c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
To be popular one must be a mediocrity.""Not with Women," said the duchess, shaking her head; "and women rule the world. I assure you we can't bear mediocrities. We women, as someone says, love with our ears, just as you men love with your eyes, if you ever love at all.""It seems to me that we never do anything else," murmered Dorian.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
The stiletto is a feminine weapon that men just don't have.
— Christian Louboutin
Men and women should own the world as a mutual possession.
— Pearl S. Buck, Of Men and Women
Ellen's life was not easy, nor was it happy, but she did not expect life to be easy, and, if it was not happy, that was woman's lot. It was a man's world, and she accepted it as such. The man owned the property, and the woman managed it. The man took credit for the management, and the woman praised his cleverness. The man roared like a bull when a splinter was in his finger, and the woman muffled the moans of childbirth, lest she disturb him. Men were rough of speech and often drunk. Women ignored the lapses of speech and put the drunkards to bed without bitter words. Men were rude and outspoken, women were always kind, gracious and forgiving.
— Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
Maybe times are never strange to women: it is just one continuous monotonous thing full of the repeated follies of their menfolks.
— William Faulkner, The Unvanquished
Their characteristics are well-known. They're beautiful -- when they're not astoundingly ugly. They're both goddesses for men to worship, and demons for them to flee. They adore children, sometimes to the point of unhealthy obsession. They have a strong association with nature, from which they're often assumed to draw magical power. Their anger is a terrible thing to behold, and all the more fearsome because anything can spark it; the rules by which these creatures operate are not those of rational men. They are creatures of fanciful whim, and they never, ever, can be understood.I'm talking, of course, about women.
— Marie Brennan
Now we really like to put people in boxes. As men, we do it because we don't understand characters that aren't ourselves and we aren't willing to put ourselves in the skin of those characters and women, I think, terrify us. We tend not to write women as human beings. It's cartoons we're making now. And that's a shame.
— Paul Haggis
Don't be a fool, there is no such thing as just a girl.
— Elissa Schappell, Blueprints for Building Better Girls: Fiction
When the subject turns to abortion, cosmetic intervention, birth, motherhood, sex, love, work, misogyny, fear, or just how you feel in your own skin, women still won’t often tell the truth to each other unless they are very, very drunk. Perhaps the endlessly reported rise in female binge-drinking is simply modern women’s attempt to communicate with each other. Or maybe it is because Sancerre is so very delicious. To be honest, I’ll take bets on either.
— Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman
If a man is unmarried, he is called a bachelor. If a woman is unmarried, she is called a spinster or an old maid. What is it about an unmarried woman that poses such a threat to the patriarchal order? Mainly, it is that women are no one's property when we're unmarried. We're under no one's control, and neither are our children. There is no telling what we might do or say.
— Marianne Williamson, A Woman's Worth
...when women gain control over spending, less family money is devoted to instant gratification and more for education and starting small businesses.
— Sheryl WuDunn, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
If you are looking for verses with which to oppress women, you will find them. If you are looking for verses with which to liberate and honor women, you will find them.
— Rachel Held Evans, A Year of Biblical Womanhood
Abby: "You were great. I don't know what I'd have done without you."Dylan: "You'd have done fine. That's one of the most intimidating things about you." Abby: "Intimidating? Me?"Dylan: "It isn't easy for a man to get involved with a woman who's totally capable of handling anything that comes along... It isn't easy for a man to believe that there are woman who can not only do those things but enjoy them... [But] it's all natural for you isn't it? It's incredible.
— Nora Roberts, Born O'Hurley
HECUBA: I had a knife in my skirt, Achilles. When Talthybius bent over me, I could have killed him. I wanted to. I had the knife just for that reason. Yet, at the last minute I thought, he's some mother's son just as Hector was, and aren't we women all sisters? If I killed him, I thought, wouldn't It be like killing family?Wouldn't it be making some other mother grieve? So I didn't kill him, but if I had, I might have saved Hector's child. Dead or damned, that's the choice we make. Either you men kill us and are honored for it, or we women kill you and are damned for it. Dead or damned. Women don't have to make choices like that in Hades. There is no love there, nothing to betray.
— Sheri S. Tepper, The Gate to Women's Country
America is a land where men govern, but women rule.
— John Mason Brown
A man who does not doubt the courage of a woman, is a man that is subjugated by her will and allure.
— Lionel Suggs
It saddens me to see girls proudly declaring they’re not like other girls – especially when it’s 41,000 girls saying it in a chorus, never recognizing the contradiction. It’s taking a form of contempt for women – even a hatred for women – and internalizing it by saying, Yes, those girls are awful, but I’m special, I’m not like that, instead of stepping back and saying, This is a lie.The real meaning of “I’m not like the other girls” is, I think, “I’m not the media’s image of what girls should be.” Well, very, very few of us are. Pop culture wants to tell us that we’re all shallow, backstabbing, appearance-obsessed shopaholics without a thought in our heads beyond cute boys and cuter handbags. It’s a lie – a flat-out lie – and we need to recognize it and say so instead of accepting that judgment as true for other girls, but not for you.
— Claudia Gray
She was a beautiful woman, fresh-scrubbed and wholesome. Just like his ex-fiancee. A heartless floozy in disguise.
— Peggy Webb, The Mona Lucy
It's odd how fast a beautiful woman can turn a guy's mind into lint storage. Just by being a beautiful woman.
— Dennis Lehane, Moonlight Mile
The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion than that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women. He has not even a suspicion that the real point is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production. For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation of our bourgeois at the community of women which, they pretend, is to be openly and officially established by the Communists. The Communists have no need to introduce the community of women; it has existed almost from time immemorial. Our bourgeois, not content with having the wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other's wives. Bourgeois marriage is in reality a system of wives in common and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with, is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalised community of women. For the rest, it is self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of the community of women springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private.
— Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
The man or the woman in whom resides greater virtue is the higher; neither the loftiness nor the lowliness of a person lies in the body according to the sex, but in the perfection of conduct and virtues.
— Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies
What tale do you like best to hear?' 'Oh, I have not much choice! They generally run on the same theme - courtship; and promise to end in the same catastrophe - marriage.
— Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Love lasts a long time but burning desire lasts two to three weeks.
— Carla Bruni
Alexander the Great slept with 'The Iliad' beneath his pillow. Though I’ve never led an army, I am a wanderer. I cradle 'The Odyssey' nights while the moon is waning, as if it were the sweet body of a woman.
— Roman Payne, Rooftop Soliloquy
May I never, I say, become that abnormal, merciless animal, that deformed monstrosity - a virtuous woman.
— Mary MacLane, The Story of Mary Maclane & Other Writings
Women, fire in their crotch, won't burn out, begin by fighting off pricks, end by going wild hunting for one that still works.
— John Updike, Rabbit Redux
You're not cross with me, though?" he said. She pulled her hand away and answered, "No, no, I'm never cross with anyone.
— Franz Kafka, The Trial
Leave it to women to be cryptic rather than straightforward
— Kaye Dacus, Ransome's Honor
Then, Patrick, you do feel it too? You do feel ... something? It would be so bleak if you felt nothing. That's what scares women, you know.''I do know, and you needn't be scared. I feel something all right.''Promise me you'll always treat me as a person.''I promise.''Promises are so easily given.''I'll fulfill this one. Let me show you.'After a shaky start he was comfortably in the swing of it, having recognised he was on familiar ground after all. Experience had brought him to see that this kind of thing was nothing more than the levying of cock-tax, was reasonable and normal, in fact, even though some other parts of experience strongly suggested that what he had shelled out so far was only a down payment.
— Kingsley Amis, Difficulties with Girls
One day, lad, your eyes will light upon a woman, and you will never forget that glint in her eye, that toss of her head, or sway of her hips. You will dream of her, whether you are asleep of awake. She will possess your mind, and your body will be on fire for her. Nothing will ever erase the linger of her scent in your nostrils, the touch of her hand on your body, the feel of her flesh beneath your fingers.When you find a woman to love, Cnut, your life changes forever.
— Helen Hollick, The Forever Queen
I have no will of my own. Never did. Limp and lily-livered, I always obey - is it possible that's attractive to women?
— Anton Chekhov
People are capable of great, great change during the span of one lifetime. And women even more than men.
— Gabrielle Zevin, Margarettown
It is a merciful provision my dears, for it takes three or four women to get each man into, through, and out of the world. You are costly creatures, boys, and it is well that mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters love their duty and do it so well, or you would perish off the face of the earth,' said Mrs. Jo solemnly…
— Louisa May Alcott, Jo's Boys
Why would men want to do without women? We adore women.”“Because they serve you,” she grumbled.“No.Because they complement us. And I mean complement with an e,not an i. Women are our other halves. Men need women.
— Susan Mallery, The Sheik's Arranged Marriage
I want to be more than a rose in my husband's lapel.
— Margaret Trudeau
[She] soon perceived that as she walked in the flock, sometimes with this one, sometimes with that, that the fresh night air was producing staggerings and serpentine courses among the men who had partaken too freely; some of the more careless women were also wandering in their gait. . . . Yet however terrestrial and lumpy their appearance just now to the mean unglamoured eye, to themselves the case was different. They followed the road with a sensation that they were soaring along in a supporting medium, possessed of original and profound thoughts, themselves and surrounding nature forming an organism of which all the parts harmoniously and joyously interpenetrated each other. They were as sublime as the moon and stars above them, and the moon and stars were as ardent as they.
— Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Indeed, for my own part, though I have been repeatedly told by persons for whom I have the greatest respect, that Miss Brown is an insignificant chit, and Mrs. White has nothing but her petit minois chiffonne, and Mrs. Black has not a word to say for herself; yet I know that I have had the most delightful conversations with Mrs. Black (of course, my dear Madam, they are inviolable): I see all the men in a cluster round Mrs. White's chair: all the young fellows battling to dance with Miss Brown; and so I am tempted to think that to be despised by her sex is a very great compliment to a woman.
— William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair
No young woman of good breeding should show exclusive partiality to one partner all night.
— Jude Morgan, Indiscretion
Jake did a quick run-through of women in his mind, not of the ones he had known or dealt with in the past few months of years so much as all of them: their concern with the surface of things, with objects and appearances, with their surroundings and how they looked and sounded in them, with seeming to be better and to be right while getting everything wrong, their automatic assumption of the role of injured party in any clash of wills, their certainty that a view is the more credible and useful for the fact that they hold it, their use of misunderstanding and misrepresentation as weapons of debate, their selective sensitivity to tones of voice, their unawareness of the difference in themselves between sincerity and insincerity, their interest in importance (together with noticeable inability to discriminate in that sphere), their fondness for general conversation and directionless discussion, their pre-emption of the major share of feeling, their exaggerated estimate of their own plausibility, their never listening and lots of other things like that, all according to him.
— Kingsley Amis, Jake's Thing
‎At the end when you cut to the bone,we're all essentially the same; we are women of great expectations
— Inji Amr
Love between women could take on a new shape in the late nineteenth century because the feminist movement succeeded both in opening new jobs for women, which would allow them independence, and in creating a support group so that they would not feel isolated and outcast when they claimed their independence. … The wistful desire of Clarissa Harlowe’s friend, Miss Howe, “How charmingly might you and I live together,” in the eighteenth century could be realised in the last decades of the nineteenth century. If Clarissa Harlowe had lived about a hundred and fifty years later, she could have gotten a job that would have been appropriate for a woman of her class. With the power given to her by independence and the consciousness of a support group, Clarissa as a New Woman might have turned her back on both her family and Lovelace, and gone to live “charmingly” with Miss Howe. Many women did.
— Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present
When a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away.
— Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd
And the question is always "When are you going to have kids?" Rather than "Do you want to have kids?
— Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman
When a woman has not received much flattery in her life, she will be seduced.
— Melina Marchetta, Froi of the Exiles
I have opened all the doors in my head. I have opened all the pores in my body. But only the tide rolls in.
— Marilyn French, The Women's Room
You don't have to beat a woman if you can make her feel guilty.
— Erica Jong, Fear of Flying
They dream of men with gentle hands, eloquent with tenderness, fingers that brushed along a cheek, that outlined open lips in the lovers' braille. Hands that sculpted sweetness from sullen flesh, that traced breast and ignited hips, opening, kneading. Flesh becomes bread in the heat of those hands, braided and rising.
— Janet Fitch
Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. The relative positions to be assumed by man and woman in the working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence than ours.
— Grover Cleveland
perhaps the greatest challenge to thinking women is the challenge to move from the desire for safety and approval to the most "unfeminine" quality of all -- that of intllectual arrogance, the supreme hubris which asserts to itself the right to reorder the world. The Hubris of the god makers, the hubris of the male-system builders.
— Gerda Lerner
The study of history is useful to the historian by teaching him his ignorance of women.
— Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams
Several things ran through my head as I watched this silent ballet: First, I was running low on pears, my favorite morning fruit. Second, I, as a woman, am much smarter than men, I having displayed foresight this male apparently lacked in regards to trash day. And finally, I desperately needed to see more of this man in his boxers.
— Benjamin R.  Smith, Sketches: An Erotic Collection
Previously, when I began to write this tale, I set out by saying that Mlle. Claude was a whore. She is a whore, of course, and I'm not trying to deny it, but what I say now is--if Mlle. Claude is a whore then what name shall I find for the other women I know?
— Henry Miller
I've got no mother, no wife, no kids. I had, but my mother's dead, and I lost my wife and my kids when I had my trouble. Women are bitches. It's hard for a chap to live without any affection in his life.
— W. Somerset Maugham, Christmas Holiday
The back windows looked out over the fields, then the Atlantic, maybe a hundred yards away. Actually, I'm just making that bit up. I had no idea how far away the sea was. Only men could do things like that. "Half a mile." "Fifty yards." Giving directions, that sort of thing. I could look at a woman and say "Thirty-six C." Or "Let's try it in the next size up." But I had no idea how far away Tim's sea was except that I wouldn't want to walk to it in high heels.
— Marian Keyes
He was in love with every pretty woman he saw now, their forms at a distance, their shadows on the walls.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night
That night I woke up to a strange fact
—  keep milk not to drink but to feed the cat.
Women are better than men in handling their emotions, that is why every happy girl is not happy.
— M.F. Moonzajer
Of course , if I am nothing but an ego, and woman is nothing but another ego, then there is really no vital difference between us. Two little dolls of conscious entities, squeaking when you squeeze them. And with a tiny bit of an extraneous appendage to mark which is which...
— D.H. Lawrence
Until that moment I'd thought I could have it both ways; to be one of them, and also my husband's wife. What conceit! I was his instrument, his animal. Nothing more. How we wives and mothers do perish at the hands of our own righteousness. I was just one more of those women who clamp their mouths shut and wave the flag as their nation rolls off to conquer another in war. Guilty or innocent, they have everything to lose. They are what there is to lose. A wife is the earth itself, changing hands, bearing scars.
— Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible
Life is not a competition between men and woman. It is a collaboration.
— David Alejandro Fearnhead
Gone are the days when women were attracted by a man's hansomeness. Today, we are talking about cash, and your compromise to become a tiger in bed.
— Michael Bassey Johnson
A woman is human.She is not better, wiser, stronger, more intelligent, more creative, or more responsible than a man.Likewise, she is never less.Equality is a given.A woman is human.
— Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
Generally, I decided, it was better to wait, if you had any feeling for the individual. If you hated her right off, it was better to fuck her right off; if you didn't, it was better to wait, then fuck her and hate her later on.
— Charles Bukowski, Women
It's in our genetics. It's why women are the master species. We give birth and we can walk in heels.
— Jaci Burton, Taking a Shot
We like the wrong sorts of girls, they wrote. They are usually the ones worth writing about.
— Catherynne M. Valente, In the Cities of Coin and Spice
It is a woman's business to get married as soon as possible, and a man'sto keep unmarried as long as he can.
— George Bernard Shaw
A family is a unit composed not only of children but of men, women, an occasional animal, and the common cold.
— Ogden Nash
Make him love you,” Ruthless Me whispered. “Make it so he can’t live without you. The devil you know.” I felt her growing inside me, bringing with her the insane idea that I actually wielded power with Caleb.
— C.J. Roberts, Captive in the Dark
For a woman's words to wound would require a man to listen first!
— Meredith Duran, At Your Pleasure
It sometimes entered Mr. Pontellier's mind to wonder if his wife were not growing a little unbalanced mentally. He could see plainly that she was not herself. That is, he could not see that she was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.
— Kate Chopin, The Awakening
Just about all men need a woman in one way or another, unless they’re very strange indeed. Tormenting you refreshes him. And you shouldn’t underestimate the gratitude all men feel for women’s beauty. Men who truly don’t like flowers are very uncommon and men who don’t respond to a beautiful woman are even more uncommon. It’s not primarily sexual; it’s a lifting of the spirits beauty gives. He’ll be in to torment you, and tease you, and enrage you, but really to have a good, refreshing look at you.
— Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels
She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness. It is the feet of clay that make the gold of the image precious.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Where is your false, your treacherous, and cursed wife?""She's gone forrard to the Police Office," returns Mr Bucket. "You'll see her there, my dear.""I would like to kiss her!" exclaims Mademoiselle Hortense, panting tigress-like. "You'd bite her, I suspect," says Mr Bucket."I would!" making her eyes very large. "I would love to tear her, limb from limb.""Bless you, darling," says Mr Bucket, with the greatest composure; "I'm fully prepared to hear that. Your sex have such a surprising animosity against one another, when you do differ.
— Charles Dickens, Bleak House
Discontented women are like pressure cookers. The steam rises and one day they just reach boiling point.
— Bella Pollen, Midnight Cactus
For some reason all the middle-aged women he knew were very efficient.
— Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
In one of the largest surveys of its kind to date, nearly 30,000 women told researchers at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine that they'd rather lose weight than attain any other goal, a figure that alone suggests just how complicated the issue of appetite can be for women. This is the primary female striving? The appetite to lose appetite?In fact, I suspect the opposite is true: that the primary, underlying striving among many women at the start of the millennium is the appetite for appetite: a longing to feel safe and secure enough to name one's true appetites and worthy and powerful enough to get them satisfied.
— Caroline Knapp, Appetites: Why Women Want
In a shelter meant for battered women, there were only two reasons a person would decide to leave. One, she had decided to launch out on her own and begin a new life. Or two, she had decided to go back to someone who had hurt her.
— Deborah Bedford, A Morning Like This
I think women sign on for some ideal when they get married, and when they realise they haven't got anything close to what they want, they bury their disappointment.
— Bella Pollen, Midnight Cactus
There is pain in being a woman, yes, but there is pride in it, too.
— Mary Pauline Lowry, The Earthquake Machine
As to women, I agree that each has three or four souls, but none of them a reasoning one.
— Henryk Sienkiewicz
Not being assaulted is not a privilege to be earned through the judicious application of personal safety strategies. A woman should be able to walk down the street at 4 in the morning in nothing but her socks, blind drunk, without being assaulted, and I, for one, am not going to do anything to imply that she is in any way responsible for her own assault if she fails to Adequately Protect Herself. Men aren’t helpless dick-driven maniacs who can’t help raping a vulnerable woman. It disrespects EVERYONE.
— Emily Nagoski
Chastity ... has, even now, a religious importance in a woman's life, and has so wrapped itself round with nerves and instincts that to cut it free and bring it to the light of day demands courage of the rarest.
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
This pre-eminence is something [men] have unjustly arrogated to themselves. And when it's said that women must be subject to men, the phrase should be understood in the same sense as when we say we are subject to natural disasters, diseases, and all the other accidents of this life: it's not a case of being subjected in the sense of obeying, but rather of suffering an imposition, not a case of serving them fearfully, but rather of tolerating them in a spirit of Christian charity, since they have been given to us by God as a spiritual trial.
— Moderata Fonte, The Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men
I am a warrior in the time of women warriors
—  the longing for justice is the sword I carry.
I know it's trash: just another story made up to scare wicked females and correct unruly children. But it's all I have. I know I need something else. Something better. Like a story that shows how brazen women can take a good man down. I can hum to that.
— Toni Morrison, Love
[I]f you seek in every way to minimise my firm beliefs by your anti-feminist attacks, please recall that a small dagger or knife point can pierce a great, bulging sack and that a small fly can attack a great lion and speedily put him to flight.
— Christine de Pizan, Le Débat Sur Le Roman De La Rose
Let most men have a finger and they will have the whole hand before you know. Let a clan cheif have a finger and he will have the entire arm.
— Robert Jordan, Lord of Chaos
Again, as I had often met it in my own church, I was confronted with the Impurity of Women doctrine that seemed to preoccupy all clergymen.
— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
In the meantime: (1) be direct; (2) remember that, being smarter than men, women respond to courtesy and kindness; (3) if you want to know what kind of a wife someone will make, observe her around her father and mother; (4) as to who gets out of the elevator first, I just can't help you.
— David Mamet, Some Freaks
It was a stretch to imagine that Barbara Walters might want to give it all up for Ed Couch, but Evelyn tried her hardest. Of course, even though she was not religious, it was a comfort to know that the Bible backed her up in being a doormat.
— Fannie Flagg, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe
[The Pigeon had learned something about [women] from his eight sisters, and if over the years he had absorbed only this one thing, it would stand as vindication that a boy does not suffer needlessly from growing up in a house with eight sisters. That thing was that a woman's heart is not bought by the currency of a man's emotion for her. A woman's heart is won over by her own feelings for herself when he just happens to be around ...
— Brigid Pasulka, A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True
Pity, if one can generalize, is at the bottom of woman. When men like us, it is for our better qualities, and however tender their liking, we dare not be unworthy of it, or they will quietly let us go. But unworthiness stimulates woman. It brings out her deeper nature, for good or for evil.
— E.M. Forster, Howards End
Troubles always seemed more severe after the sun went down. Even irrational worries and fears could seem perfectly logical at midnight.
— Jeanne Stephens, Broken Dreams
An important aspect of the ebbing of sex was that other things became interesting. Sex obliterates the individuality of young women more often than it does that of young men, because so much more of a woman than a man is used by sex.
— Diana Athill, Somewhere Towards the End
Clothing was magic. Casey believed this. She would never admit this to her classmates in any of her women's studies courses, but she felt that an article of clothing could change a person... Each skirt, blouse, necklace, or humble shoe said something - certain pieces screamed, and others whispered seductively, but no matter, she experienced each item's expression keenly, and she loved this world. every article suggested an image, a life, a kind of woman, and Casey felt drawn to them." (Free Food For Millionaires, p.41).
— Min Jin Lee, Free Food for Millionaires
Women couldn’t identify with her and didn’t support her.
— Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies
The more sexual partners a woman has had, the more likely it is that she is depressed.
— Mark Regnerus, Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, and Think about Marrying
(Georgie) Two hundred years later and it's exactly the same thing. You want to spend every single moment with your children and still have a fulfilling life at work.
— Nancy Woodruff, My Wife's Affair
Let us play hide and seek in a mountain which is like a women's back.
— Santosh Kalwar
Women do amazing, creative, wonderful things.
— Kate Jacobs, The Friday Night Knitting Club
Women would rather talk to other women than to men, even when they would rather talk to a man than to a woman.
— Berta Ruck
…I'm always ready to talk, shouldn't be a woman if I were not,' laughed Mrs. Jo…
— Louisa May Alcott, Jo's Boys
Colin: "1 dinna understand why we canna just go to bed and have sex." He looked truly puzzled.
— Nina Bangs, The Pleasure Master
As Atwood concludes after a random and informal sampling, men and women differ markedly in the 'scope of their threatenability': 'Why do men feel threatened by woman?' I asked a male friend of mine....'[M]en are bigger, most of the time...and they have on the average a lot more money and power.' 'They're afraid women will laugh at them,' he said. 'Undercut their world view.' Then I asked some women students in a quickie poetry seminar I was giving, 'Why do women feel threatened by men?' 'They're afraid of being killed,' they said'.
— Shuli Barzilai, Tales of Bluebeard and His Wives from Late Antiquity to Postmodern Times
When I grow up next year my life will be easy." Vanity
— Caroline Gerardo, Cardinal Sin Vanity
We decided to become a society of women, a club to make sure women were protected. The club was something important back then. Not like it is today.
— Sarah Addison Allen
It is amazing what a woman can do if only she ignores what men tell her she can't.
— Carol K. Carr, India Black
Radical feminist theorists do not seek to make gender a bit more flexible, but to eliminate it. They are gender abolitionists, and understand gender to provide the framework and rationale for male dominance. In the radical feminist approach, masculinity is the behaviour of the male ruling class and femininity is the behaviour of the subordinate class of women. Thus gender can have no place in the egalitarian future that feminism aims to create.
— Sheila Jeffreys, Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism
Now say, have women worth, or have they none? Or had they some, but with our Queen is’t gone? Nay Masculines, you have thus tax’d us long, But she, though dead, will vindicate our wrong. Let such as say our sex is void of reason Know ‘tis a slander now, but once was tre
— Anne Bradstreet, The Works of Anne Bradstreet
Because misogynists are the best of men.” All the poets reacted to these words with hooting. Boccaccio was forced to raise his voice: “Please understand me. Misogynists don’t despise women. Misogynists don’t like femininity. Men have always been divided into two categories. Worshipers of women, otherwise known as poets, and misogynists, or, more accurately, gynophobes. Worshipers or poets revere traditional feminine values such as feelings, the home, motherhood, fertility, sacred flashes of hysteria, and the divine voice of nature within us, while in misogynists or gynophobes these values inspire a touch of terror. Worshipers revere women’s femininity, while misogynists always prefer women to femininity. Don’t forget: a woman can be happy only with a misogynist. No woman has ever been happy with any of you!
— Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
And a woman by herself is missing a man, while a man by himself is his own master. Trousers. That's the secret. Trousers and a pair of socks. I never dreamed it was like this. Put on trousers and the world changes. We walk different. We act different. I see these girls and I think: Idiot's Get yourself some trousers!
— Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment
(Exchange with Winston Churchill)Churchill explains that having a woman in Parliament was like having one intrude on him in the bathroom, to which the Lady Astor retorted, "Sir, you are not handsome enough to have such fears".
— Nancy Astor the Viscountess Astor
...but once more I say do as you please, for we women are born to this burden of being obedient to our husbands, though they be blockheads
— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
Prioritise self-care & incorporate a MINIMUM of 60 mins 'ME TIME' into your daily routine. YES THERE ARE enough hours in the day. NO EXCUSES.
— Miya Yamanouchi, Embrace Your Sexual Self: A Practical Guide for Women
Bless the bright eyes of your sex! They never see, whether for good or bad, more than one side of any question; and that is always, the one which first presents itself to them.
— Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
Desire acts as a honey trap to the unwary male, luring him into unworthy and catastrophic enterprises. The beauty of the Narnian witches isn't ancillary to their evil, but integral to it, one of the weapons in their arsenal. Evil must, after all, appear attractive if it's going to be tempting, and from there it's only a small step further to the conclusion that feminine beauty is inherently wicked.
— Laura Miller, The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia
A woman will flirt with anybody in the world as long as other people are looking on.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
I think my Mama and Savannah must be special people in the Lord's eyes, as they have gone about doing generous and loving things without even a second thought. For me, it seems like the only thing that comes natural is aggravation and hard word
— Nancy E. Turner, These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901
Nancy Astor: "Winston, you are a drunk!"Winston Churchill: "And you, madam, are ugly. But I shall be sober in the morning."(Reported exchange will Winston Churchill.
— Nancy Astor the Viscountess Astor
It often struck Nina that women who seemed capable of only limited mental tasks in most situations could retain information regarding other peoples weight for years, sometimes decades. Unlike genuine idiots savants, they couldn't tell you that December 13, 1972 had fallen on a Wednesday. But they could often tell you, within a pound or two, how much you'd weighed that week.
— Marissa Piesman, Heading Uptown
When a handful of students came to RBG in 1970 and asked her to teach the first-ever Rutgers class on women and the law, she was ready to agree. It took her only about a month to read every federal decision and every law review article about women’s status. There wasn’t much. One popular textbook included the passage “Land, like woman, was meant to be possessed.
— Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Little girls ought to be taught and brought up with boys, so that they might be always together. A woman ought to be trained so that she may be able, like a man, to recognise when she's wrong, or she always thinks she's in the right. Instil into a little girl from her cradle that a man is not first of all a cavalier or a possible lover, but her neighbour, her equal in everything. Train her to think logically, to generalise, and do not assure her that her brain weighs less than a man's and that therefore she can be indifferent to the sciences, to the arts, to the tasks of culture in general. The apprentice to the shoemaker or the house painter has a brain of smaller size than the grown-up man too, yet he works, suffers, takes his part in the general struggle for existence. We must give up our attitude to the physiological aspect, too -- to pregnancy and childbirth, seeing that in the first place women don't have babies every month; secondly, not all women have babies; and, thirdly, a normal countrywoman works in the fields up to the day of her confinement and it does her no harm. Then there ought to be absolute equality in everyday life. If a man gives a lady his chair or picks up the handkerchief she has dropped, let her repay him in the same way. I have no objection if a girl of good family helps me to put on my coat or hands me a glass of water --
— Anton Chekhov
One thing that became clear to me is that images of a divine mother are surprisingly important in the psychological wholeness of women, especially in the process of women taking up residence in their own authority.
— Sue Monk Kidd
America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash.
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
Someday there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but only life and reality: the female human being.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Beautiful women are always drawn to men they think will keep them beautiful.
— Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves
The tragedy is that women so committed to survival cannot recognize that they are committing suicide.
— Andrea Dworkin
You men have none of you any hearts.''If we have not hearts, we have eyes; and they give us torment enough.
— Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
Women derive a pleasure, incomprehensible to the other sex, from the delicate toil of the needle.
— Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
What I personally knew about courting women could comfortably fit into a thimble without taking it off your finger first.
— Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear
She has very strong ideas about family - ideas that probably sound kind of sexist to you. She believes all dhampirs should train and put in time as guardians, but that the women should eventually return home to raise their children together.But not the men?No, he said wryly. She thinks men still need to stay out there and kill Strigoi.
— Richelle Mead, Shadow Kiss
Sometimes God gits familiar wid us womenfolks too and talks His inside business. He told me.how surprised y'all is goin' tuh be if you ever find out you don't know half as much 'bout us as you think yo do. It's so easy to make yo'self out God Almighty when you ain't got nothin' tuh strain against but women and chickens.
— Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
I don't understand women at all. Like how a women can pour boiling hot wax onto their upper thigh, then rip the hair out by the root... and still be afraid of a spider.
— Jerry Seinfeld
The idea that women's strong attachments to each other are what make them so vulnerable is horrifying. I count my close friendships with a few girls that I know as one of the best things I have going for me right now. My love for them leaves me open to hurt, but ... all love does, or at least that's the cliche. Perhaps girls and women do come to love each other too quickly, or once they are trapped into appearing as though they love one another, they don't want to back out of it. That is probably true. But a fear of confrontation in relationships is the downside. The ability to love easily is a positive.
— Phyllis Chesler, Woman's Inhumanity to Woman
It's not being a woman I mind so much," she said slowly. "'Tis the way men seem to always order my life." She leaned earnestly toward him. "Your hand, Papa, has wielded a sword and cradled a child and held power over hundreds of men." She held up her own hand. "This one has far fewer adventures before it.
— Barbara Samuel, A Bed of Spices
Women, it is said, have a bad attitude toward sex. Women, it not said often enough, have a long-lived resentment against forced-sex and a longing for freedom.
— Andrea Dworkin
There were a lot of these middle-aged single types in the neighborhood, shipwrecked by every kind of catastrophe, but she was one of the few who didn't have children, who lived alone, who was still kinda young. Something must have happened, your mother speculated. In her mind, a woman with no child could be explained only by vast untrammelled calamity.Maybe she just doesn't like children.Nobody likes children, your mother assured you. That doesn't mean you don't have them.
— Junot Díaz, This Is How You Lose Her
I live in a house over there on the Island, and in that house there is a man waiting for me. When he drove up at the door I drove out of the dock because he says I’m his ideal.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Winter Dreams
In the end, he had to admit, he didn't really understand her. He didn't understand women. He didn't understand men. He didn't even understand children very well. All he really understood, he thought, was himself and the rest of the universe. Neither anything like completely, of course, but both well enough to know that what remained to be discovered would make sense; it would fit in, it could all be gradually and patiently fitted together a bit at a time, like an infinite jigsaw puzzle, with no straight edges to look for and no end in sight, but one in which there was always going to be somewhere for absolutely any piece to fit.
— Iain Banks
Nurse Duckett found Yossarian wonderful and was already trying to change him.
— Joseph Heller
And now it appeared that there was a mysterious Queen clothed by rumour with dread and wonderful attributes, and commonly known by the impersonal but, to my mind, rather awesome title of She.
— H. Rider Haggard, She
Why, the club was just the quietest place in the world, a place where a woman could run in to brush her hair and wash her hands, and change her library book, and have a cup of tea.
— Kathleen Thompson Norris, Saturday's Child
It’s me, you fool. Who do you think it is? I’m coming in.” He was already naked. She turned away from him as he slipped in by her side but he caught her in his arms and felt her body thaw his belly and thighs. That was all, just to lie there listening to the breathing and the silence and feel the warmth colour his belly and thighs and head. She never wore clothes in bed. They were naked and the warmth run out of her. He wanted to laugh, because it was such a marvelous discovery to make, this warmth. She was hissing like a snake.“No, it’s wrong.” She went on hissing. She brought an elbow back smartly and struck him in the paunch. She seemed all elbows, shoulder blades and heels. It was like trying to make love to a dough-mixing machine. She wanted it, didn’t she, otherwise why all this hissing and moaning?
— P.H. Newby, Something to Answer For
His heart cracked, and he fell in love. He wondered if she would marry him. “Tu sei pazzo,” she told him with a pleasant laugh. “Why am I crazy?” he asked. “Perché non posso sposare.” “Why can’t you get married?” “Because I am not a virgin,” she answered. “What has that got to do with it?” “Who will marry me? No one wants a girl who is not a virgin.” “I will. I’ll marry you.” “Ma non posso sposarti.” “Why can’t you marry me?” “Perché sei pazzo.” “Why am I crazy?” “Perché vuoi sposarmi.” Yossarian wrinkled his forehead with quizzical amusement. “You won’t marry me because I’m crazy, and you say I’m crazy because I want to marry you? Is that right?” “Si.” “Tu sei pazz’!” he told her loudly. “Perché?” she shouted back at him indignantly, her unavoidable round breasts rising and falling in a saucy huff beneath the pink chemise as she sat up in bed indignantly. “Why am I crazy?” “Because you won’t marry me.” “Stupido!” she shouted back at him, and smacked him loudly and flamboyantly on the chest with the back of her hand. “Non posso sposarti! Non capisci? Non posso sposarti.” “Oh, sure, I understand. And why can’t you marry me?” “Perché sei pazzo!” “And why am I crazy?” “Perché vuoi sposarmi.” “Because I want to marry you. Carina, ti amo,” he explained, and he drew her gently back down to the pillow. “Ti amo molto.” “Tu sei pazzo,” she murmured in reply, flattered. “Perché?” “Because you say you love me. How can you love a girl who is not a virgin?” “Because I can’t marry you.” She bolted right up again in a threatening rage. “Why can’t you marry me?” she demanded, ready to clout him again if he gave an uncomplimentary reply. “Just because I am not a virgin?” “No, no, darling. Because you’re crazy.
— Joseph Heller, Catch-22
Girls can do anything boys can do in high heels!
— Brooke Sachau
But us women, well, we like our egos stroked every once in a while and a boy mourning over us is a huge boost
— J.L. Paul, Vicious Circles
If women had power what would men be but women who can't bear children? And what would women be but men who can?
— Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu
But even now, especially now, it seems to me that women have a strength about them that men never had. And I wonder how did men always get portrayed in the movies and such as the strong ones? How did it come to be that women are made to look like the weak ones who need protectin'? Truth is, it's men who need the protectin'. Really they do. Women have the strong thing inside of them and the can get through anything. They just can. They're used to pain of child birthing - pain no man knows - and some women being battered around and not treated right through all the centuries and having to learn at a real young age how to stay alive on the inside when the outside is being hurt real bad. Most all women know that. But men. Those poor men. They just don't have the inside strength the women do. It's harder for men to feel pain.
— Sarah Felix Burns, Song Over Quiet Lake
In fact I've reached the stage where I look at people and say - he or she, they are whole at all because they've chosen to block off at this stage or that. People stay sane by blocking off, by limiting themselves.
— Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
Go and catch a falling star,Get with child a mandrake root,Tell me where all past years are,Or who cleft the devil's foot,Teach me to hear mermaids singing,Or to keep off envy's stinging,And findWhat windServes to advance an honest mind.If thou be'st born to strange sights,Things invisible to see,Ride ten thousand days and nights,Till age snow white hairs on thee,Thou, when thou return'st, wilt tell me,All strange wonders that befell thee,And swear,No whereLives a woman true and fair.
— John Donne
I was there to see beautiful naked women. So was everybody else. It's a common failing.
— Robert A. Heinlein, Expanded Universe
I just thought: Oh goodness, you can wear nice clothes and get your hair done and still be a feminist and a serious intellectual.
— Jacqueline Rose
He turned to Miss Minerva. "I'm relying on you, at any rate. You've got a good mind. Anybody can see that.""Thank you," she said."As good as a man's," he added."Oh, now you've spoiled it!
— Earl Derr Biggers, The House Without a Key
It occurred to Susan that men were always waiting for something cataclysmic--love or war or a giant asteroid. Every man wanted to be a hot-headed Bruce Willis character, fighting against the evil foreign enemy while despising the domestic bureaucracy. Men just wanted to focus on one big thing, leaving the thousands of smaller messes for the women around them to clean up.
— Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage
How to care for intimate apparel? Treat your bras like you’d want a partner to handle your breasts: with kindness and a gentle touch.
— Elisabeth Dale
He mistook, as the cleverest men often do mistake, in underrating the cruelty of women.
— Ouida, Wanda, Countess von Szalras.