quotations about women
Women's emotions are still fitted for a kind of society that no longer exists. My deep emotions, my real ones, are to do with my relationship with a man. One man. But I don't live that kind of life, and I know few women who do. So what I feel is irrelevant and silly.
DORIS LESSING
The Golden Notebook
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
A woman, like a cross-eyed man, looks one way, but goes another--hence her mysteriousness.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
If I could remake the world, I'd banish women, send them away with all their trouble. Then children would come from a purer source.
EURIPIDES
Medea
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
Men are often like that. They grow bored with simple goodness and want a woman who is dangerous, a challenge.
SUSANNE ALLEYN
Game of Patience
Sure, we can be heartless and refuse to express any sort of emotion. We can be stubborn as hell and scarily temperamental. We often refuse to admit when we're wrong, and we won't acknowledge it when we realize we are. We can be way too aggressive and abrupt. We feel the need to come off as tough, despite the fact that our hearts are made of gold. Aquarius women are a rare breed.
ELIZABETH CABALLERO
"8 Reasons Aquarius Women Are The Most Confident Partners In The Zodiac", Elite Daily, February 9, 2016
The woman born to physical subjection and degradation can never seek or use knowledge as her birthright. Never till she holds her sex in honor, as man holds his, can she be his equal, even in her own realm.
MARY CLEMMER AMES
Outlines of Men, Women, and Things
A bride at her second marriage does not wear a veil. She wants to see what she is getting.
HELEN ROWLAND
A Guide to Men
A woman in Deep Sleep is one who goes about in an unconscious state. She seems unaware or unfazed by the truth of her own female life, the truth about women in general, the way women and the feminine have been wounded, devalued, and limited within culture, churches, and families. She cannot see the wound or feel the pain. She has never acknowledged, much less confronted, sexism within the church, biblical interpretations, or Christian doctrine. Okay, so women have been largely missing from positions of church power, we've been silenced and relegated to positions of subordination by biblical interpretations and doctrine, and God has been represented to us as exclusively male. So what? The woman in Deep Sleep is oblivious to the psychological and spiritual impact this has had on her. Or maybe she has some awareness of it all but keeps it sequestered nicely in her head, rarely allowing it to move down into her heart or into the politics of her spirituality.
SUE MONK KIDD
The Dance of the Dissident Daughter
Affection with some women amounts almost to disease.
LEWIS F. KORNS
Thoughts
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
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
Does the imagination dwell the most
Upon a woman won or woman lost?
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
"The Tower", The Tower
Man dreams of fame while woman wakes to love.
ALFRED TENNYSON
Idylls of the King
The average woman was firmly convinced, it seemed, that she could not make a man recognize her worth unless every time she opened her legs she did so as if it were a scene in a soap opera.
KOBO ABE
The Woman in the Dunes
Women age early, and their mistake is not knowing where to hide all the time that lies behind them so that no one sees it. What are they to do, devour it like the umbilical cords of their children? Hell and damnation!
ELFRIEDE JELINEK
Lust
A lovely woman rolls up
The delicate bamboo blind.
She sits deep within,
Twitching her moth eyebrows.
Who may it be
That grieves her heart?
On her face one sees
Only the wet traces of tears.
LI BAI
"The Night of Sorrow"
Almost all women will give a sympathizing hearing to men who are in love. Be they ever so old, they grow young again with that conversation, and renew their own early times.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Philip
Don't tell me about God having made such creatures to be companions for us! I don't say but He might make Eve to be a companion for Adam in Paradise--there was no cooking to be spoilt there, and no other woman to cackle with and make mischief; though you see what mischief she did as soon as she'd an opportunity.
GEORGE ELIOT
Adam Bede