quotations about women
God bless them pretty women,
I wish they was mine,
Their breath is as sweet,
The dew on the vine.
BOB DYLAN
"Moonshiner"
But like all the other women I have referred to, she expressed herself with passionate and disarming effrontery.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays
Women are seldom silent. Their beauty is forever speaking for them.
PHILIP MOELLER
Helena's Husband
Great ladies ... are like the best sauces -- it is better not to know how they are made.
OCTAVE MIRBEAU
The Diary of a Chambermaid
Man can never know the kind of loneliness a woman knows. Man lies in a woman's womb only to gather strength, he nourishes himself from this fusion, and then he rises and goes into the world, into his work, into battle, into art. He is not lonely. He is busy. The memory of the swim in amniotic fluid gives him energy, completion. The woman may be busy too, but she feels empty. Sensuality for her is not only a wave of pleasure in which he has bathed, and a charge of electric joy at contact with another. When man lies in her womb, she is fulfilled, each act of love is a taking of man within her, and act of birth and rebirth, of child bearing and man bearing. Man lies in her womb and is reborn each time anew with a desire to act, to BE. But for a woman, the climax is not in the birth, but in the moment when man rests inside of her.
ANAÏS NIN
diary, May 25, 1932
An unsatisfied woman requires luxury, but a woman who is in love with a man will lie on a board.
ANDRÉ MAUROIS
An Art of Living
Women upset everything. When you let them into your life, you find that the woman is driving at one thing and you're driving at another.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Pygmalion
I have often wondered that learning is not thought a proper ingredient in the education of a woman of quality or fortune. Since they have the same improvable minds as the male part of their species.
JOSEPH ADDISON
The Guardian, September 8, 1713
Women still have an uneasy relationship with power and the traits necessary to be a leader. There is this internalized fear that if we are really powerful, we are going to be considered ruthless or pushy or strident--al those epithets that strike right at our femininity. We are still working at trying to overcome the fear that power and womanliness are mutually exclusive.
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON
Newsweek, October 15, 2007
For men have marble, women waxen, minds,
And therefore are they form'd as marble will;
The weak oppress'd, the impression of strange kinds
Is form'd in them by force, by fraud, or skill:
Then call them not the authors of their ill,
No more than wax shall be accounted evil
Wherein is stamp'd the semblance of a devil.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
The Rape of Lucrece
I tell you the women who make fervent wives
And sweet tender mothers, had Fate been less fair,
Are the women who might have abandoned their lives
To the madness that springs from and ends in despair.
As the fire on the hearth which sheds brightness around,
Neglected, may level the walls to the ground.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"Angel or Demon"
No one but a women can help a man when he is in trouble of the heart.
BRAM STOKER
Dracula
A woman has but eight roles open to her: ingénue, mother, witch, detective, nun, whore, queen, and corpse.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Radiance
The faces of most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
letter to "Scottie" Fitzgerald, October 5, 1940
A woman you've endured such a gnawing desire for, you can't help bearing a little grudge against, when the ache is gone.
JOHN UPDIKE
Rabbit at Rest
It's like there is a section of society that thinks single women are a bit odd. If you've found someone who agrees to live with you and spend time with you then you get "stamped" with approval -- you've met the requirements of life. If you haven't been "validated" -- and are single -- there can be a suspicion about you, that there's something a bit wrong with you.
MEERA DATTANI
"Are You A Victim Of Singlism?", Grazia Daily, February 10, 2016
Someone once asked me why women don't gamble as much as men do, and I gave the commonsensical reply that we don't have as much money. That was a true but incomplete answer. In fact, women's total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage.
GLORIA STEINEM
attributed, Quote Unquote
That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty, even if they're not much to look at, or even if they're sort of stupid, you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are. Girls. Jesus Christ. They can drive you crazy. They really can.
J. D. SALINGER
The Catcher in the Rye
Women have more fun because there's more things forbidden to them.
KEN ALSTAD
Savvy Sayin's
Over a lifetime of dealing with difficult women, I have learned it is often better to give into their demands immediately.
PATRICIA BRIGGS
When Demons Walk