quotations about women
If you're a woman, it's almost impossible to establish a relationship. You're too much for everybody. It's too much. The woman always has to play this role of being fragile and dependent. And if you're not, they're fascinated by you, but only for a little while. And then they want to change you and crush you. And then they leave.
MARINA ABRAMOVIC
The Guardian, May 12, 2014
Certainly, it is more reasonable to devote one's life to women than to postage stamps or old snuff-boxes, even to pictures or statues. But the example of other collections should be a warning to us to diversify, to have not one woman only but several.
MARCEL PROUST
The Guermantes Way
It is not extraordinary that the extraterrestrial origin of women was a recurrent theme of science fiction.
KINGSLEY AMIS
The King's English: A Guide to Modern English Usage
A woman's passion is like the tide, it stays for no man when the hour is come.
APHRA BEHN
The Lucky Chance
My son, beware of a plain damsel who charmeth thee, for she needeth much wile, and useth diverse weapons.
GELETT BURGESS
The Maxims of Methuselah
These little women are very important, and those that appear to be the humblest, often assume great authority in their homes.
GASTON BACHELARD
The Poetics of Space
When [Mike] Pence says he will not eat alone with a woman who is not his wife, he is perpetuating the patriarchal notion that women are either Mary, Jesus' pure virgin Mother, or Eve, a temptress, a liability. It perhaps is no coincidence that Pence reportedly refers to his Mary -- wife Karen Pence -- as "Mother." For Pence and many evangelical men, all women who are not Marys are Eves, placed peripherally in their lives as temptations to resist. Every Eve is one alone-meeting away from destroying a godly man. In order to protect their honor and reputation, these men cut us off completely. This reduces all women to a monolithic sexual identity. To men like Pence, we are not complex, complete, sacred vessels full of intellect and divinity and grit. We are not fully formed spiritual beings; we are not fully formed citizens. We are exclusively sexual creatures. This mistrust of women is pumped through the veins of the Christian church and, apparently, the executive branch of the United States of America.
GLENNON DOYLE MELTON
"Mike Pence's Marriage Rule Holds Women Back", Time, April 3, 2017
Woman is the only creature in nature that hunts down its hunters and devours the prey alive.
ABRAHAM MILLER
Unmoral Maxims
Men can sleep with a different woman every night and indulge in the most revolting practices--but let an unmarried woman make one mistake, be led astray when she's young and silly and knows nothing of the world, and she's tainted for life and called a harlot!
SUSANNE ALLEYN
Game of Patience
Man dreams of fame while woman wakes to love.
ALFRED TENNYSON
Idylls of the King
If you cannot inspire a woman with love of you, fill her above the brim with love of herself;--all that runs over will be yours.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
All of a sudden, in the good-natured child, the woman stood revealed, a disturbing woman with all the impulsive madness of her sex, opening the gates of the unknown world of desire. Nana was still smiling, but with the deadly smile of a man-eater.
EMILE ZOLA
Nana
Women have traditionally been either put on pedestals or damned as the source of all sexual temptation and sin. These are two sides of the same coin, since both place women in a nonhuman role. Playboy has opposed these warped sexual values and, in so doing, helped women step down from their pedestals and enjoy their natural sexuality as much as men.
HUGH HEFNER
Playboy, January 1974
If a woman's got nothing but her fair fame to feed on, why, it's thin tack, and a donkey would die of it!
D. H. LAWRENCE
Sons and Lovers
Women are necessarily capable of almost anything in their struggle for survival and can scarcely be convicted of such manmade crimes as "cruelty."
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
Tender Is the Night
Women don't require motives that are comprehensible to my intellectual processes.
REX STOUT
Three Doors to Death
A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.
U2
"Tryin' to Throw Your Arms Around the World"
A woman's heart is much like the moon, always changing but always has a man in it.
GRENVILLE KLEISER
Dictionary of Proverbs
If family and society tell you its unfeminine, not really womanly, to be aggressive, to speak up, to have strong opinions, to take up space, then women won't trust their own voice, because to be heard and to be influential, you've got to have a way to sing out with passion and love and self-trust--to sing out your song for everyone to hear.
ELIZABETH LESSER
"What's Possible: An Interview With Elizabeth Lesser", Omega, May 8, 2012
Centuries roll, customs change, but, ever since the time of the earliest mother, woman yearns to be the soother.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
Pausanias, the Spartan