quotations about women
All one's life as a young woman one is on show, a focus of attention, people notice you. You set yourself up to be noticed and admired. And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous. No one notices you. You achieve a wonderful freedom. It's a positive thing. You can move about unnoticed and invisible.
DORIS LESSING
attributed, An Uncommon Scold
Women are not for using. Women are for loving.
KEVIN LEMAN
Sex Begins in the Kitchen
Seen through the glow of a building orgasm, a woman seems to blaze with angelic glory.
LARRY NIVEN
Ringworld
Women themselves condition their daughters to serve the system of male primacy. If a daughter challenges it, the mother will generally defend the system rather than her daughter. These mothers, victims themselves, have unwittingly become wounded wounders. Women need to attack culture's oppression of women, for there truly is a godlike socializing power that induces women to "buy in" or collude, but we also need to confront our own part in accepting male dominance and take responsibility where appropriate.
SUE MONK KIDD
The Dance of the Dissident Daughter
When the hour of adversity arrives, when false friends are scattered, when we are moving through the keen atmosphere of selfishness, then it is that the virtuous wife, like an angel of light, shines with peculiar lustre.
WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY
Proverbs
Don't wait for the good woman. She doesn't exist.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
letter to Steve Richmond, November 1971
Woman began at zero, and has through ages slowly unfolded and risen. Each age has protested against growth as unsexing woman.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Sometimes women who aren't perfect are more interesting; they've done more, or learned something.
JEAN M. AUEL
The Valley of Horses
The younger and healthier a woman is and the more her new and glossy body seems destined for eternal freshness, the less useful is artifice; but the carnal weakness of this prey that man takes and its ominous deterioration always have to be hidden from him ... In any case, the more traits and proportions of a woman seem contrived, the more she delighted the heart of man because she seemed to escape the metamorphosis of natural things. The result is this strange paradox that by desiring to grasp nature, but transfigured, in woman, man destines her to artifice.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
The Second Sex
Girls are so queer you never know what they mean. They say no when they mean yes, and drive a man out of his wits just for the fun of it.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
Little Women
Women are the backbone of this country. We do it all -- we are the most organized and compassionate workers -- and we do it knowing our counterparts are paid more.
TONYA MURRAY
Los Angeles Times, March 8, 2017
If you tell anything to a woman ... it's like putting it in the papers.
IVAN KLIMA
Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light