women Quotes

“Do not consider me now as an elegant female, intending to play you, but as a rational creature, speaking the truth from her heart.”

“A lady’s imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.”

“It does good to no woman to be flattered [by a man] who does not intend to marry her; and it is madness in all women to let a secret love kindle within them, which, if unreturned and unknown, must devour the life that feeds it; and, if discovered and responded to, must lead, ignis-fatuus-like, into miry wilds whence there is no extrication.”

“Flirting is a woman’s trade, one must keep in practice.”

“Wendy,” Peter Pan continued in a voice that no woman has ever yet been able to resist, “Wendy, one girl is more use than twenty boys.”

“A girl likes to be crossed a little in love now and then.”

“Women endure entire lifetimes of these indignities—in the form of catcalls, groping, assault, oppression. These things injure us. They sap our strength. Some of the cuts are so small they’re barely visible. Others are huge and gaping, leaving scars that never heal. Either way, they accumulate. We carry them everywhere, to and from school and work, at home while raising our children, at our places of worship, anytime we try to advance.”

“A woman, especially if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.”

“If adventures will not befall a young lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad.”

“One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.”

“Friendships between women, as any woman will tell you, are built of a thousand small kindnesses... swapped back and forth and over again.”

“Since stepping reluctantly into public life, I’ve been held up as the most powerful woman in the world and taken down as an “angry black woman.” I’ve wanted to ask my detractors which part of that phrase matters to them the most—is it “angry” or “black” or “woman”?”

“I knew from my own life experience that when someone shows genuine interest in your learning and development, even if only for ten minutes in a busy day, it matters. It matters especially for women, for minorities, for anyone society is quick to overlook.”

“Yet but three come one more. Two of both kinds make up four. Ere she comes curst and sad. Cupid is a knavish lad. Thus to make poor females mad.”

“The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

“I tried not to feel intimidated when classroom conversation was dominated by male students, which it often was. Hearing them, I realized that they weren’t at all smarter than the rest of us. They were simply emboldened, floating on an ancient tide of superiority, buoyed by the fact that history had never told them anything different.”

“Women may fall when there’s no strength in men.”

“Women should be respected as well! Generally speaking, men are held in great esteem in all parts of the world, so why shouldn’t women have their share? Soldiers and war heroes are honored and commemorated, explorers are granted immortal fame, martyrs are revered, but how many people look upon women too as soldiers?”

Woman is sacred; the woman one loves is holy.

“Wasn’t that the point of the book? For women to realize, We are just two people. Not that much separates us. Not nearly as much as I’d thought.”

“That’s what sisters and girlfriends are all about. Sticking together even in the mud, ’specially in mud.”

“Guilt management can be just important as time management for mothers.”

“I hope you find true meaning, contentment, and passion in your life. I hope you navigate the difficult times and come out with greater strength and resolve. I hope you find whatever balance you seek with your eyes wide open. And I hope that you - yes, you - have the ambition to lean in to your career and run the world. Because the world needs you to change it.”

“Ya need some girlfriends, hon, ’cause they’re furever. Without a vow. A clutch of women’s the most tender, most tough place on Earth.”

“If this was a man’s world, a veil took the rough beard right off. Everything appeared softer, nicer. When I walked behind August in my bee veil, I felt like a moon floating behind a night cloud.”

“I recommend adopting two concurrent goals: a long-term dream and an eighteen-month plan.”

“There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.”

“Turned on its side, the brick announced a happy bee family, no Ozzie, just Harriet and her ten thousand daughters.”

“Egg laying is the main thing, Lily. She’s the mother of every bee in the hive, and they all depend on her to keep it going. I don’t care what their job is—they know the queen is their mother. She’s the mother of thousands.”

″‘Good riddance,’ he said, and moved toward the door. We had to open up our little wall of women to let him through.”

″. . . Big Mama kept bees, too, right out there in the same spot they’re in today. Nobody around here had ever seen a lady beekeeper till her. She liked to tell everybody that women made the best beekeepers, ‘cause they have a special ability built into them to love creatures that sting. ‘It comes from years of loving children and husbands,’ she’d say.”

“I realized that searching for a mentor has become the professional equivalent of waiting for Prince Charming. We all grew up on the fairy tale “Sleeping Beauty,” which instructs young women that if they just wait for their prince to arrive, they will be kissed and whisked away on a white horse to live happily ever after. Now young women are told that if they can just find the right mentor, they will be pushed up the ladder and whisked away to the corner office to live happily ever after. Once again, we are teaching women to be too dependent on others.”

“She explained that many people, but especially women, feel fraudulent when they are praised for their accomplishments. Instead of feeling worthy of recognition, they feel undeserving and guilty, as if a mistake has been made. Despite being high achievers, even experts in their fields, women can’t seem to shake the sense that it is only a matter of time until they are found out for who they really are- impostors with limited skills or abilities.”

“In the future, there will be no female leaders. There will just be leaders.”“In the future, there will be no female leaders. There will just be leaders.”

“What struck me – with her and with many other female American friends I have – is how invested they are in being ‘liked’. How they have been raised to believe that their being likeable is very important and that this ‘likeable’ trait is a specific thing. And that specific thing does not include showing anger or being aggressive or disagreeing too loudly.”

“We must raise both the ceiling and the floor.”

“We spend too much time teaching girls to worry about what boys think of them. But the reverse is not the case. We don’t teach boys to care about being likeable.”

“Some people ask: ‘Why the word feminist? Why not just say you are a believer in human rights, or something like that?’ Because that would be ... a way of pretending that it was not women who have, for centuries, been excluded. It would be a way of denying that the problem of gender targets women.”

“As women must be more empowered at work, men must be more empowered at home.”

“The time is long overdue to encourage more women to dream the possible dream.”

“We teach girls shame. ‘Close your legs. Cover yourself.’ We make them feel as though being born female they’re already guilty of something. And so, girls grow up to be women who cannot say they have desire. They grow up to be women who silence themselves. They grow up to be women who cannot say what they truly think. And they grow up — and this is the worst thing we do to girls — they grow up to be women who have turned pretense into an art form.”

“She realized that the landscape of a woman’s soul could change as quickly as a world at war.”

“Success and likeability are positively correlated for men and negatively for women. When a man is successful, he is liked by both men and women. When a woman is successful, people of both genders like her less.”

Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the company of intelligent women

“Women need to shift from thinking ‘I’m not ready to do that’ to thinking ‘I want to do that- and I’ll learn by doing it.‘”

“When woman work outside the home and share breadwinning duties, couples are more likely to stay together. In fact, the risk of divorce reduces by about half when a wife earns half the income and a husband does half the housework.”

“I have chosen to no longer be apologetic for my femaleness and my femininity. And I want to be respected in all of my femaleness because I deserve to be.”

“Men tell stories,” I say. It is the truest, simplest answer to his question. “Women get on with it.”

“It’s hard to love a woman and do anything.”

“And then we do a much greater disservice to girls, because we raise them to cater to the fragile egos of males. We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls: You can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful but not too successful, otherwise you will threaten the man. If you are the breadwinner in your relationship with a man, pretend that you are not, especially in public, otherwise you will emasculate him.”

“I carried the books to my room and read through the night. I loved the fiery pages of Mary Wollstonecraft, but there was a single line written by John Stuart Mill that, when I read it, moved the world: “It is a subject on which nothing final can be known.” The subject Mill had in mind was the nature of women. Mill claimed that women have been coaxed, cajoled, shoved and squashed into a series of feminine contortions for so many centuries, that it is now quite impossible to define their natural abilities or aspirations.”

“Why do men often call smart women devious?”

I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman’s inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman’s fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men.

“When women are gathered together with no men around, they don’t have to be anything in particular; they can just be.”

“At some point in a woman’s life, she just gets tired of being ashamed all the time. After that, she is free to become whoever she truly is.”

I hate to hear you talk about all women as if they were fine ladies instead of rational creatures. None of us want to be in calm waters all our lives.

All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one: you need not covet it), is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone!

“No one but a woman can help a man when he is in trouble of the heart.”

“There was something rather blousy about roses in full bloom, something shallow and raucous, like women with untidy hair”

“I suppose that we women are such cowards that we think a man will save us from fears, and we marry him.”

“We women have something of the mother in us that makes us rise above smaller matters when the mother-spirit is invoked.”

“Men are simpler than you imagine my sweet child. But what goes on in the twisted, tortuous minds of women would baffle anyone.”

Women can always put things in fewest words. Except when it’s blowing up; and then they lengthens it out.

“All the girls in the world were divided into two classes: one class--all the girls in the world except her, and those girls with all sorts of human weaknesses, and very ordinary girls: the other class--she alone, having no weaknesses of any sort and higher than all humanity.”

“Evil indeed is the man who has not one woman to mourn him.”

“Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more, Men were deceivers ever, One foot in sea and one on shore, To one thing constant never.”

“There’s a light in a woman’s eyes that speaks louder than words.”

“I see a woman may be made a fool, If she had not a spirit to resist.”

“Women? Women are like...thunderstorms. They’re beautiful to look at, and sometimes they’re nice to listen to-but most of the time they’re just plain inconvenient.”

“A country coquette, beset with a labyrinth of whims and caprices, which were forever presenting new difficulties and impediments.”

“Now I want to live like everybody else. I want to have a wife like everybody else and to take her out on Sundays. I have invented a mask that makes me look like anybody. People will not even turn round in the streets. You will be the happiest of women. And we will sing, all by ourselves, till we swoon away with delight.”

“A woman’s heart is such a complex problem—the owner thereof is often most incompetent to find the solution of this puzzle.”

“I profess not to know how women’s hearts are wooed and won. To me they have always been matters of riddle and admiration.”

It was a woman. Only a woman would stab like that.

“The schoolmaster is generally a man of some importance in the female circle of a rural neighborhood, being considered a kind of idle, gentlemanlike personage, of vastly superior taste and accomplishments to the rough country swains, and, indeed, inferior in learning only to the parson.”

“Ducks and geese are foolish things, and must be looked after, but girls can take care of themselves.”

“And he would have passed a pleasant life of it, in despite of the Devil and all his works, if his path had not been crossed by a being that causes more perplexity to mortal man than ghosts, goblins, and the whole race of witches put together, and that was—a woman.”

D’Artagnan had time to reflect that women - those gentle doves - treat one another more cruelly than bears and tigers.

“And the great advantage of being a literary woman was that you could go everywhere and do everything.”

Women are like that. When they are enraged they have great strength.

“All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That is his.”

“Thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years.”

“Any woman can weep without tears,” she answered over her shoulder, “and most can heal with their hands. It depends on the wound. She is a woman, Your Highness, and that’s riddle enough”

What man can pretend to know the riddle of a woman’s mind?

“They wore their professional clothes like armor. They wielded their work like weapons, warding off the presumption of inferiority because they were Negro or female.”

“Their path to advancement might look less like a straight line and more like some of the pressure distributions and orbits they plotted, but they were determined to take a seat at the table.”

″‘People tend to overestimate my character,’ I say quietly. ‘They think that because I’m small, or a girl, or a Stiff, I can’t possibly be cruel. But they’re wrong.‘”

“Katherine Johnson knew: once you took the first step, anything was possible.”

“Women, on the other hand, had to wield their intellects like a scythe, hacking away against the stubborn underbrush of low expectations.”

“There was virtually no aspect of twentieth-century defense technology that had not been touched by the hands and minds of female mathematicians.”

“Even as a professional in an integrated world, I had been the only black woman in enough drawing rooms and boardrooms to have an inkling of the chutzpah it took for an African American woman in a segregated southern workplace to tell her bosses she was sure her calculations would put a man on the Moon.”

“What I wanted was for them to have a grand, sweeping narrative that they deserved, the kind of American history that belongs to the Wright Brothers and the astronauts, to Alexander Hamilton and Martin Luther King Jr. Not told as a separate history, but as part of the story we all know. Not at the margins, but at the very center, the protagonists of the drama. And not just because they are black, or because they are women, but because they are part of the American epic.”

“What she wouldn’t have given for her father to see her—to see his baby girl who used to count the stars now sending men to travel among them. Joshua Coleman knew as if from second sight that Katherine, his brilliant, charismatic, inquisitive youngest child—a black girl from rural West Virginia, born at a time when the odds were more likely that she would die before age thirty-five than even finish high school—would somehow, someday, unite her story with the great epic of America.”

The most loving women are the women who will test you the most.

A happy woman is a woman relaxed in her body and heart: powerful, unpredictable, deep, potentially wild and destructive, or calm and serene, but always full of life, surrendered to and moved by the great force of her oceanic heart.

The feminine’s moods and opinions are like weather patterns. They are constantly changing, severe and gentle, and they have no single source. No analysis will work.

“But women who have common sense are so curiously plain, father, aren’t they?”

“How you women war against each other!”

“It is the growth of the moral sense in women that makes marriage such a hopeless, one-sided institution.”

“We have all feet of clay, women as well as men; but when we men love women, we love them knowing their weaknesses, their follies, their imperfections, love them all the more, it may be, for that reason.”

“Ah! the strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. […] Science can never grapple with the irrational.”

“Women are not meant to judge us, but to forgive us when we need forgiveness. Pardon, not punishment, is their mission.”

“You can forget. Men easily forget. And I forgive. That is how women help the world. I see that now.”

“The kindest words my father said to me Women like you drown oceans.”

“And she would be married, and to Giddon. She would be his wife, the lady of his house. She’d be charged with entertaining his wretched guests. Expected to hire and dismiss his servants, based on their skill with a pastry, or some such nonsense. Expected to bear him children, and stay at home to love them. She would go to bed at night, Giddon’s bed, and lie with a man who considered a scratch to her face an affront to his person. A man who thought himself her protector—her protector when she could outduel him if she used a toothpick to his sword.”

“Learn this now and learn it well. Like a compass facing north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. Always. You remember that, Mariam.”

“A society has no chance of success if its women are uneducated, Laila. No chance.”

“A woman who will be like a rock in a riverbed, enduring without complaint, her grace not sullied but shaped by the turbulence that washes over her.”

“Women need solitude in order to find again the true essence of themselves.”

“Men kick friendship around like a football, but it doesn’t seem to crack. Women treat it like glass and it goes to pieces.”

“Helda,” Katsa said, “how much time do you suppose I spend wondering which of the gentlemen finds me beautiful?” “Not enough.”

“You’re not an unnatural woman, Katsa. You can fight as other women can’t, but you’re not so different from other women. You’ll want babies. I’m certain of it.”

“Bone by bone, hair by hair, Wild Woman comes back. Through night dreams, through events half understood and half remembered...”

“For men and women alike, this journey is a the trajectory between birth and death, a human life lived. No one escapes the adventure. We only work with it differently.”

“With no men around, everyone was surprisingly lighthearted.”

“Though there is no playbook on how to navigate the path of life, if I do it with the grace and heart of the women before me, the I will have lived my life with honor.”

“Men argue for the right to be free while women argue for the right to be upset. Men want space while women want understanding.”

“You see, women are like fires, like flames. Some women are like candles, bright and friendly. Some are like single sparks, or embers, like fireflies for chasing on summer nights. Some are like campfires, all light and heat for a night and willing to be left after. Some women are like hearthfires, not much to look at but underneath they are all warm red coal that burns a long, long while.”

“This hotel – the Amazon – was for women only, and they were mostly girls my age with wealthy parents [...] and they were all going to posh secretarial schools like Katy Gibbs, where they had to wear hats and stockings and gloves to class, or they had just graduated from places like Katy Gibbs and were secretaries to executives and junior executives and simply hanging around in New York waiting to get married to some career man or other.”

“I’m a lady. You might not believe that from my offspring, but I am.”

“There was a silence—a comfortable replete silence. Into that silence came The Voice. Without warning, inhuman, penetrating . . . ‘Ladies and gentlemen! Silence, please! . . . You are charged with the following indictments.‘”

“Father and I protect women from one another from themselves our women.”

“a woman who has adjusted to many things in life and overcome many more, her face is full of strength. She has, we can see, wit and faith of a kind that keep her eyes lit and full of interest and expectancy. She is, in a word, a beautiful woman. Her bearing is perhaps most like the noble bearing of the women of the Hereros of Southwest Africa - rather as if she imagines that as she walks she still bears a basket or a vessel upon her head.”

“It’s just that it’s fearsome for a man to have a woman start thinking right in front of him. It always leads to trouble.”

“I don’t like this kind of talk. It is like women talking.”

“We need to understand that there is no formula for how women should lead their lives. That is why we must respect the choices that each woman makes for herself and her family. Every woman deserves the chance to realize her God-given potential.”

“You’re like seven of the strangest women I’ve ever met.”

“Let’s be honest: women are still only really valued for two things—their looks and their role as mothers.”

“It’s a time when men and women come to know what they truly are. A time of purging.” I’d been looking at the ceiling as he spoke. At his final words, I turned to face him in surprise. “Is that what the Catholics mean by purgatory?” “In essence.” He nodded. “A period during which each soul is cleansed by a self-imposed recognition of past deeds—and misdeeds.”

“Misfortune is a fact of nature acceptable to women, especially when it falls on other women.”

“Women are weaker, but their weakness is full of cunning and an equally rigid moral certainty. ”

“If one is a woman one is often surprised by a sudden splitting off of consciousness, say in walking down Whitehall, when from being the natural inheritor of that civilisation, she becomes, on the contrary, alien and critical. ”

“Only Jane Austen did it and Emily Brontë. It is another feather, perhaps the finest, in their caps. They wrote as women write, not as men write. Of all the thousand women who wrote novels then, they alone entirely ignored the perpetual admonitions of the eternal pedagogue—write this, think that. ”

“When men and women punish each other for truth telling, we reinforce the notion that lies are better. To be loving we willingly hear the other’s truth, and most important, we affirm the value of truth telling. Lies may make people feel better, but they do not help them to know love.”

“What do you think has become of the young and old men? And what do you think has become of the women and children? They are alive and well somewhere, The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.”

“Excuse the straight question, Higgins. Are you a man of good character where women are concerned?”

“Beware of women altogether. Only let to a man. . . . Men don’t gossip over tea-cups. If they get drunk, there’s an end of them—they lie down comfortably and sleep it off. If they’re vulgar, they somehow keep it to themselves. It doesn’t spread so. Give me a man—of course, provided he’s clean.”

“A woman’s love — it stands the test of time, logic, and all circumstance.”

“It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.”

“It’s not the guy who determines whether you’re a sports fish or a keeper — it’s you.”

“I say that there is no role for women--there is, instead, a role for each woman, and she must make it for herself. ... A woman’s strength should not be in her role, whatever she chooses it to be, but in the power to choose that role.”

“Ah, women and young girls, how incomprehensible are your feminine hearts! When you are not the timidest, you are the bravest of creatures.”

“You know what they say: A woman needs a man about as much as a fish needs a bicycle.”

“The reason we’re such fertile ground for the dark forces of such lies and social manipulation is that we’re dissociated from the genuine light of self-awareness.”

“Women are still in emotional bondage as long as we need to worry that we might have to make a choice between being heard and being loved.”

“We are afraid to allow ourselves to blossom fully because of the general disapproval that fills our air whenever a ‘little lady’ forgets her place.”

“Much of traditional religious imagery has represented women as inferior, even evil. It is only an enlightened spiritual worldview that reveals both men and women in all our true glory.”

“The regime of oppression is almost over; its life force is waning, and only its ghost remains. Don’t tarry too long to mourn its effects; celebrate and rejoice in the new. The past is over. Wipe the dirt off your feet.”

“...the more of us who understand the game and see through the lie and forge ahead in support of every other woman’s right to a passionate response to life, the more we will hasten the end of our jail term.”

“Don’t stop now. Keep going. The next time someone makes you feel though, winning as you are, perhaps you’re getting too big for your britches; say to them silently, ‘I haven’t even started yet.’ ”

“In those earlier days she had always nourished a secret contempt for girls who were the slaves of the first good-looking young fellow who should choose to salute them.

“It appears that ordinary men take wives because possession is not possible without marriage, and that ordinary women accept husbands because marriage is not possible without possession.”

“She did not look at things from the proper feminine angle. The society of such women was about as relaxing as going from your work to teach the second form, instead of reclining in a paradise with sweet laughs for bird-notes, and blue eyes for a heaven.”

“She was not a woman to be spoken of as other women are.”

“So why do women keep falling victim to the trap of jealousy, comparison, negativity and cattiness?”

“Of course, some of the girls are no longer children. Yet they are not allowed to be women. They are not married. There is no place for them in this way of life here. Except to do hard work or study scriptures. Their hopes and desires die on the vine. This turns them inward. They are seeking ways out of themselves. So they come to Tituba.”

“I have been treated better than I should have been---not by life in general nor by the machinery of things but by women.”

“Masses of the people think that feminism is always the only about women seeking to be equal to men. Their misunderstanding of feminist politics reflects the reality that most folks learn about feminism from patriarchal mass media.”

“As long as women are using class or race power to dominate other women, feminist sisterhood cannot be fully realized.”

“Women will only be truly sexually liberated when we arrive at a place where we can see ourselves as having sexual value and agency irrespective of whether of not we are the objects of male desire.”

“Unloved women have no biographies--they have histories.”

“Young women drawn to Chicago by the fair and by the prospect of living on their own had disappeared, last seen at the killer’s block-long mansion, a parody of everything architects held dear.”

“Instead of teaching women how to keep a man let’s encourage them to be the greatest things to and for themselves.”

“Women, I allow, may have different duties to fulfil; but they are human duties, and the principles that should regulate the discharge of them, I sturdily maintain, must be the same.”

“Besides, how should a woman void of reflection be capable of educating her children?”

“To say the truth women are, in general, too familiar with each other, which leads to that gross degree of familiarity that so frequently renders the marriage state unhappy.”

“Would ye, O my sisters, really possess modesty . . . ye must acquire that soberness of mind, which the exercise of duties, and the pursuit of knowledge, alone inspire, or ye will remain in a doubtful dependent situation, and only be loved whilst ye are fair!”

“Civilized women are, therefore, so weakened by false refinement, that, respecting morals, their condition is much below what it would be were they left in a state nearer to nature.”

“The same love of pleasure, fostered by the whole tendency of their education, gives a trifling turn to the conduct of women in most circumstances.”

“A good women isn’t asking for perfection from her man, she’s asking for consistency. ”

“Women are always to seem to be this and that.”

“Chorus: One day the story will change: then shall the glory of women resound… Reversing at last the sad reputation of ladies.”

“I want to enjoy the mystery of not knowing you. Take in every exciting opportunity to learn you. Then, fall in love with the anticipation of one day truly understanding you, so that I can become totally obsessed with the beauty of doing all the things that make you smile.”

“Medea: I had rather stand my ground three times among the shields than face a childbirth once.”

“In your relationship, never settle for less than what you deserve. At the same time, never think you deserve more out of a relationship than you are willing to put into it.”

“Chorus: If only Apollo, Prince of the lyric, had put in our hearts the invention Of music and songs for the lyre Wouldn’t I then have raised up a feminine paean To answer the epic of men?”

“Medea: Of all creatures that can feel and think, we women are the worst treated things alive.”

“Medea: Divorce is a disgrace (at least for women), to repudiate the man, not possible.”

“Making a good woman feel secure in the relationship has nothing to do with how much money you spend ON HER, but rather how much quality time you are willing to spend with her.”

“Any man who makes you feel as if you have to change who you are, as a person, to be with him, is a man that will leave you as soon as he meets the woman he’s trying to make you out to be.”

“Medea: Well, suppose they are dead: … will any man afford me home in a country safe for living…?”

“Medea: we (women) bid the highest price in dowries just to buy some man to be dictator of our bodies… How that compounds the wrong!”

“When a man complains of your standards being too high, it is usually because he’s used to dealing with women who have none.”

″ When a strong women finally gives up, it is not because she is weak, or because she no longer loves her man. To put it in the simplest terms-- she is tired. She’s tired of the games... She’s tired of the sleepless nights.. she’s tired of feeling like she’s all alone and the only one trying... she’s tired. ”

“Chorus: Woman of stone, heart of iron, Disconsolate woman, ready to kill The seed of your hands with the hand that tilled.”

“No, women like you don’t write. They carve onion sculptures and potato statues. They sit in dark corners and braid their hair in new shapes and twists in order to control the stiffness, the unruliness, the rebelliousness.”

″ She is not ‘nagging,’ she’s trying to tell you something; the only reason she is being so persistent is because she cares. When she stops ‘nagging’ as you call it, you should be worried because at that point... she no longer cares.”

“When he texts you, he’s thinking about you. When he calls you, he misses you. When he shows up, he wants you. When he suddenly stops doing all of the above for you, he’s doing it for someone else.”

“What do you think you’re doing, you naughty girl, listening to those other women and giving me a hard time and hurting yourself as well.”

“No, that’s also been well provided for: we’re going to occupy the Acropolis this very day. The older women are assigned that part: while we’re working out our agreement down here, they’ll occupy the Acropolis, pretending to be up there for a sacrifice.”

“Honey, they’ll be along. You know, it’s a lot of trouble for wives to get out of the house: we’re giving hubby a hand, or waking up a slave, or putting the baby to bed, or bathing it, or feeding it a snack.”

“A woman’s intuition is better than a man’s.”

“Sometimes, even grown women need their mother’s comfort so we can just take a break from having to be strong all the time.”

″... a woman will never do again what has been done before.”

“Nobody knows anything, really, you know, and a woman can guess a good deal nearer than a man.”

“Still, I kept thinking about Lydia. The good parts of our relationship felt like a rat walking around and gnawing at the inside of my stomach.”

“In her first passion Woman loves her lover, In all the others all she loves is Love, Which grows a habit she can ne’er get over, And fits her loosely—like an easy glove”

“Few beautiful women were willing to indicate in public that they belonged to someone. I had known enough women to realize this. I accepted them for what they were, and love came hard and very seldom. When it did it was usually for the wrong reasons. One simply became tired of holding love back and let it go because it needed some place to go. Then usually, there was trouble.”

“I’m a philosopher; confound them all! Bills, beasts, and men, and—no! not womankind! With one good hearty curse I vent my gall”

“Dee Dee poured another glass of wine. It was good wine. I liked her. It was good to have a place to go when things went bad. I remembered the early days when things would go bad and there wasn’t anywhere to go. Maybe that had been good for me. Then. But now I wasn’t interested in what was good for me. I was interested in how I felt and how to stop feeling bad when things went wrong. How to start feeling good again.”

“I was naturally a loner, content just to live with a woman, eat with her, sleep with her, walk down the street with her. I didn’t want conversation, or to go anywhere except the racetrack or the boxing matches. I didn’t understand t.v. I felt foolish paying money to go into a movie theatre and sit with other people to share their emotions. Parties sickened me. I hated the game-playing, the dirty play, the flirting, the amateur drunks, the bores.”

“Once a woman turns against you, forget it. They can love you, then something turns in them. They can watch you dying in a gutter, run over by a car, and they’ll spit on you.”

“Her sixth, to stab herself; her seventh, to sentence The lash to Baba: —but her grand resource Was to sit down again, and cry—of course”

“You men deserve whatever rabbit-boiling scenario dating crazy women gets you.”

“I am to believe I am special, and how many other girls Brody has taken on similar lunches.”

“His father’s general mistrust of the future carried through to his thoughts on women. Like success, women would inevitably turn on you someday. He had a suspicion of women that bordered on paranoia. His son internalized these views as well.”

“I canna tell whether ya mean to compliment my virility Sassenach, or insult my morals, but I dinna care much for either suggestion. Murtaugh told me women were unreasonable, but Jesus God.”

“They are conversation-openers in the arcane femine language of Shoe.”

“I can’t help but feel you’re making a mistake in not allowing that woman to talk. If she gets around at all, she may have picked up some very interesting little news items.”

“They prayed secretly, read the Bible through at least once a year, and went to hear the minister preach even when it snowed. Hoping for an eternal crown, they never asked to be remembered on earth. And they haven’t been.”

“Eve is essential. She has an irreplaceable role to play. And so you’ll see that women are endowed with fierce devotion, an ability to suffer great hardships, a vision to make the world a better place.”

“So what do people see when they read that well-behaved women rarely make history? Do they imagine good-time girls in stiletto heels or do-good girls carrying clipboards and passing petitions? Do they envision an out-of-control hobbyist or a single mother taking down a drunk in a bar? I suspect that it depends on where they stand themselves.”

″ Christine went back to books and discovered the lives of worthy women—queens, princesses, warriors, poets, inventors, weavers of tapestries, wives, mothers, sibyls, and saints.”

“An androgynous mind was not a male mind. It was a mind attuned to the full range of human experience, including the invisible lives of women.”

“Aware of our deep failings, we pour contempt on our own hearts for wanting more. Oh, we long for intimacy and for adventure; we long to be the beauty of some great story. But the desires set deep in our hearts seem like a luxury, granted only to those women who get their acts together. The message to the rest of us – whether from a driven culture or a driven church – is try harder.”

“Some history making is intentional; much of it is accidental.”

″ A studious female discovers male disdain for women, and that discovery leads to a new mission.”

“Mary had Joseph. Esther had Mordecai. Ruth had Boaz. We will not become the women God intends us to be without the guidance, counsel, wisdom, strength, and love of good men in our lives.”

“All had intellectual fathers, domestic mothers. All three were raised in settings that simultaneously encouraged and thwarted their love of learning. All three married men who supported their intellectual ambitions. All three lived through the wrenching deaths of loved ones and terrifying, fratricidal warfare—the Hundred Years War in Christine’s case, the American Civil War in Stanton’s, and World War I for Woolf. All three identified with women yet imagined becoming male. In their work and in their lives, all three writers addressed an enduring puzzle: Are differences between the sexes innate or learned? Using stories about the past to challenge history, they talked back to books.”

“As I lay there I wondered what would happen to me if I went against the law of our tribe which forbade the making of weapons by women—if I did not think of it at all and made those things which I must have to protect myself.”

“Elizabeth Zott held grudges too. Except her grudges were mainly reserved for a patriarchal society founded on the idea that women were less.”

“I’m not like an expert or anything, but they have different ways of life from us, don’t they? They don’t treat women quite like we do. So I’m guessing maybe Andie decided she didn’t want to be with him or something, and he killed her in a rage because, in his eyes, she belonged to him.”

“Women are books, and men the readers be...”

“That’s the thing about women. There’s no good way to be one. Wear your emotions on your sleeve and you’re hysterical. Keep them tucked away where your boyfriend doesn’t have to tend to them and you’re a heartless bitch.”

“Women ought to be free—as free as we are.”

“It is no longer possible to ignore that voice, to dismiss the desperation of so many American women.”

“The magazine... is crammed full of food, clothing, cosmetics, furniture, and the physical bodies of young women, but where is the world of thought and ideas, the life of the mind and spirit?”

“The truth is—and how long it has been true, I’m not sure, but it was true in my generation and it is true of girls growing up today—an American woman no longer has a private image to tell her who she is, or can be, or wants to be.”

“As a white woman, part of my awakening has included a growing awareness of my privilege and an active education in dismantling the ways I contribute to the oppression of black, brown, and indigenous people. It’s the job of white women (and white men) to undo this discrimination, the same way it’s the job of men to undo toxic masculinity”

“Men have choices that women don’t.”

“Hari and the other Alibagh villagers stood open-mouthed in amazement: they had not brought along a single woman with them, had not thought it necessary, had been sure that they, the menfolk, could manage it all on their own and the women would only be a nuisance.”

″ ‘Dear little swallow,’ said the Prince, ‘you tell me of marvelous things, but more marvelous than anything is the suffering of men and women. There is no mystery so great as Misery. Fly over my city, little swallow, and tell me what you see.’ ”

“the reason there are so many struggling women is because there were so many wounded girls.”

″...every sailor needs someone to return to, that every woman needs someone to wait for.”

“Men do oppress women. People are hurt by rigid sexist role patterns. These two realities coexist. Male oppression of women cannot be excused by the recognition that there are ways men are hurt by rigid sexist roles. Feminist activists should acknowledge that hurt, and work to change it—it exists. It does not erase or lessen male responsibility for supporting and perpetuating their power under patriarchy to exploit and oppress women in a manner far more grievous than the serious psychological stress and emotional pain caused by male conformity to rigid sexist role patterns.”

“A woman is a warrior too. But she is meant to be a warrior in a uniquely feminine way. Sometime before the sorrows of life did their best to kill it in us, most young women wanted to be a part of something grand, something important.”

“We need to highlight the role women play in perpetuating and sustaining patriarchal culture so that we will recognize patriarchy as a system women and men support equally, even if men receive more rewards from that system. Dismantling and changing patriarchal culture is work that men and women must do together.”

“Aware of our deep failings, we pour contempt on our own hearts for wanting more. Oh, we long for intimacy and for adventure; we long to be the Beauty of some great story. But the desires set deep in our hearts seem like a luxury, granted only to those women who get their acts together. The message to the rest of us – whether from a driven culture or a driven church – is try harder.”

“Certainly, women are the least to be trusted of all animals, monks and abbots excepted.”

“As the Men got hungrier and hungrier, they also got angrier and angrier; and the Women, on their part, got stubborner and stubborner.”

“Sometimes I wish that I had been born to the Men’s side; sometimes I grow weary of the spinning and the weaving and the grinding corn.”

″...the Women stirred the pots, and the Men went back to work, and the Sun rose in the East and set in the West; and the world forgot in less than no time everything that comes when the King’s Daughter cries for the Moon.”

“Nothing ever was as good these days as it had been when he was a young man. Horses could not run so fast, young men were not so brave and dashing, women were not so pretty, flowers did not grow so well, and as for dogs, if there were any decent ones left in the world, it was because they were in his own kennels.”

“Of course the Man was wild too. He was dreadfully wild. He didn’t even begin to be tame till he met the Woman, and she told him that she did not like living in his wild ways.”

“Women are so emotional. Now there’s nothing I object to more than emotion.”

“I’m not like an expert or anything, but they have different ways of life from us, don’t they? They don’t treat women quite like we do. So I’m guessing maybe Andie decided she didn’t want to be with him or something, and he killed her in a rage because, in his eyes, she belonged to him.”

“Like any modern woman, I am any number of things, as and when the need arises. We have to be chameleons, don’t we?”

“For in a caliphate where a woman’s actions were always in danger of being turned against her, there was nothing easy about pretending to be a man.”

“Men like Torik- good men- see what these creatures could be: women and girls, mothers and daughters. But I can only see them as they are: monsters and beasts, creatures and devils.”

For her only one reparation could make up for the loss of her daughter’s honour: marriage.