quotations about women
I had long since given up trying to extract from a woman as it were the square root of her unknown quantity, the mystery of which a mere introduction was generally enough to dispel.
MARCEL PROUST
Sodom and Gomorrah
Ah! What pleasure it must be to a woman to suffer for the one she loves!
HONORE DE BALZAC
Père Goriot
Man dreams of fame while woman wakes to love.
ALFRED TENNYSON
Idylls of the King
A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.
U2
"Tryin' to Throw Your Arms Around the World"
Woman must not depend upon the protection of man, but must be taught to protect herself.
SUSAN B. ANTHONY
speech in San Francisco, July 1871
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"
When women express darker emotions, they are told to calm down, that their emotions are simply the result of "their time of the month," or that the emotional frustration they feel is not based in a rational (i.e., masculine) worldview. While men's emotional expression is marginalized as feminine, women's emotional expression is infantilized. It is in this repressed emotional space that the alarming sense of being gaslighted can emerge for women.
MARK GREENE
"Women Are Better At Expressing Emotions, Right? Why It's Not That Simple", Yes Magazine, January 27, 2016
Women are women and can't help themselves.
WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE
The Red Planet
It has been our experience that women usually prefer thin, undernourished, flatchested females, dressed to the teeth, as a concept of "feminine beauty" -- and that men prefer exactly the opposite: voluptuous, well-rounded and undressed. The women's idealization of woman is actually a male counterpart, competing with man in society; man's view of women is far more truly feminine.
HUGH HEFNER
The Realist, May, 1961
No man with any sense assumes that a woman's words mean to her exactly what they mean to him.
REX STOUT
The Mother Hunt
Women ... have long been discouraged from the awareness and forthright expression of anger. Sugar and spice are the ingredients from which we are made. We are the nurturers, the soothers, the peacemakers, and the steadiers of rocked boats.
HARRIET LERNER
The Dance of Anger: A Woman's Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships
As such portraits as we have are almost invariably of the male sex, who strut more prominently across the stage, it seems worthwhile to take as a model one of those many women who cluster in the shade. For a study of history and biography convinces any right minded person that these obscure figures occupy a place not unlike that of the showman's hand in the dance of the marionettes; and the finger is laid upon the heart.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
"Phyllis and Rosamond", The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf
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
If you want to stay single, look for a perfect woman.
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
See, I will always have this penchant for what I call kamikaze women. I call them kamikazes because they, you know they crash their plane, they're self-destructive. But they crash into you, and you die along with them.
WOODY ALLEN
Husbands and Wives
There are two kinds of spiritual law, two kinds of conscience, one in man and another, altogether different, in woman. They do not understand each other; but in practical life the woman is judged by man's law, as though she were not a woman but a man.
HENRIK IBSEN
From Ibsen's Workshop
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
While a woman is losing confidence in a man she is usually reposing it in another.
LEWIS F. KORNS
Thoughts
Those philosophers who believe in the absolute logic of truth have never had to discuss it on close terms with a woman.
CESARE PAVESE
This Business of Living, February 19, 1937