WOMEN QUOTES V
quotations about women
O woman, perfect woman! what distraction
Was meant to mankind when thou wast made a devil!
JOHN FLETCHER
Monsieur Thomas
A sensible woman can never be happy with a fool.
GEORGE WASHINGTON
letter to Eleanor Parke Custis, January 16, 1795
A bitch is no match for a lady except in a brass bed, honey, and sometimes not even there.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
The Night of the Iguana
A woman has to have something on or there's nothing to take off.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Notes of a Dirty Old Man
In the eighty or ninety years I have given to this subject, trying to trace out the meanderings of their twisty little minds, the only thing that I have learned for certain about women is that when a gal is gonna, she's gonna. All a man can do is cooperate with the inevitable.
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
Stranger in a Strange Land
It was the part of a woman so to refine and educate her mind, as to be the cause of good alone to him whose fate depended on her smile.
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY
Lodore
All women had been cursed from the cradle; all, in one fashion or another, being given the same cruel destiny, born to suffer the weight of men.
JAMES BALDWIN
Go Tell It on the Mountain
A woman with a well-stocked toy drawer isn't dependent on anyone and is unlikely to hurl herself at a lowlife just for nooky.
ARIANNE COHEN
Marie Claire Magazine, March 2008
Birth control is the first important step woman must take toward the goal of her freedom. It is the first step she must take to be man's equal. It is the first step they must both take toward human emancipation.
MARGARET SANGER
"Morality and Birth Control", Birth Control Review, February/March 1918
Two women can't share a house comfortably, no matter how fond they might be of each other. It's got to be one woman's kitchen.
NORA ROBERTS
Blue Smoke
When once the woman has tempted us, and we have tasted the forbidden fruit, there is no such thing as checking our appetites, whatever the consequences may be.
GEORGE WASHINGTON
letter to Mrs. Richard Stockton, September 2, 1783
In societies where men are truly confident of their own worth, women are not merely tolerated but valued.
AUNG SAN SUU KYI
Keynote Address at NGO Forum on Women, Beijing China, August 31, 1995
How do those who contend that woman is the intellectual inferior of man account for the fact that she can give a man a piece of her mind 365 days in the year and still have a huge reserve supply?
ROBERT ELLIOTT GONZALES
Poems and Paragraphs
A true woman loves a strong man because she knows his weaknesses. She protects as much as she is protected.
ANDRÉ MAUROIS
An Art of Living
I am certain I have not a right feeling towards women -- at this moment I am striving to be just to them, but I cannot. Is it because they fall so far beneath my boyish imagination? When I was a schoolboy I thought a fair woman a pure Goddess; my mind was a soft nest in which some one of them slept, though she knew it not.
JOHN KEATS
letter to Benjamin Bailey, July 18, 1818
Women believe -- or at least often pretend to believe -- that all our tenderness for them springs from desire; that we love them when we have not for a time enjoyed them, and dismiss them when we are sated, or to express it more precisely, exhausted. There is no truth in this idea, though it may be made to appear true. When we are rigid with desire, we are apt to pretend a great tenderness in the hope of satisfying that desire; but at no other time are we in fact so liable to treat women brutally, and so unlikely to feel any deep emotion but one.
GENE WOLFE
The Claw of the Conciliator
When we assume women to be more adept at managing emotional communication, we are responding to the fact that women are granted permission to publicly express a somewhat wider range of emotions. But women have long been relegated to the greeting-card school of emotional expression. Love or condolences with a nice filigree. Nothing threatening. Nothing dark. You won't find a Hallmark card for despair or rage. You won't find a Hallmark card for panic or insecurity.
MARK GREENE
"Women Are Better At Expressing Emotions, Right? Why It's Not That Simple", Yes Magazine, January 27, 2016
Of all the paths lead to a woman's love
Pity's the straightest.
JOHN FLETCHER
The Knight of Malta
I am not accustomed to the language of eulogy. I have never studied the art of paying compliments to women. But I must say, that if all that has been said by orators and poets since the creation of the world in praise of women were applied to the women of America, it would not do them justice.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
speech, March 18, 1864
No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness. When we allow ourselves to believe we are, we lost touch with parts of ourselves defined as unacceptable by that consciousness; with the vital toughness and visionary strength of the angry grandmothers, the shamanesses, the fierce market-women of the Ibo's Women's War, the marriage-resisting women silkworkers of prerevolutionary China, the millions of widows, midwives, and the women healers tortured and burned as witches for three centuries in Europe.
ADRIENNE RICH
Blood, Bread and Poetry