“A woman's got one life: She's got to reach out and grab it with both hands, or it'll pass her by and leave nothing but a smelly old fart in her face.”

“To win a woman in the first place one must please her, then undress her, and then somehow get her clothes back on her. Finally, so she will allow you to leave her, you've got to annoy her.”

Jean Giraudoux Amphitryon 38

“After all, a woman didn't leave much behind in the world to show she'd been there. Even the children she bore and raised got their father's name. But her quilts, now that was something she could pass on.”

Sandra Dallas American writer

“She's got style and she's got her own money
So she's not another honey you can quickly disarm
She's got the eyes that make you realize
She won't be hypnotized by your usual charm.
You've got your plan of attack
That won't attract the modern woman
When you're an old fashioned man
She understands the things you're doin'
She's a modern woman.”

Billy Joel (1949) American singer-songwriter and pianist

“A woman has got to love a bad man once or twice in her life to be thankful for a good one.”

Elizabeth Taylor (1932–2011) British-American actress

“A woman has got to love a bad man once or twice in her life, to be thankful for a good one.”

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1896–1953) American novelist

“If a woman hasn't got a tiny streak of harlot in her, she's a dry stick as a rule.”

D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter

“Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.”

Sylvia Plath book Crossing the Water

“Her hair is Harlow gold
Her lips a sweet surprise
Her hands are never cold
She's got Bette Davis eyes”

Jackie DeShannon (1941) American singer-songwriter

“Sth, I know that woman. She used to live with a flock of birds on Lenox Avenue. Know her husband, too. He fell for an eighteen-year-old girl with one of those deepdown, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going. When the woman, her name is Violet, went to the funeral to see the girl and to cut her dead face they threw her to the floor and out of the church. She ran, then, through all that snow, and when she got back to her apartment she took the birds from their cages and set them out the windows to freeze or fly, including the parrot that said, "I love you."”

Toni Morrison book Jazz