quotations about women
Be delicate, little wife-woman. Never be without your veil, without many veils. Veil yourself in a thousand veils, all shimmering and glittering with costly textures and precious jewels. Never let the last veil be drawn. Against the morrow array yourself with more veils, ever more veils, veils without end. Yet the many veils must not seem many. Each veil must seem the only one between you and your hungry lover who will have nothing less than all of you. Each time he must seem to get all, to tear aside the last veil that hides you. He must think so. It must not be so. Then there will be no satiety, for on the morrow he will find another last veil that has escaped him.
JACK LONDON
The Valley of the Moon
But like all the other women I have referred to, she expressed herself with passionate and disarming effrontery.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays
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
Woman is like a diamond with many facets: the imagination of man, the light which produces from them innumerable permutations and combinations of color. The character of woman is comparatively simple, but man imagines much and attributes it to her.
CHARLES EDWARD JERNINGHAM
The Maxims of Marmaduke
The fear of women is the beginning of knowledge.
GELETT BURGESS
The Maxims of Methuselah
To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men.
JOHN BERGER
Ways of Seeing
Over a lifetime of dealing with difficult women, I have learned it is often better to give into their demands immediately.
PATRICIA BRIGGS
When Demons Walk
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
Women are seldom silent. Their beauty is forever speaking for them.
PHILIP MOELLER
Helena's Husband
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 have traditionally been either put on pedestals or damned as the source of all sexual temptation and sin. These are two sides of the same coin, since both place women in a nonhuman role. Playboy has opposed these warped sexual values and, in so doing, helped women step down from their pedestals and enjoy their natural sexuality as much as men.
HUGH HEFNER
Playboy, January 1974
When a hen cackles, she's either layin' or lyin'.
KEN ALSTAD
Savvy Sayin's
Great ladies ... are like the best sauces -- it is better not to know how they are made.
OCTAVE MIRBEAU
The Diary of a Chambermaid
Prejudice, in which there is truth, does cast, throughout the world but especially in France, a great stigma on the woman with whom no man has been willing to share the blessings or endure the ills of life. Now, there comes to all unmarried women a period when the world, be it right or wrong, condemns them on the fact of this contempt, this rejection. If they are ugly, the goodness of their characters ought to have compensated for their natural imperfections; if, on the contrary, they are handsome, that fact argues that their misfortune has some serious cause. It is impossible to say which of the two classes is most deserving of rejection. If, on the other hand, their celibacy is deliberate, if it proceeds from a desire for independence, neither men nor mothers will forgive their disloyalty to womanly devotion, evidenced in their refusal to feed those passions which render their sex so affecting. To renounce the pangs of womanhood is to abjure its poetry and cease to merit the consolations to which mothers have inalienable rights.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Vicar of Tours
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
I'm a failure as a woman. My men expect so much of me, because of the image they've made of me -- and that I've made of myself -- as a sex symbol. They expect bells to ring and whistles to whistle, but my anatomy is the same as any other woman's and I can't live up to it.
MARILYN MONROE
attributed, Marilyn, 1962
I think women dwell quite a bit on the duress under which they work, on how hard it is just to do it at all. We are traditionally rather proud of ourselves for having slipped creative work in there between the domestic chores and obligations. I'm not sure we deserve such big A-pluses for all that.
TONI MORRISON
Newsweek, March 30, 1981
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
Women are not waiting around for lovers, they're living their lives. And believe it or not, having the morning to yourself is very zen.
KAITLYN WILDE
"Comic Artist Depicts Single Women They Way They Really Are -- Quite Content, Thank You Very Much", Bustle, February 9, 2016
If family and society tell you its unfeminine, not really womanly, to be aggressive, to speak up, to have strong opinions, to take up space, then women won't trust their own voice, because to be heard and to be influential, you've got to have a way to sing out with passion and love and self-trust--to sing out your song for everyone to hear.
ELIZABETH LESSER
"What's Possible: An Interview With Elizabeth Lesser", Omega, May 8, 2012