quotations about women
If thou makest a statement concerning women, lo, she shall immediately try to disprove it straightway. She goeth by contraries.
GELETT BURGESS
The Maxims of Methuselah
A woman has but eight roles open to her: ingénue, mother, witch, detective, nun, whore, queen, and corpse.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Radiance
A woman you've endured such a gnawing desire for, you can't help bearing a little grudge against, when the ache is gone.
JOHN UPDIKE
Rabbit at Rest
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
They often say woman cannot keep a secret, but every woman in the world, like every man, has a hundred secrets in her own soul which she hides from even herself. The more respectable she is, the more certain it is the secrets exist.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
A woman's love, like lichens upon a rock, will still grow where even charity can find no soil to nurture itself.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
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
Every physical quality admired by men in women is in direct connection with the manifold functions of women for the propagation of the species.
JAMES JOYCE
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
I tell you the women who make fervent wives
And sweet tender mothers, had Fate been less fair,
Are the women who might have abandoned their lives
To the madness that springs from and ends in despair.
As the fire on the hearth which sheds brightness around,
Neglected, may level the walls to the ground.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"Angel or Demon"
Man can never know the kind of loneliness a woman knows. Man lies in a woman's womb only to gather strength, he nourishes himself from this fusion, and then he rises and goes into the world, into his work, into battle, into art. He is not lonely. He is busy. The memory of the swim in amniotic fluid gives him energy, completion. The woman may be busy too, but she feels empty. Sensuality for her is not only a wave of pleasure in which he has bathed, and a charge of electric joy at contact with another. When man lies in her womb, she is fulfilled, each act of love is a taking of man within her, and act of birth and rebirth, of child bearing and man bearing. Man lies in her womb and is reborn each time anew with a desire to act, to BE. But for a woman, the climax is not in the birth, but in the moment when man rests inside of her.
ANAÏS NIN
diary, May 25, 1932
The average woman was firmly convinced, it seemed, that she could not make a man recognize her worth unless every time she opened her legs she did so as if it were a scene in a soap opera.
KOBO ABE
The Woman in the Dunes
Certainly, it is more reasonable to devote one's life to women than to postage stamps or old snuff-boxes, even to pictures or statues. But the example of other collections should be a warning to us to diversify, to have not one woman only but several.
MARCEL PROUST
The Guermantes Way
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
It would take a hell of a wife to beat no wife at all.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
The Crossing
All of a sudden, in the good-natured child, the woman stood revealed, a disturbing woman with all the impulsive madness of her sex, opening the gates of the unknown world of desire. Nana was still smiling, but with the deadly smile of a man-eater.
EMILE ZOLA
Nana
A woman, like a cross-eyed man, looks one way, but goes another--hence her mysteriousness.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Sure, we can be heartless and refuse to express any sort of emotion. We can be stubborn as hell and scarily temperamental. We often refuse to admit when we're wrong, and we won't acknowledge it when we realize we are. We can be way too aggressive and abrupt. We feel the need to come off as tough, despite the fact that our hearts are made of gold. Aquarius women are a rare breed.
ELIZABETH CABALLERO
"8 Reasons Aquarius Women Are The Most Confident Partners In The Zodiac", Elite Daily, February 9, 2016
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"
Woman is the only creature in nature that hunts down its hunters and devours the prey alive.
ABRAHAM MILLER
Unmoral Maxims
When a hen cackles, she's either layin' or lyin'.
KEN ALSTAD
Savvy Sayin's