 'sides,' and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the Headmaster himself a highly ornamental pot.
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
…gender is not sane. It's not sane to call a rainbow black and white.
— Kate Bornstein
Woah,' I said, blocking the doorway. 'You can't come in here. This is the girls' r
— Adam Rex, The True Meaning of Smekday
There’s something different about when a female directs versus a male. The level of maturity, mutual respect, and energy that you get from a female director is so different. I’ve worked with male directors who aren’t good, and no one says anything about it, but then we had one female director who was kind of all over the place and everyone complained. It’s so gendered. I feel safer when working with a female director because I know it’s from a female gaze.
— Rowan Blanchard
The first question we usually ask new parents is : “Is it a boy or a girl ?”.There is a great answer to that one going around : “We don’t know ; it hasn’t told us yet.” Personally, I think no question containing “either/or” deserves a serious answer, and that includes the question of gender.
— Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us
It's like chess, you know. The Queen saves the King.
— Terry Pratchett, The Shepherd's Crown
People say I'm not much of a girl either," Tiger Lily said.She thought of Tik Tok, who was fond of saying that people were all bits of each thing, boy and girl.
— Jodi Lynn Anderson, Tiger Lily
[N]ow that I am drawing to the close of this work, in which I have spoken of so many important things done by the Americans, to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply: To the superiority of their women.
— Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
I have grown up to be many things, but dainty sure as hell isn't one of them.
— Lynn Peril, Pink Think: Becoming a Woman in Many Uneasy Lessons
I was not really surprised by what he was saying. A lot of people felt that way. Especially men. There was a quantity of things that men hated. Or had no use for, as they said. And that was exactly right. They had no use for it, so they hated it. Maybe it was the same way I felt about algebra- I doubted very much that I would ever find any use for it. But I didn't go so far as to want it wiped off the face of the earth for that reason.
— Alice Munro, Dear Life: Stories
Ruth believes that boys are not found around stables because what they like is taking things apart and putting them together again, and for this purpose horses are not so satisfactory as cars, motorcycles, and even bicycles, while girls adore horses because they are biological and have functions.
— Wallace Stegner, All the Little Live Things
When the Majority of jokes made at the expense of trans people center on "men wearing dresses" or "men who want their penises cut off" that is not transphobia- it is trans-misogyny. When the majority of violence and sexual assaults omitted against trans people is directed at trans women, that is not transphobia- it is trans-misogyny.
— Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity
It's imprecise and insufficient, defining the homosexual as a person whose gender expression is at odds with his or her sex.
— Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
Man will never understand woman and vice versa. We are oil and water. An equal level can never be maintained, as one will always excel where the other doesn't, and that breeds resentment.
— Dionne Warwick
So please, for the love of gender- go bloom. Or water someone else while they do.
— S. Bear Bergman, The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You
The misapprehension about gender performativity is this: that gender is a choice, or that gender is a role, or that gender is a construction that one puts on, as one puts on clothes in the morning, that there is a 'one' who is prior to this gender, a one who goes to the wardrobe of gender and decides with deliberation which gender it will be today.
— Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex"
Eventually you can't help but figure out that, while gender is a construct, so is a traffic light, and if you ignore either of them, you get hit by cars. Which, also, are constructs.
— Imogen Binnie, Nevada
Raise boys and girls the same way.
— Jenny Holzer
I don't know why people persist in believing women are inferior, when it is quite clear that men are the more feeble-minded of the two.
— Julia Quinn, Minx
I followed the trail out of the room, invigorated by the possibility of reinventing my own body. The meaning was mine, as long as I was with those who had the vision and vocabulary to understand my creation.
— Nick Krieger, Nina Here Nor There: My Journey Beyond Gender
When I was a girlthe books I read were by men. 
— Sharon Doubiago, Hard Country
Gender and the complications it gives rise to simply aren't relevant to the lives appliances lead.
— Thomas M. Disch, The Brave Little Toaster
If a woman tells a man the god favor him, everybody says she's far-minded.' The broom halted mid-sweep and the slave turned to Hild. 'But let a woman do what the gods tell her, without asking a man's permission first? Then she's possessed.' Unwen punctuated her words with her broom, jabbing it into the corner.
— Rebecca Barnhouse, Peaceweaver
I was used to being perceived as having a good attitude. Self-control, self-effacement, self-denial. People like this, especially in girls.
— Stephanie Grant, The Passion of Alice
Some women have become far too proscriptive of other women's pleasures and private arrangements, and the definition of feminism has become ideologically overloaded.
— Naomi Wolf, Fire with Fire: New Female Power and How It Will Change the Twenty-First Century
It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple
—  one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. ... Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated.
I see fashion as a proclamation or manifestation of identity, so, as long as identities are important, fashion will continue to be important. The link between fashion and identity begins to get real interesting, however, in the case of people who don't fall clearly into a culturally-recognized identity.
— Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us
The fundamental condition of man is his verticality.
— Laura Fraser, An Italian Affair
Young men list music as their focus and means of identity -- before sport, before TV, before cinema -- while women cite fashion as most important, with music an ambivalent second.
— Lucy O'Brien, She Bop: The Definitive History of Women in Rock, Pop & Soul
In a 1999 paper, Reiner indicates that his data show "that with time and age, children may well know what their gender is, regardless of any and all information and child-rearing to the contrary. They seem to be quite capable of telling us who they are, and we can observe how they act and function even before they tell us.
— Deborah Rudacille, The Riddle of Gender: Science, Activism, and Transgender Rights
Are you bisexual""Labels were invented for people like you who can't grasp a reality outside of a defined gender role. I like what i like.
— Colleen Hoover
The gender thing is a giveaway, though. Only a Radchaai would misgender people the way you do."I'd guessed wrong. "I can't see under your clothes. And even if I could, that's not always a reliable indicator.
— Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice
There are many worlds in the 'Realm of Worlds' where the ascendant beings are not male or female.
— Anne Rice, Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis
Gender is a shell game. What is a man? Whatever a woman isn't. What is a woman? Whatever a man is not, Tap on it and it's hollow. Look under the shells: it's not there.
— Naomi Alderman, The Power
Even when we are confused about someone’s gender, and don’t have a greater awareness of what it means to be trans, we have a choice to respond with kindness rather than cruelty.
— C. N. Lester
And that makes us (black women) feel like we have spokespeople, because everybody we encounter feels they have a piece of you and can tell you how to live your life
— Malebo Sephodi
The first thing you're going to want to know about me is: Am I a boy, or am I a girl?
— Jeff Garvin, Symptoms of Being Human
That’s the vicious truth doctor. For me and persons like me, we are experiencing a divorce from our own individual self by sensing our sensations, emotions, behaviors as not belonging to the same person or identity. That’s how you psychiatrists could explain it. That’s how society would like to codify its population. Such a ludicrous model we’ve been creating calling it civilization
— Neda Aria
I was arguing not that everyone should read books by ladies—though shifting the balance matters—but that maybe the whole point of reading is to be able to explore and also transcend your gender (and race and class and orientation and nationality and moment in history and age and ability) and experience being others.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions
Like me wanting to get nailed made me less of a man than him? That was bullshit. He seemed kind of sexist. I bet he was a fucking Republican.
— Megan Erickson, Fast Connection
He feels excited. He feels ashamed. He wants to talk to her, but he is afraid. Maybe he imagined it all. Maybe she will call him a bad name if he asks her what happened.
— Naomi Alderman, The Power
She follows her nose and stands once more before the doors of a quintessential dilemma. Male or Female. Here is her paradox. A staccato voice seems to challenge her, berate her. Hombre or Mujer. Mann or Frau. Homme or Femme. Gentleman or Lady. Com on, decide. She knows them all. She is them all. Not fluid or all-encompassing, gathering the harvest of the reaping fields, but fractured and split and bleeding. Her inner core weeping out of itself. There is nothing for hermaphrodites. It's too confusing. The words rattle around in her earbones, androgynous and humming. How can she choose? She cannot choose. To choose is to sunder.
— Mark O'Flynn, The Last Days of Ava Langdon
When did you know you were a girl? When did I know I was a boy?" he said. "I knew my whole life. I can't tell you exactly when, but it wasn't like I was ten and realized, 'Oh gee, I must be a boy!' What people fail to realize is they made that decision way earlier than that. It just happened that their gender identity and their anatomy matched.
— Jaime A. Seba, Feeling Wrong in Your Own Body: Understanding What It Means to Be Transgender
The idea of a character dichotomy between women and men has been overwhelmingly, decisively, refuted. The broad psychological similarity of men and women as groups can be regarded, on the volume of evidence supporting it, as one of the best-established generalizations in all the human sciences.
— Raewyn W. Connell, Gender: in world perspective
Get it? Gender is a country, a field of signifying roses you can walk through, or wear tucked behind your ear.Eventually the flower wilts & you can pick another, or burn the field, or turn & run back across the tracks.(from "Essay on the Theory of Motion")
— Cameron Awkward-Rich, Transit
My name," the boy said importantly, "is Stacey de Lacey." "But that's a girl's name!" blurted Oliver. Stacey de Lacey's face turned a dark shade of red. "Silence!" he shouted. "Stacey is one of those names that can be for a boy or a girl! Like Hilary, or Leslie, or...um... Anyway...!
— Philip Reeve, Oliver and the Seawigs
Binary thinking is human nature: Light/Dark, Beautiful/Ugly, Full/Empty, Male/Female.But NONE of those are binary—they’re all gradients.
— Jimbeaux Dean, Chrome Cady
It's a man's world and show business is a man's meal, with women generously sprinkled through it like overqualified spice.
— Carrie Fisher
When I was born, my mother dressed me as a boy because she could not afford to feed any more daughters. By the mystic laws of gender and economics, it ruins a peasant to place half a bowl of figs in front of his daughter, while his son may gorge on the whole tree, burn it for firewood and piss on the stump, and still be reckoned a blessing to his father.
— Jeanette Winterson, The Powerbook
When we stand, we do so not only for ourselves, but also for countless others who have similar stories but may never have an opportunity to be witnessed.
— William Keepin, Divine Duality: The Power of Reconciliation Between Women and Men
No one escapes gender conditioning. Most of us unwittingly carry the cultural gender shadow into our important relationships, and we end up in struggles with our partners, family members, friends, and colleagues that aren’t really about us as individual. When women and men do gender reconciliation work in community, they begin to see the power of this cultural baggage in a new light. They realise the prevalence of overarching social patterns and conditioning in much of their experience – and comprehend that, in this larger context, they are not alone in what happened to them.
— William Keepin, Divine Duality: The Power of Reconciliation Between Women and Men
We stand not as victims, but rather to bear witness to the gender injustices present in our lives and in our world as a whole.
— William Keepin, Divine Duality: The Power of Reconciliation Between Women and Men
No doubt the female self and the male self can be as useful as any other social identity in the right circumstances. But flexible, context-sensitive, and useful is not the same as “hardwired”.
— Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference
When women and men listen with the heart a liberating or cleansing process comes about in the collective, and something transformative moves through both parties and into the dialogue.
— William Keepin, Divine Duality: The Power of Reconciliation Between Women and Men
Gender-equality rests on the idea that one can climb the sea and swim the mountains.
— Klonovsky
Bailey, a former prosecutor, attacked her credibility scattershot, an approach he would use throughout the trial, particularly with female witnesses. ...He accused her, that is--without coming out and saying it--of being a certain kind of woman: conceited, disingenuous, and dissatisfied. The universal misogynist caricature.I'd never gone in for academic gender theories, but Bailey's cross-examination strategy--with Farrar and other women to come--convinced me that the culture of criminal justice has a fundamentally masculine tilt. Repeatedly, in a manner that I suspected was typical in modern courtrooms, he portrayed the female mind as intrinsically unreliable, ruled by emotion, immune to logic, prone to pettiness, swayed by lust, and corrupted by vanity. It rarely spoke plainly. It was seldom candid. It was composed of layers of hidden agendas. It put up a front, behind which was another front. It either aimed to please or to conceal, which were often the same thing. The only way to get the truth from it was to push and prod until it snapped. Make it angry. Make it cry.
— Walter Kirn, Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade
...at the heart of sexism is the construction of gender polarization, in which femininity and masculinity are assumed to be clearly delineated and any transgression of this pattern warrants punitive measures.
— W Anne Joh
They'd pay attention to me less. They'd judge me by gender, by looks, by weight before anything else. I automatically started every interaction at a disadvantage.
— Kameron Hurley
Reconciliation is a step beyond the domain of conflict resolution, which, as traditionally defined and practiced, is coming to be viewed as inadequate for creating true healing, harmony, and effective community in arenas where they has been long-standing conflict.
— William Keepin, Divine Duality: The Power of Reconciliation Between Women and Men
Gender is but a doorway to a vast inner universe of ultimate relationships between oneness and duality, manifest and divine, being and nonbeing, temporal and eternal.
— William Keepin, Divine Duality: The Power of Reconciliation Between Women and Men
At some point during my research, I came across the term "gender fluid." Reading those words was a revelation. It was like someone tore a layer of gauze off the mirror, and I could see myself clearly for the first time. There was a name for what I was. It was a thing. Gender fluid. Sitting there in front of my computer--like I am right now--I knew I would never be the same. I could never go back to seeing it the old way; I could never go back to not knowing what I was.But did that glorious moment of revelation really change anything? I don't know. Sometimes, I don't think so. I may have a name for what I am now--but I'm just as confused and out of place as I was before. And if today is any indication, I'm still playing out that scene in the toy store--trying to pick the thing that will cause the least amount of drama. And not having much success.
— Jeff Garvin, Symptoms of Being Human
Whenever I hear someone who has not had a transsexual experience say that gender is just a construct or merely a performance, it always reminds me of that Stephen Colbert gag where he insists that he doesn’t see race. It’s easy to fictionalize an issue when you’re not aware of the many ways in which you are privileged by it.
— Julia Serano, Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation
It is important to note that the relevant factor to sexual harassment in this story is not gender identity but gender perception. Some friends and acquaintances who have experienced harassment do not, in fact, identify as women; they were perceived as women. As I sought support, the key issue was not their gender identity, but the gender signifiers that led them to be perceived as women. If we don’t admit that sexual harassment is a gendered experience, we can never shed light on the sexism implicit in many cases of harassment. However, in addressing these sorts of gendered experiences, we may find that gender identity is not the most useful category.
— Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation
Gender isn’t simply some faucet that we can turn on and off in order to appease other people, whether they be heterosexist bigots or queerer-than-thou hipsters. How about this: Let’s stop pretending that we have all the answers, because when it comes to gender, none of us is fucking omniscient. Instead of trying to fictionalize gender, let’s talk about the moments in life when gender feels all too real. Because gender doesn’t feel like drag when you’re a young trans child begging your parents not to cut your hair or not to force you to wear that dress. And gender doesn’t feel like a performance when, for the first time in your life, you feel safe and empowered enough to express yourself in ways that resonate with you, rather than remaining closeted for the benefit of others. And gender doesn’t feel like a construct when you finally find that special person whose body, personality, identity, and energy feels like a perfect fit with yours. Let’s stop trying to deconstruct gender into nonexistence, and instead start celebrating it as inexplicable, varied, profound, and intricate.
— Julia Serano, Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation
Being transgender guarantees you will upset someone. People get upset with transgender people who choose to inhabit a third gender space rather than “pick a side.” Some get upset at transgender people who do not eschew their birth histories. Others get up in arms with those who opted out of surgical options, instead living with their original equipment. Ire is raised at those who transition, then transition again when they decide that their initial change was not the right answer for them. Heck, some get their dander up simply because this or that transgender person simply is not “trying hard enough” to be a particular gender, whatever that means. Some are irked that the Logo program RuPaul’s Drag Race shows a version of transgender life different from their own. Meanwhile, all around are those who have decided they aren’t comfortable with the lot of us, because we dared to change from one gender expression or identity to some other.
— Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation
Let us not make a procrustean bed of trans issues and force deities of the past onto it, let us instead awaken trans and other gender-variant deities from their own beds! There is no possibility of blasphemy against existing powers and their human followers if the deities in question are our own, and we never have to "take them back," because they have always been ours to begin with!
— P. Sufenas Virius Lupus, All-Soul, All-Body, All-Love, All-Power: A TransMythology
For a Man ought no more to value himſelf upon being Wiser than a Woman, if he owe his Advantage to a better Education, and greater means of Information, then he ought to boast of his Courage, for beating a Man, when his Hands were bound.
— Judith Drake, An  Essay in Defence of the Female Sex in Which Are Inserted the Characters of a Pedant, a Squire, a Beau, Vertuoso, a Poetaster, a City-Critick, in a
We change our attitudes, our careers, our relationships. Even our age changes minute by minute. We change our politics, our moods, and our sexual preferences. We change our outlook, we change our minds, we change our sympathies. Yet when someone changes hir gender, we put hir on some television talk show. Well, here’s what I think: I think we all of us do change our genders. All the time. Maybe it’s not as dramatic as some tabloid headline screaming “She Was A He!” But we do, each of us, change our genders. In response to each interaction we have with a new or different person, we subtly shift the kind of man or woman, boy or girl, or whatever gender we’re being at the moment. We’re usually not the same kind of man or woman with our lover as we are with our boss or a parent. When we’re introduced for the first time to someone we find attractive, we shift into being a different kind of man or woman than we are with our childhood friends. We all change our genders.
— Kate Bornstein, My Gender Workbook: How to Become a Real Man, a Real Woman, the Real You, or Something Else Entirely
That is one thing that in all my years among your folk I have never become accustomed to. The great importance that you attach to what gender one is.
— Robin Hobb, Assassin's Quest
There are more locations than girl and boy, man and woman. Decamping from one does not have to mean climbing into another. There’s plenty of space in between, or beyond the bounds, or all along and across the plane or sphere or whatever of gender, and it is entirely okay to say, “I do not like being a girl, and so I shall be a boy.” But it must also be okay to say, “I do not like being a girl, so I shall set about changing what it means to be a girl,” and, yes, okay to say, “I do not like being a girl, and so I shan’t.
— S. Bear Bergman, The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You