WOMEN QUOTES XV

quotations about women

The Madonna-Whore complex refers to the tendency to make a distinction between good, pure girls or the "Madonnas," and bad, desirable girls or the "Whores." This idea, however, requires there be a distinction between women you respect and women you desire while insisting they can't be both. Somehow, people still can't shake the idea women's respectability is contingent on their adherence to puritan values that equate "goodness" with being quiet, submissive, virginally pure and modest.

JULIA O'DONNELL

"Women are so much more than just sisters, mothers, wives", The Badger Herald, March 14, 2017


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

Tags: Toni Morrison


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


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

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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


I am not one of those who believe -- broadly speaking -- that women are better than men. We have not wrecked railroads, nor corrupted legislatures, nor done many unholy things that men have done; but then we must remember that we have not had the chance.

JANE ADDAMS

address before the Chicago Political Equality League, 1897

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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

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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

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My son, beware of a plain damsel who charmeth thee, for she needeth much wile, and useth diverse weapons.

GELETT BURGESS

The Maxims of Methuselah

Tags: Gelett Burgess


I've always felt there are two things a woman should never do after the age of thirty-five: stand in natural light and have a baby.

ERMA BOMBECK

Family: The Ties that Bind ... and Gag!

Tags: Erma Bombeck


There are two races of people -- men and women -- no matter what women's libbers would have you pretend. The male is motivated by toys and science because men are born with no purpose in the universe except to procreate. There is lots of time to kill beyond that. They've got to find work. Men have no inherent center to themselves beyond procreating. Women, however, are born with a center. They can create the universe, mother it, teach it, nurture it. Men read science fiction to build the future. Women don't need to read it. They are the future.

RAY BRADBURY

Playboy, 1996

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Woman's great strength lies in being late or absent. Presence immediately reveals the weak points of our beloved; when she is absent she become one of the sylph-like figures of our adolescence whom we endowed with perfection.

ANDRÉ MAUROIS

An Art of Living


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

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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

Tags: Christian Nestell Bovee


Brother, do you know a nicer occupation,
Matter of fact, neither do I,
Than standing on the corner
Watching all the girls go by?

FRANK LOESSER

"Standing on the Corner"

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The burning gaze of a young woman, such as hath tasted man, shall not escape me; for I have a spirit keen to mark these things.

AESCHYLUS

fragment, Toxotides

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Women can sometimes be unpredictable. Even as a woman, I regularly don't understand the choices of my female friends, mother (love you) and sisters (love you lots!).

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS

"Why Women Are So Complicated", Huffington Post, February 9, 2016


Women age early, and their mistake is not knowing where to hide all the time that lies behind them so that no one sees it. What are they to do, devour it like the umbilical cords of their children? Hell and damnation!

ELFRIEDE JELINEK

Lust

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While a woman is losing confidence in a man she is usually reposing it in another.

LEWIS F. KORNS

Thoughts


Some women destroy all your sensibility towards them by their coldness, others by their heat.

FULKE GREVILLE

Maxims, Characters, and Reflections

Tags: Fulke Greville