quotations about women
Some women destroy all your sensibility towards them by their coldness, others by their heat.
FULKE GREVILLE
Maxims, Characters, and Reflections
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
Women complain about premenstrual syndrome, but I think of it as the only time of the month that I can be myself.
ROSEANNE BARR
attributed, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Health Fair
A woman has but eight roles open to her: ingénue, mother, witch, detective, nun, whore, queen, and corpse.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Radiance
A woman cannot be herself in the society of the present day, which is an exclusively masculine society, with laws framed by men and with a judicial system that judges feminine conduct from a masculine point of view.
HENRIK IBSEN
From Ibsen's Workshop
The really clever thing, in affairs of this sort, is not to win a woman already desired by everyone, but to discover such a prize while she is still unknown.
CESARE PAVESE
This Business of Living, October 7, 1940
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 have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
A Room of One's Own
These women are always the same; they will, and they will not; their Yes so often merely a cowardly sort of a No; and their No, a coy sort of a Yes. One should be a diplomatist to understand them.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
Altavona: Fact and Fiction From My Life in the Highlands
Women are not allowed to be complicated in our society. We still very much have a Madonna-whore complex. We're comfortable seeing women as great mothers, and then we're comfortable seeing them as hookers, but there's no in-between.
CHARLIZE THERON
Glamour Magazine, July 2008
If I have sometimes seemed to make fun of Woman, I assure you it has only been for the purpose of egging her on.
JAMES THURBER
"The Duchess and the Bugs", Lanterns & Lances
As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Three Guineas
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
You don't know a woman until you have had a letter from her.
ADA LEVERSON
Tenterhooks
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"
Woman is the highest, holiest, most precious gift to man. Her mission and throne is the family, and if anything is withheld that would make her more efficient, useful, or happy in that sphere, she is wronged, and has not her rights.
JOHN TODD
Woman's Rights
We never see the mass of women en costume, without being reminded of the artificial flies used in angling--tricked out, also, with much the same object, only that, like St. Peter, women are "fishers of men."
CHARLES WILLIAM DAY
The Maxims, Experiences, and Observations of Agogos
A woman, like a cross-eyed man, looks one way, but goes another--hence her mysteriousness.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Women have more fun because there's more things forbidden to them.
KEN ALSTAD
Savvy Sayin's
Next to God we are indebted to women, first for life itself, and then for making it worth having.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought