WOMEN QUOTES XII

quotations about women

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"

Tags: Ella Wheeler Wilcox


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

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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

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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


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


Beware of a woman who signeth not her name to her letters; she will bear watching, aye, she hath a past.

GELETT BURGESS

The Maxims of Methuselah


A woman is rarely up to date on the subject of her age.

ROBERT ELLIOTT GONZALES

Poems and Paragraphs


Horns to bulls wise Nature lends;
Horses she with hoofs defends;
Hares with nimble feet relieves;
Dreadful teeth to lions gives;
Fishes learn through streams to slide;
Birds through yielding air to glide;
Men with courage she supplies;
But to women these denies.
What then gives she? Beauty, this
Both their arms and armour is:
She, that can this weapon use,
Fire and sword with ease subdues.

ANACREON

"Beauty"

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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

Tags: Arianna Huffington


A woman has but eight roles open to her: ingénue, mother, witch, detective, nun, whore, queen, and corpse.

CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE

Radiance


To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men.

JOHN BERGER

Ways of Seeing

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The most important thing in knowing that women are necessary is knowing that men are necessary too.

TAMARA ANGELA GRANT

"Women Are Necessary...", Huffington Post, March 9, 2017


I need a real MAN--
so, I can be a Woman--
We are different for good reasons.
We need each other like puzzle pieces.
To inspire greatness in each other.

PAMELA ANDERSON

blog post, Pamela Anderson Foundation, April 4, 2017

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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


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

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Be delicate, little wife-woman. Never be without your veil, without many veils. Veil yourself in a thousand veils, all shimmering and glittering with costly textures and precious jewels. Never let the last veil be drawn. Against the morrow array yourself with more veils, ever more veils, veils without end. Yet the many veils must not seem many. Each veil must seem the only one between you and your hungry lover who will have nothing less than all of you. Each time he must seem to get all, to tear aside the last veil that hides you. He must think so. It must not be so. Then there will be no satiety, for on the morrow he will find another last veil that has escaped him.

JACK LONDON

The Valley of the Moon

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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

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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

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Great ladies ... are like the best sauces -- it is better not to know how they are made.

OCTAVE MIRBEAU

The Diary of a Chambermaid

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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