c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
This not to say that the men and women associated with the Rat Bastard Protective Association had freed themselves from the powerful hold of established gender roles on their lives. Shirley Burman, Joan Brown, Jean Conner, Jay DeFeo, and Joanna McClure most frequently provided the practical component of the vision they shared with their spouses; that is, the women all worked for a living... As Càndida Smith observed, the 'contradictions of this imaginary society fell most acutely upon the women, for... they carried the burden of 'holding things together'.
— Anastasia Aukeman, Welcome to Painterland: Bruce Conner and the Rat Bastard Protective Association
That’s why we must continue to support godly men and women who have dedicated their lives to Christian principles and to continuing those ideas in our offspring. Professors’ worldviews influence whatever they teach, from humanities to basic sciences, and what they think about God cannot be hidden from their students.
— James C. Dobson, Life on the Edge: The Next Generation's Guide to a Meaningful Future
She found Safiye leaning against an oil lantern out in the garden and saw for herself that she wasn't the only foolish woman in the world, or even at that party, for Safiye had Lucy's highly polished bangle in her hand and was turning it this way and that in order to catch fireflies in the billowing, transparent left sleeve of her gown.
— Helen Oyeyemi, What is Not Yours is Not Yours
The trouble with women is, they all become bossy in the end, like they think they own you. There's nothing I loathe more than a bossy woman. Hell, there have been times I made up my mind to give up women completely-go cold turkey. Fortunately the rest of my body never agrees. That demon pow-whammy keeps calling me back.
— Bruce Golden
i am not a hotel room. i am homei am not the whiskey you wanti am the water you needdon't come here with expectationsand try to make a vacation out of me
— Rupi Kaur, Milk and Honey
She carried herself like a dishonored queen. Even the way she held her head at an angle as she considered the buildings around us seemed watched and pretentious, and I thought about my mother saying there was something toxic about being very beautiful. It must be terrible to be a woman.
— Rufi Thorpe, Dear Fang, With Love
A woman is an important somebody and sometimes you win the triple crown: good food, good sex, and good talk. Most men settle for any one, happy as a clam if they get two. But listen, let me tell you something. A good man is a good thing, but there is nothing in the world better than a good good woman. She can be your mother, your wife, your girlfriend, your sister, or somebody you work next to. Don’t matter. You find one, stay there. You see a scary one, make tracks.
— Toni Morrison, Love
let the stars inside you breathe,before the darkness swallows them whole.let them burn through your skinand light this whole goddamn world on fire.
— Ava, You Are Safe Here.
Women are like locked diaries that men expect to read like open books.
— Munia Khan
Women are not made for one single man
—  'tis for men at large Nature created them.
What can you answer? Now be careful, don’t arouse my spite, Or with my slipper I’ll take you napping,faces slappingLeft and right.
— Aristophanes, Lysistrata
To lie is always a necessity for women; above all when they choose to deceive, falsehood becomes vital to them.
— Marquis de Sade, Philosophy in the Boudoir or, The Immoral Mentors
Maybe men who still have the cave-man expectations of women should be sent back into caves. A lot of women will readily volunteer to build such caves free of charge.
— Dauglas Dauglas, Roses in the Rainbow
The only path of escape he could conceive as yet for Lady Harman lay through the chivalry of some other man. That a woman could possibly rebel against one man without the sympathy and moral maintenance of another was still outside the range of Mr. Brumley's understanding. It is still outside the range of most men's understandings -- and of a great many women's.
— H.G. Wells, The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman
This self-reliance, this direct dealing with the world, seemed to him, even in the height of his concern, unwomanly, a deeper injury to his own abandoned assumptions than any he had contemplated.
— H.G. Wells, The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman
He perceived too in these still hours how little he had understood her hitherto. He had been blinded, — obsessed. He had been seeing her and himself and the whole world far too much as a display of the eternal dualism of sex, the incessant pursuit. Now with his sexual imaginings newly humbled and hopeless, with a realization of her own tremendous minimization of that fundamental of romance, he began to see all that there was in her personality and their possible relations outside that. He saw how gravely and deeply serious was her fine philanthropy, how honest and simple and impersonal her desire for knowledge and understandings. There is the brain of her at least, he thought, far out of Sir Isaac's reach. She wasn't abased by her surrenders, their simplicity exalted her, showed her innocent and himself a flushed and congested soul. He perceived now with the astonishment of a man newly awakened just how the great obsession of sex had dominated him — for how many years? Since his early undergraduate days. Had he anything to put beside her own fine detachment? Had he ever since his manhood touched philosophy, touched a social question, thought of anything human, thought of art, or literature or belief, without a glancing reference of the whole question to the uses of this eternal hunt? During that time had he ever talked to a girl or woman with an unembarrassed sincerity? He stripped his pretences bare; the answer was no. His very refinements had been no more than indicative fig-leaves. His conservatism and morality had been a mere dalliance with interests that too brutal a simplicity might have exhausted prematurely. And indeed hadn't the whole period of literature that had produced him been, in its straining purity and refinement, as it were one glowing, one illuminated fig-leaf, a vast conspiracy to keep certain matters always in mind by conspicuously covering them away? But this wonderful woman — it seemed — she hadn't them in mind! She shamed him if only by her trustful unsuspiciousness of the ancient selfish game of Him and Her that he had been so ardently playing.... He idealized and worshipped this clean blindness. He abased himself before it.
— H.G. Wells, The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman
They were all slender, frail creatures with wondering eyes and soft fluttery voices. But they were all made out of thin invisible steel.
— Betty  Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
They were all slender, frail creatures with wondering Wes and soft fluttery voices. But they were all made out of thin invisible steel.
— Betty  Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Females are very simple, with them, yes means yes, & no means yes, & no means no, & no means maybe, but maybe means yes, & maybe means no!
— Eyden I., Kiss Friendzone Goodbye
I will be a good wife," she thought, "that all the earth will know there is a God in Israel.
— Lois T. Henderson, Ruth
Women! They think it so romantic to break the rules. But what are we if we don't hold to tradition, am I right?" ~Darian
— Jessica Khoury, The Forbidden Wish
Toni Morrison said that if you can't find the book you want to read, write it. So I did! It's high time to give our heroines a different kind of happy ending.
— Diane Claire Benant, Just Jenna: How hard can it be to last a week without a man?
If she is wrong educate her, don't belittle her..
— Eyden I., Kiss Friendzone Goodbye
There's a way of listening in the dark that's so intense for girls. You can feel the insides of your ears.
— Elisabeth de Mariaffi, The Devil You Know
Be wise in time. What youth sows, old age must reap....Sow to yourself rather in righteousness: break up your fallow ground, sow not among thorns.
— J.C. Ryle, Thoughts for Young Men
Perhaps it’s true that in our sex-saturated culture it does take a certain amount of self-discipline to resist having sex, but restraint does not equal morality. And let’s be honest: if this were simply about resisting peer pressure and being strong, then the women who have sex because they actively want to — as appalling as that idea might be to those who advocate abstinence — wouldn’t be scorned. Because the “strength” involved in these women’s choice would be about doing what they want despite pressure to the contrary, not about resisting the sex act itself.
— Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women
Mother says there are locked rooms inside all women, kitchen of love, bedroom of grief, bathroom of apathy. Sometimes, the men, they come with keys, and sometimes the men, they come with hammers.
— Warsan Shire
What did I learn that day in the sabha?All this time I'd believed in my power over my husbands. I'd believed that because they loved me they would do anything for me. But now I saw that though they did love me—as much perhaps as any man can love—there were other things they loved more. Their notions of honor, of loyalty toward each other, of reputation were more important to them than my suffering. They would avenge me later, yes, but only when they felt the circumstances would bring them heroic fame. A woman doesn't think that way. I would have thrown myself forward to save them if it had been in my power that day. I wouldn't have cared what anyone thought. The choice they made in the moment of my need changed something in our relationship. I no longer depended on them so completely in the future. And when I took care to guard myself from hurt, it was as much from them as from our enemies
— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions
Thank you, Men, for the railroads. Thank you, Men, for inventing the automobile and killing the red Indians who thought it might be nice to hold on to America for a while longer, since they were here first. Thank you, Men, for the hospitals, the police, the schools. Now I'd like to vote, please, and have the right to set my own course and make my own destiny. Ince I was chattel, but now that is obsolete. My days of slavery must be over; I need to be a slave no more than I need to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a tiny boat with sails. Jet planes are safer and quicker than little boats with sails and freedom makes more sense than slavery. I am not afraid of flying. Thank you, Men.
— Stephen King, The Stand
Be careful when you ask Karma for something that you have always wanted. When I was young, I asked to be surrounded by beautiful women. Now I have a wife and four daughters.
— James Hauenstein
Women. You have to love them the way they are or they'll drive you insane.
— James Hauenstein
Just reviewing this list, these to-dos and dones, her pace quickens; she feels lighter, she feels smarter, she feels in control, she feels alive.
— Rumaan Alam, Rich and Pretty
Throughout her life, Highsmith looked for women whom she could worship. Sex was far from the most important factor in any relationship; rather, it was this near-divine quality for which she yearned.
— Andrew Wilson, Patricia Highsmith, Ζωή στο σκοτάδι
With fire we test gold, and with gold we test women, and with women we test men.
— Eyden I., Woman's Book: Only For Men
Maybe women forget days, but they always remember moments.
— Eyden I., Woman's Book: Only For Men
Woman won't accept to be your second opinion, either you choose her or you lose her.
— Eyden I., Woman's Book: Only For Men
The patriarchy longs for the days 'when men were men' and women were oppressed, subservient - and they can see no wrong in it. It justifies its former power and lust to hold on to it - and if possible, to regain it by quoting fundamentalist and radical religion and tradition and calling it 'love'. Some love. How can oppression and power over another person's life ever be 'love'?
— Christina Engela, Autumn Burning: Dreadtime Stories for the Wicked Soul
Everyone is allowed a weakness, even women of the twentieth century.
— Laurie R. King, A Letter of Mary
I can understand backward patriarchal reasoning coming from a male, but from a woman - and of all people, a leader of women? It says something profound about leadership - and, if anything - what it says about followers is not very flattering at all.
— Christina Engela, Demonspawn
Right now though, there is little that concerns me more than the impending assault on the human rights and equality of women and the pink community in South Africa. Right now there are events afoot in this country which justify my concern.
— Christina Engela, The Time Saving Agency
D'Artagnan had time to reflect that women - those gentle doves - treat one another more cruelly than bears and tigers.
— Alexandre Dumas, The Man in the Iron Mask
It is a mother's duty to teach her daughters about the uses of blood, particularly a magical daughter.
— Zen Cho, Sorcerer to the Crown
Having studied the toxic biological effects of wireless radio frequency (RF) radiation, I find it amazing that women will willfully strap on two radio frequency antennas to their breasts in the form of an underwired bra. The wireless industry knows the underwired bra as a dipole antenna or doublet.
— Steven Magee
Why, when men hate themselves, it’s women who take the beatings.
— Lindy West, Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman
To be a femme fatale you don't have to be slinky and sensuous and disastrously beautiful, you just have to have the will to disturb.
— Alice Munro
Youth and beauty are not accomplishments. They're the temporary happy byproducts of time and/or DNA. Don't hold your breath for either.
— Carrie Fisher
Women secretly love to talk about their vaginas. They get very excited, mainly because no one has ever asked them before.
— Eve Ensler, The Vagina Monologues
How is it possible to live? Life is so hard?’‘You must be harder than life, Firdaus. Life is very hard. The only people who really live are those who are harder than life itself.’‘But you are not hard, Sharifa, so how do you manage to live?’‘I am hard, terribly hard, Firdaus.’‘No, you are gentle and soft.’‘My skin is soft, but my heart is cruel, and my bite deadly.’‘Like snake?’‘Yes, exactly like a snake. Life is a snake. They are the same, Firdaus. If the snake realises you are not a snake, it will bite you. And if life knows you have no sting, it will devour you.
— Nawal El-Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero
No one rejoices more in revenge than women, wrote Juvenal. Women do most delight in revenge, wrote Sir Thomas Browne. Sweet is revenge, especially to women, wrote Lord Byron. And I say, I wonder why, boys. I wonder why.
— Siri Hustvedt, The Blazing World
She was a pious Buddhist and every day in her prayers asked Buddha not ro reincarnate her as a woman. "Let me become a cat or dog, but not a woman," was her constant murmur as she shuffled around the house, oozing apology with every step.
— Jung Chang, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China
Women will one day rule the world, and when they do, their brains will be so finely tuned from all the years of quiet that I anticipate they will be far superior rulers to men.
— Samantha Hunt, The Invention of Everything Else
Every time she went home she found herself being criticized. She was accused of being "too attached to her family," which was condemned as a "bourgeois habit," and had to see less and less of her own mother.
— Jung Chang, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China
And it was only then that I realized what I had let myself in for, and only then I realized how bloody thick I had been not to have predicted it. It would seem that the combination of elements--woman, desert, camels, aloneness--hit some soft sport in this era's passionless, heartless, aching psyche. It fired the imaginations of people who seem themselves as alienated, powerless, unable to do anything about a world gone mad. And wouldn't it be my luck to pick just this combination. The reaction was totally unexpected and it was very, very weird. I was now public property. I was now a kind of symbol. I was now an object of ridicule for small-minded sexists, and I was a crazy, irresponsible adventurer (though not as crazy as I would have been had I failed). But worse than all that, I was now a mythical being who had done something courageous and outside the possibilities that ordinary people could hope for. And that was the antithesis of what I wanted to share. That anyone could do anything. If I could bumble my way across a desert, then anyone could do anything. And that was true especially for women, who have used cowardice for so long to protect themselves that it has become a habit.
— Robyn Davidson, Tracks: A Woman's Solo Trek Across 1700 Miles of Australian Outback
How is it possible to live? Life is so hard?’‘You must be harder than life, Firdaus. Life is very hard. The only people who really live are those who are harder than life itself.’‘But you are not hard, Sharifa, so how do you manage to live?’‘I am hard, terribly hard, Firdaus.’‘No, you are gentle and soft.’‘My skin is soft, but my heart is cruel, and my bite deadly.’‘Like a snake?’‘Yes, exactly like a snake. Life is a snake. They are the same, Firdaus. If the snake realises you are not a snake, it will bite you. And if life knows you have no sting, it will devour you.
— Nawal El-Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero
good weatheris likegood women—it doesn’t always happenand when it doesit doesn’talways last.
— Charles Bukowski, Poems written before jumping out of an 8 story window
If men stopped making fools of themselves in front of women, I'm 80% sure the planet would cease to spin on its axis.
— Rhys
Grandmother trains me when to slip and slide and change, and when to remain inert. She tells me, "It is true, women are the keepers. We are keepers of silverware, the bites of savouries in our broth. We are the sole keepers of the keys to the almari. But child, what we really excel at is adapting. Outward, we appear fixed, planted as feet, but we are also amphibians, pulling our families through land and sea when catastrophe strikes.
— Yasmin Lahda
Where I grew up, women’s liberation was when you let a chick out of her cage for 15 minutes so she could stretch her legs.
— John Rachel
The psychology of adultery has been falsified by conventional morals, which assume, in monogamous countries, that attraction to one person cannot coexist with affection for another. Everybody knows that this is untrue.
— Bertrand Russell
For a moment this day, for many moments this May, let us gape in awe at the strength of women, and look upon their sinewy courage with respect and humility, as the Lord looked on His Mother, and still does. Like Him we are of women born, and to women must pay our first respect, and owe our first love, for they are as strong as the very ribs of the earth.
— Brian  Doyle, Credo: Essays on Grace, Altar Boys, Bees, Kneeling, Saints, the Mass, Priests, Strong Women, Epiphanies, a Wake, and the Haun
But men are bound to saySome things that, though untrue,Will get you down the aisleUntil you say "I do.
— Joyce Rachelle, Sewing Figs
Why is there always this twitchiness, when you introduce a man to a woman friend, about whether the man will be bored or put off?
— Alice Munro
Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply.
— F.Scott Fitzgerlad
What to do with daughters has always been something of a problem, unless they are so pretty or so passive or so wealthy that they are snatched up as brides as soon as the come of marriageable age.— THE COLLECTORS: DR. CLARIBEL AND MISS ETTA CONE
— Barbara Pollack
Receptionist: How do you write women so well?Melvin Udall: I think of a man, and I take away reason and accountability.
— Melvin Udall played by Jack Nicholson in AS GOOD AS IT GETS.
... a whole day’s tête-à-tête between two women can never end without a quarrel.
— Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
The woman who is liberated must never cross the line in which we ask men to examine their actions; we are a country built on the ideas, ingenuity, canniness, and downright brutality of man—to question their motives is to question our existence.
— Kristen Kehoe, Dropping In
When they go low, we go high.
— Michelle Obama
This is a battlefield, Faith! Women find themselves on battlefields, just as men do. We are given no weapons, and cannot be seen to fight. But fight we must, or perish.
— Frances Hardinge, The Lie Tree
When the heart is beautiful, its light shines through the eyes, vocal tones and actions of its master. True beauty is not in the body, but in the heart of the beholder.
— Suzy Kassem
You call her a Bitch,Because she throws attitude?Gentlemen, You need to Grow up!Try to be modest in Her Eyes,Not a disgust in Her Insights!
— Qalandar Nawaz
Surely we want to get to a point where women can be strong and powerful and not sexy. Or only sexy when they feel like it, not as a requirement to getting media coverage or being valued.
— Anna Kessel, Eat Sweat Play: How Sport Can Change Our Lives
I think too often we forget that girls can like sport; we are not biologically programmed to detest it, we are - in the main - conditioned against it. But shouldn’t we try to change that?
— Anna Kessel, Eat Sweat Play: How Sport Can Change Our Lives
She is yet like a diamond on a heap of broken glass.
— Mina Loy, The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy
The professors in the academy say, “Do not make the model more beautiful than she is,” and my soul whispers, “O if you could only paint the model as beautiful as she really is.
— Kahlil Gibran, Beloved Prophet: The Love Letters of Kahlil Gibran and Mary Haskell, and Her Private Journal
And maybe it was more than that.Maybe it was actually an unspoken instant agreement between the four women on the balcony: No woman should pay for the accidental death of this particular man. Maybe it was an involuntary, atavistic response to thousands of years of violence against women. Maybe it was for every rape, every brutal backhanded slap, every other Perry that had come before this one.
— Liane Moriarty, Big Little Lies
I have been envious of male characteristics, if not the men themselves. I'm jealous of the ease with which they seem to inhabit their professional pursuits: the lack of apologizing, of bending over backward to make sure the people around them are comfortable with what they're trying to do. The fact that they are so often free of the people-pleasing instincts. I have watched men order at dinner, ask for shitty wine and extra bread with confidence I could never muster, and thought, what a treat that must be. But I also considered being female such a unique gift, such a sacred joy, in ways that run so deep I can't articulate them. It's a special kind of privilege to be born into the body you wanted, to embrace the essence of your gender even as you recognize what you are up against. Even as you seek to redefine it.
— Lena Dunham, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned"
Ask a woman if she’s ambitious and she’ll look at you as if you just asked whether she sticks pins in puppies for fun. Ask a woman if she’s competitive and she’ll look at you as if you suggested that she’s a hooker.
— Gina Barreca
Poets, you always write about women worth dying for. Write, for a change, something about the ones worth living for!
— Ljupka Cvetanova, The New Land
When all you know is pain you don’t know that that is not normal. It is not a woman’s lot to suffer, even if we’ve been raised that
— Susan Sarandon
i am a woman and a poem. – visceral
— Nayyirah Waheed, Salt
You sure you're all right? You aren't out here pondering dark female thoughts are you?
— Joe Hill, NOS4A2
Pay equality is not going to happen because we scream and yell about it, it's going to happen when we start demandin
— Susan Sarandon
Much of what we accomplish in the church is due to the selfless service of women.
— Quentin L. Cook
Working with women is such a rewarding experience because as you interact with them, you realize that although they face various struggles, women have one goal, to see the world change for the better.
— Gugu Mona
She is a small woman with a face like a book mite
—  she is not without opinions.
In the history of American fatherhood, there have been roughly three stages, each a response to economic change. In the first, agrarian stage, a father trained and disciplined his son for employment, and often offered him work on the farm, while his wife brought up the girls. (For blacks, this stage began after slavery ended.) As economic life and vocational training moved out of the family in the early nineteenth century, fathers left more of the child-rearing to their wives. According to the historian John Nash, in both these stages, fathers were often distant and stern. Not until the early twentieth century, when increasing numbers of women developed identities, beyond brief jobs before marriage, in the schoolhouse, factory, and office, did the culture discover the idea that "father was friendly". In the early 1950s, popular magazines began to offer articles with titles such as "Fathers Are Parents Too" and "It's Time Father Got Back into the Family". Today, we are in the third stage of economic development but the second stage of fatherhood.
— Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Second Shift
Stop raping your feelings with thoughts!
— Ramana Pemmaraju
But an ordinary day can mark the beginning of an extraordinary journey!
— Elizabeth George, The Remarkable Women of the Bible: And Their Message for Your Life Today
Flythe kitesof your soul,letyour spiritsoar.
— - A Starry Eyed April
The Women Who Can Wait For Her ManTill Dawn, Without Any Argument,Are Priceless.
— Ahmed Ali Anjum, Talking Pillow
they were in love with apocalypse, like all men, more in love with myths than with any woman.
— Marge Piercy, Dance the Eagle to Sleep
If got chance, 90% of married women in this world possess the power to manage home, child and career simultaneously, and many are still doing it. The challenge here is that what percent of married men has the will to say - I will help you out.
— Shayana K.
The Eastern potentate who declared that women were at the bottom of all mischief, should have gone a little further and seen why it is so. It is because women are never lazy. They don’t know what it is to be quiet. They are Semiramides, and Cleopatras, and Joan of Arcs, Queen Elizabeths, and Catharine the Seconds, and they riot in battle, and murder, and clamour, and desperation. If they can’t agitate the universe and play at ball with hemispheres, they’ll make mountains of warfare and vexation out of domestic molehills; and social storms in household teacups. Forbid them to hold forth upon the freedom of nations and the wrongs of mankind, and they’ll quarrel with Mrs Jones about the shape of a mantle or the character of a small maid-servant. To call them the weaker sex is to utter a hideous mockery. They are the stronger sex, the nosier, the more persevering, the most self-assertive sex.
— Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley's Secret
At heart, women are creatures of darkness all the time.
— Robert Aickman, Ringing the Changes, Dark Entries
I want to be a Renaissance Woman. I want to paint, and I want to write, and I want to act, and I just want to do everything.
— Emma Watson
If you want to run for Prime Minister, you can. If you don’t, that’s wonderful, too. Shave your armpits, don’t shave them, wear flats one day, heels the next. These things are so irrelevant and surface to what it is all really about, and I wish people wouldn’t get caught up in that. We want to empower women to do exactly what they want, to be true to themselves, to have the opportunities to develop.
— Emma Watson
The saddest thing a girl can do is dumb herself down for a guy.
— Emma Watson
weak men are afraid of a woman's strength.
— R.H. Sin
I'd rather have a heart of goldThan all the treasure of the world.
— Ana Claudia Antunes, Memoirs of An Amazon
Good-girl-gone-queer Lindsay Lohan, divorced single mother Britney Spears, Caitlyn Jenner with her sultry poses, Kim Kardashian having the gall to show up on the cover of Vogue with her black husband: All of them are tied to the tracks and gleefully run over, less for what they've done than for the threat they pose to the idea that female sexuality fits within a familiar and safe pattern. If control over women's bodies were the sole point of the trainwreck, that would be terrifying enough. But it's only the beginning: Shame and fear are used to police pretty much every aspect of being female. After you've told someone what to do with her body, you need to tell her what to do with her mind.
— Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why
As for women who were pretty, intelligent, strikingly sensual, the daughters of rich families—they would only have served to disrupt my carefully ordered existence
— Han Kang, The Vegetarian
When at 15, my girlfriends started dropping out of their beloved sports teams, because they didn’t want to appear muscle-y, when at 18, my male friends were unable to express their feelings, I decided that I was a feminist.
— Emma Watson
[of Nan Goldin] In an afterword to Ballad written in 2012, she declared: ‘I decided as a young girl I was going to leave a record of my life and experience that no one could rewrite or deny.
— Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
You view love and especially women...as something hostile, something against which you defend yourself, although in vain, something whose power over you, however, you feel as a sweet torment, a prickling cruelty: this is truly a modern attitude.
— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs
I live like a woman and I love like a man. If only,you can deal with it.
— Himmilicious
too many left-wing student groups treat no one as badly as students of color or women who consider themselves to be classical liberals, libertarians, or conservatives, or who merely disagree with the actions of progressive protesters on campus. They’re seen as special kinds of traitors.
— Conor Friedersdorf
Some say that happy women are immaterial.
— Mina Loy, The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy
If it were left to men, there'd be nothing in the world but mating and squabbling.
— Judith Tarr, White Mare's Daughter
Amid this social intercourse, however, he avoided sedulously a meeting with Mrs. Annice; he had decided not to see her for a while. Indeed, it was not till an evening late in February, after dinner, that he took a cab to her house near Washington Square. He found her at home, and had not waited a minute before she came into the room. She was a tall woman, and wonderfully handsome by gaslight; but she had that tiresome habit, which many women have, of talking intensely--in italics, as it were: a habit found generally in women ill brought up-women without control of their feelings, or command of the expression of them.("The Bargain of Rupert Orange")
— Vincent O'Sullivan, The Supernatural Omnibus: Being a Collection of Stories of Apparitions, Witchcraft, Werewolves, Diabolism, Necromancy, Satanism, Divination, Sorcery, Goetry, Voodoo, Possession, Occult, Doom and Destiny
Psychologically, Japanese women depend largely on each other. In their sex-segregated society, they could be criticized for living in a female ghetto, and yet they have what some American feminists are trying to build, a ”women’s culture” with its own customs, values and even language.
— Kittredge Cherry, Womansword: What Japanese Words Say about Women
When [Japanese] women encouraged men to bask in public glory, it reminded me of the way you would indulge a child with a sweet-bean treat.
— Kittredge Cherry, Womansword: What Japanese Words Say about Women
In direct confrontation, the [Japanese] women might yield like blades of grass -- and spring back just as quickly. One of them compared this flexibility to the Vietcong guerrillas…
— Kittredge Cherry, Womansword: What Japanese Words Say about Women
It is merely the egoism of men, who wants to bury a woman like a treasure. All attempts at using vows, contracts, and holy ceremonies have failed to bring permanence into the most changeable aspect of changeable human existence, namely love. Can you deny that our Christina world is rotting?
— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs
The chaos of their voices registers as a single, overwhelming force cutting off her ability to reason, and all she wants is to get as far away from people as possible.
— Zainab Omaki, Side Babies: Contemporary Women In Africa
For men, women are their ‘counter weights’ and when that is not enough, their daughters are their ‘counter weights.’ One can’t do without a counter weight. Otherwise, he will fall over.
— Dada Bhagwan
She was a beautiful savage.
— R.H. Sin
Maybe exercise and sport can be something we do for ourselves. For fun! For Happiness! For clear thinking! Because physical activity should be something integral to our being alive. And it is the essential part that really concerns us here, not the bit about how many millimetres it might shave off your inside thigh measurements.
— Anna Kessel, Eat Sweat Play: How Sport Can Change Our Lives
Some women would not cheat, and some would not have cheated, had they each married a man whom they love … or at least like.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Does that new man in your life call his ex "a slut", "a whore", "a bitch", "psycho" , "crazy", "a nutter" etc etc. Chances are, whatever he's calling his ex right now, he'll be calling you when things don't go his way. Be warned.
— Miya Yamanouchi, Embrace Your Sexual Self: A Practical Guide for Women
If there's one thing I know about women, it's that they have vaginas.
— J. Richard Singleton
…each woman is a wonderful world unto herself. And monogamy? It’s like choosing to live in a single town and never traveling to experience the beauty, history, and enchantment of all the other unique, wonderful places in the world. Why does love have to limit us?	Perhaps it doesn’t. Only fear is restrictive. Love is expansive. And I wonder, since fear of enmeshment impels us to avoid commitment and fear of abandonment makes us possessive, what type of evolved relationship can emerge once those wounds are healed?
— Neil Strauss, The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships
The whole truth?" Miss Bart laughed. "What is the truth? Where a woman is concerned, it's the story that's easiest to believe. In this case it's a great deal easier to believe Bertha Dorset's story than mine, because she has a big house and an opera box, and it's convenient to be on good terms with her
— Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
Do not be surprised,' she said. 'It is I, and it is not I; You shall find me again, and you shall lose me; Once more shall I come among you; for few men have seen me, and none has understood me; And you shall forget me, and you shall recognize me, and you shall forget me.
— Marcel Schwob, The Book of Monelle
Leslie Marmon Silko whispers the story is long. No, longer. Longer than that even. Longer than anything. With Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath drink at the bar. Laugh the dark laughter in the dark light. Sing a dark drunken song of men. Make a slurry toast. Rock back and forth, and drink the dark, and bask in the wallow of women knowing what women know. Just for a night. When you need to feel the ground of your life and the heart of the world, there will be a bonfire at the edge of a canyon under a night sky where Joy Harjo will sing your bonesong. Go ahead-with Anne Carson - rebuild the wreckage of a life a word at a time, ignoring grammar and the forms that keep culture humming. Make word war and have it out and settle it, scattering old meanings like hacked to pieces paper doll confetti. The lines that are left … they are awake and growling. With Virginia Woolf there will perhaps be a long walk in a garden or along a shore, perhaps a walk that will last all day. She will put her arm in yours and gaze out. At your backs will be history. In front of you, just the ordinary day, which is of course your entire life. Like language. The small backs of words. Stretching out horizonless. I am in a midnight blue room. A writing room. With a blood red desk. A room with rituals and sanctuaries. I made it for myself. It took me years. I reach down below my desk and pull up a bottle of scotch. Balvenie. 30 year. I pour myself an amber shot. I drink. Warm lips, throat. I close my eyes. I am not Virginia Woolf. But there is a line of hers that keeps me well: Arrange whatever pieces come your way. I am not alone. Whatever else there was or is, writing is with me.
— Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water
In a patriarchal society, one of the most important functions of the institution of the family is to make feel like a somebody whenever he is in his own yard a man who is a nobody whenever he is in his employer’s yard.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
give a woman the chance to reject something else besides me
— Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer
Shevek saw that he had touched in these men an impersonal animosity that went very deep. Apparently they, like the tables on the ship, contained a woman, a suppressed, silenced, bestialized woman, a fury in a cage. He had no right to tease them. They knew no relation but possession. They were possessed.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
And yet now and then he let himself steal a glance at her. Lovely dark colors of her skin, hair, and eyes. We are half-baked compared to them. Allowed out of the kiln before we were fully done. The old aboriginal myth; the truth, there.
— Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle
Women tend to act heroically within their own moral universe, regardless of whether anyone else knows about it - donating more kidneys to nonrelatives than men do, for example. Men, on the other hand, are far more likely to risk their lives at a moment's notice, and that reaction is particularly strong when others are watching, or when they are part of a group.
— Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging
I like a bit of spunk in a lady
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
Neither Boncer nor Teddy comes out of the house, not even to watch from the veranda. Here, laying the dead to rest, like washing and feeding and birth, is women’s work.
— Charlotte Wood
But more often there are regular people in the pool. Beautiful women seniors doing water aerobics - mothers and grandmothers and great grandmothers - their massive breasts and guts reminding you how it is that women carry worlds. When I swim by them I watch their legs and bodies underwater, and feel a strange kinship with a maternal lineage.
— Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water
Becoming a woman felt a bit like becoming famous. For, from being benevolently generally ignored – the base-line existence of most children – a teenage girl is suddenly fascinating to others, and gets bombarded with questions: What size are you? Have you done it yet? Will you have sex with me? Have you got ID? Do you want to try a puff of this? Are you seeing anyone? Have you got protection? What’s your signature style? Can you walk in heels? Who are your heroes? Are you getting a Brazilian? What porn do you like? Do you want to get married? When are you going to have kids? Are you a feminist? Were you just flirting with that man? What do you want to do? WHO ARE YOU?All ridiculous questions to ask of a 13-year-old simply because she now needs a bra. They might as well have been asking my dog. I had absolutely no idea.
— Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman
Many men, One CryOne Woman, a Pleasant Pride.
— Goitsemang Mvula
Using poise is not being fake; it is being professional, strong, and composed.
— Tanya R. Liverman, In The Mirror: A Woman's Saga
There is a root to every action, which is really a reaction to what is going on inside of us.
— Tanya R. Liverman, In The Mirror: A Woman's Saga
I don't think it's really about being bitchy or demanding or cold or calculating: those characteristics, after all, can be attached to most women with even the paltriest of evidence. I think, quite frankly, that the world simply does not care for the complicated girls, the ones who seem too dark, too deep, too vibrant, too opinionated...
— Elizabeth Wurtzel, Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women
There is an inner beauty and outer beauty. Both have tremendous influence.
— Tanya R. Liverman, In The Mirror: A Woman's Saga
She was shocked when she followed her aunt and cousin down into the city proper. The streets were crawling with people, all hurrying to and fro, mindless of one another. They brushed by with barely even a glance, stepping down into the busy roads between horse drawn buses and draymen’s carts with such confidence, seemingly oblivious that they could be run down at any moment. Children dodged in and out amongst them, ragamuffins all, some barefoot.
— Lillian White, The Mill Owner's Son: Ellen's Story
Being assertive enough to avoid being coerced into sex sounds like a good skill to learn. But you have to wonder what the corresponding page on Challenges said: Try not to rape your girlfriend?
— Moira Wegel
I am a woman with thoughts and questions and shit to say. I say if I'm beautiful. I say if I'm strong. You will not determine my story — I will.
— Amy Schumer
They wanted their girls to be safe. To do what they had to do to conform, to defer, to survive, to grow up. They wanted their girls never to grow up. Never to stop burning. They wanted their girls to say fuck it, to see through the lies, to know their own strength. They wanted their girls to believe the things could be different this time, and they wanted it to be true.They wondered, sometimes, if they'd made a mistake. If it was dangerous, taming the wild, stealing away the words a girl might use to name her secret self. They wondered at the consequences of teaching a girl she was weak instead of warning her she was strong. They wondered, if knowing was power, what happened to power that refused to know itself; they wondered what happened that couldn't be satisfied, to pain that couldn't be felt, a rage that couldn't be spoken.
— Robin Wasserman, Girls on Fire
Making female noises, shrieking and squeaking and being shrill, all those things that annoy people with longer vocal cords. Another case where the length of organs seems to be so important to men.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks & Essays on the Writer, the Reader & the Imagination
Until our own time, history focussed on man the achiever; the higher the achiever the more likely it was that the woman who slept in his bed would be judged unworthy of his company. Her husband's fans recoiled from the notion that she might have made a significant contribution towards his achievement of greatness. The possibility that a wife might have been closer to their idol than they could ever be, understood him better than they ever could, could not be entertained.
— Germaine Greer, Shakespeare's Wife
We can tell a lot about a woman from her books.
— Director Phil Coulson
She is made up of depths even the ocean couldn't fathom.
— Jessica Katoff
she'd played mother and wives. Women in narratives were always defined by their relations.
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
We must accept the idea that having a male child has a unique social and psychological meaning for a woman. Even women who led the movement to break out the passivity and sublimation of the female role were deeply influenced by the belief in superior masculine power.
— Klein Carole
She was gracious and yet fading, like an old statue in a garden, that symbolizes the weather through which it has endured, and is not so much the work of man as the work of wind and rain and the herd of the seasons, and though formed in men's image is a figure of doom.
— Djuna Barnes
[Women] are superior beings to us men. When they love us, then they are being gracious, for only rarely do we give them reason to love us. I learned that from your mother, and she's right. Sad to say, she's right.
— Nina George, The Little Paris Bookshop
She had that kind of undeniable femininity that few women achieve, bogged down as we are by other things.
— Kate Pullinger, Weird Sister
Maybe, long ago, we used to be good. Maybe all little girls are good in the beginning.
— Nova Ren Suma
More often than not, the ideal breast is an invented breast. Decolletage, the tushy breast, is an artifact of clothing. Naked breasts don't dance cheek to cheek--they turn away from each other. Breasts vary in size and shape to an outlandish degree, but they can be whipped into an impressive conformity, and because we are human and we can't leave anything alone, we have whipped away.
— Natalie Angier
The relentlessness with which these women tried to repair their relationships was foreign to me
—  I didn’t understand why they didn’t simply give up.
And the matron sighed over the destiny of ladies in good society, whose moral judgement led them to love unabashedly and whose depravity led them to pay for it.
— Michelle Franklin
I would describe her more as a knitter than a doer.
— William Goldman, The Princess Bride
Look at these magnificent women, I thought, created in such misogynistic and hierarchical societies, yet they are the subversive centers around which the plot is shaped. Everything is supposed to revolve around the male hero. But it is the active presence of these women that changes events and diverts the man's life from its traditional course, that shocks him into changing his very mode of existence. In the classical Iranian narrative, active women dominate the scene; they make things happen.
— Azar Nafisi, Things I've Been Silent About: Memories
Even the mild-mannered Sophia Western of Tom Jones and Richardson's annoyingly pious Clarissa Harlow distinguished themselves by saying no to the authority of their parents, their societies, and norms and demanding to marry the man they chose. Perhaps it was exactly because women were deprived of so much in their real lives that they became so subversive in the realm of fiction, refusing the authority imposed on them, breaking out of old structures, not submitting.
— Azar Nafisi, Things I've Been Silent About: Memories
You 'ain't found out yet we're women-folks, Nanny Penn," said she. "You 'ain't seen enough of men-folks yet to. One of these days you'll find it out, an' then you'll know that we know only what men-folks think we do, so far as any use of it goes, an' how we'd ought to reckon men-folks in with Providence an' not complain of what they do any more than we do of the weather.
— Mary Wilkins Freeman, The Complete Works of Mary Wilkins Freeman
To be “out of touch” with a society in which women have internalized their subjugation is an admirable thing.
— Mona Eltahawy
The syndicate was successful in including an officer and two other crew members in its plan. Sheikh employed old ways of enticing by wine, women and money to use them.
— Ravi Ranjan Goswami, The gold syndicate
I sometimes wonder how powerful are those Fortune 500 CEOs who can can’t even change the way that list looks (leave aside how the world looks). And, I wonder what message do we send to our young girls, in classrooms across the world, who work as hard as our young boys but see only 20 CEOs out of those 500 who look like them.
— Sharad Vivek Sagar
Also the fact that he's a guy. A girl screws around like Lotto and she's like diseased. Untouchable. But a guy can stick it to a million places and everyone just thinks he's doing what boys do.
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
a feminist is just someone who recognizes power structures that keep people from having the fullest life they can.
— Lauren Groff
The prisoners of the cultures are mostly the women! House is the name of the prison!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Faith had always told herself that she was not like other ladies. But neither, it seemed, were other ladies.
— Frances Hardinge, The Lie Tree
He existed in his own terms and I followed it without hesitation.
— Pushpa Rana, Just the Way I Feel
A feminist is any woman who tells the truth about her life.
— Virginia Woolf