Quotes about woman (4135 quotes, page 26)

“There were women in the golden age of Greece, called hetaerae, who were celebrated by Socrates and philosophers of his time. Although they existed solely for their own pleasure and that of men, they were respected for their independence of mind and spirit and thought of highly by the Greeks. Single women in today's world can function like hetaerae, learning from many and giving back to whom they will, and for the woman who enjoys such a life, it can be a good one, and one both she and society can be the better for.”

Merle Shain (1935–1989) Canadian writer

Some Men are More Perfect Than Others (1973)

Life , Women , Men , Pleasure

“Sketches indeed, from that most passionate page,
A woman's heart, of feelings, thoughts, that make
The atmosphere in which her spirit moves;”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

A History of the Lyre
The Venetian Bracelet (1829)

Feeling , Passion , Heart

“Do not choose for your wife any woman you would not choose for a friend if she were a man.”

Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist

“When a woman forgets gossip, McGee, she is nearing the end of her road.”

John D. MacDonald (1916–1986) writer from the United States

Travis McGee series, (1964)

Forgetting

“If an employer had to pay a man one dollar for the same work a woman could do for 59 cents, why would anyone hire a man?”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Why Men Earn More (2005), p. xix.

“I will talk to my sister, my daughter and my mother, the women, in July 24, when I asked you to gave me the mandate and the order to combat possible terrorism, The Egyptian woman with all her plainness, took her husband, her children, her food during Ramadan and took the streets. and the world watched her. take them again and let the world see you again.”

Abdel Fattah el-Sisi (1954) Current President of Egypt

Remarks by el-Sisi asking Egyptian women to go vote on the referendum during a cultural symposium organized by MOD Department of Moral Affairs on 11 January 2014 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1w50oWry07E.
2014

Women , Children , World , Food

“People like that woman make it clear just how asinine it is to believe that human beings have some kind of in-built universal sense of goodness. These days I think that everybody's just one spit away from being a mall bomber.”

Douglas Coupland Hey Nostradamus!

Hey Nostradamus! (2003)

People , Thinking , Sense , Universe

“He who has a good woman's love is ashamed of every ill deed.”

Walther von der Vogelweide (1170–1230) Middle High German lyric poet

Swer guotes wîbes minne hât,
der schamt sich aller missetât.
"Waz sol ein man, der niht engert", line 11; translation from Henry John Chaytor The Troubadours (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912) p. 128.

Love

“This acquaintance [with Marianne Werefkin ] would change my life. I became a friend of hers, of this clever woman gifted with genius.”

Alexej von Jawlensky (1864–1941) Russian painter

from his memoirs, 1936/41: in Lebenserinnerungen (Memories), Alexej Jawlensky - Köpfe-GesichteMeditationen (Heads-Faces-Meditations), ed. Clemens Weiler (Hanau: H. Peters, 1970), p. 106
1936 - 1941

Life , Change

“An old woman wept among the white faces. Two men carrying a body. An old dog crawling on his belly, dragging his hind legs. Several bodies in the corner of the lot, beside a shed, blood-soaked sheets covering them. An ambulance.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

Men , Dogs

“I feel like I was particularly impressed by Richard Corben's work. But in general I would not say the underground made that big of an impression except for Corben… His science-fiction stories, those almost primitive black and white comics he did back then. I was very struck by the visceral punch they had, by the unusual artistic point of view. And also by the unabashed exaggeration. It's as if you wanted a woman to have big breasts, you drew it. There was something just so joyously excessive and erotic about his stuff, that I just ate it up.|Frank Miller }}”

Richard Corben (1940) American illustrator

Feeling , Science

“In childhood we live under the brightness of immortality — heaven is as near and actual as the seaside. Behind the complicated details of the world stand the simplicities: God is good, the grown-up man or woman knows the answer to every question, there is such a thing as truth, and justice is as measured and faultless as a clock. Our heroes are simple: they are brave, they tell the truth, they are good swordsmen and they are never in the long run really defeated. That is why no later books satisfy us like those which were read to us in childhood—for those promised a world of great simplicity of which we knew the rules, but the later books are complicated and contradictory with experience; they are formed out of our own disappointing memories.”

Graham Greene book The Ministry of Fear

Bk. 1, ch. 7, sct. 1
The Ministry of Fear (1943)

God , Truth , Books , World

“Liberalism and libertinism are intertwined. The more liberal a woman, the more libertine she'll be—and the more she'll liberate herself to be coarse, immodest, vulgar and plain repulsive.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

" Harvey Sweinstein And Hollywood's Hos http://www.wnd.com/2017/10/harvey-sweinstein-and-hollywoods-hos/," WND.COM, October 19, 2017.
2010s, 2017

“[W]hile the man is born to do whatever he can, for the woman and the negro there is no such privilege.”

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) Suffragist and Women's Rights activist

As quoted in Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction https://books.google.com/books?id=Tpb7HAIhWHgC&printsec=frontcover&dq=9780199843282&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjz1ILxqfLcAhVDnuAKHda9Ai0Q6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&q=9780199843282&f=false (2012), by Allen C. Guelzo, Chapter One

“Love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

pg 209
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Five: Lightness and Weight

Love , Memory

“We are stripped of authority and reduced and devaluated and silenced. Silenced here means that the purposes of the First Amendment, premised upon conditions presumed and promoted by protecting free speech, do not pertain to women because they are not our conditions. Consider them: individual self-fulfillment – how does pornography promote our individual self-fulfillment? How does sexual inequality even permit it? Even if she can form words, who listens to a woman with a penis in her mouth?”

Catharine A. MacKinnon (1946) American feminist and legal activist

"Francis Biddle's Sister: Pornography, Civil Rights, and Speech" (1984), p. 193
Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (1987)

Women , Silence

“Ugly. Is irrelevant. It is an immeasurable insult to a woman, and then supposedly the worst crime you can commit as a woman. But ugly, as beautiful, is an illusion. A matter of taste, a whim, an eye, a beholder, an opinion, a spin, light crossing the frame, paint, projection. The moment. Context.”

Margaret Cho (1968) American stand-up comedian

From Her Weblog

Beauty , Light , Painting

“(Woman organizing picnic) Most normal people would agree that pizza is nature's perfect food, right?”

Nicole Hollander (1939) Cartoonist

Source: Sylvia cartoon strip, p. 50

People , Food , Nature , Perfection

“It occurred to me that to have a naked woman on the radio would be outrageous. And yet really who would it offend? It's all theater of the mind. You don't even really know if she's naked or not.”

Howard Stern (1954) American radio personality

Howard Stern on Piers Morgan Tonight, CNN (January 18, 2011)

“Here, when a woman is in childbirth, it is the husband who takes to his bed. He lies there groaning with his head wrapped up and his wife feeds him with loving care. She even prepares the bath for the event.”

Apollonius of Rhodes book Argonautica

Source: Argonautica (3rd century BC), Book II. Onward to Colchis, Lines 1011–1014

Love

“Afraid of a woman! Ha, great writer this! How can he write about women, when he's never had a woman? Oh you lousy fake, you phony, no wonder you can't write! No wonder there wasn't a woman in The Little Dog Laughed. No wonder it wasn't a love story, you fool, you dirty little schoolboy.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

Love , Women , Dogs , Fools

“It takes one woman twenty years to make a man of her son—and another woman twenty minutes to make a fool of him.”

Helen Rowland (1875–1950) American journalist

Overture: Prelude http://www.gutenberg.org/files/30630/30630-h/30630-h.htm#Page_20
A Guide to Men (1922)

Fools

“Son, you'll know you're in love when a woman's voice settles into your spine.”

David Weber (1952) author

a remembered quote from Victor Cachat's father
"Honorverse", Crown of Slaves (2004)

Love

“A Senator of the U. S., a woman, is still a sort of political joke with our masculine leaders in party politics.. But the trail has been blazed! The road is apparently rough—maybe rocky—but the trail has been located. It is an established fact. While it is also a romantic adventure, it will ever remain an historical precedent—never to be erased.”

Rebecca Latimer Felton (1835–1930) American politician

Nov. 7, 1922 [Who was Rebecca L. Felton?, http://www.wilkinsons.com/Bananna/2005/08/who-was-rebecca-l-felton.html, Banana Stew, August 2, 2005].

“A girl's coquetry is of the simplest, she thinks that all is said when the veil is laid aside; a woman's coquetry is endless, she shrouds herself in veil after veil, she satisfies every demand of man's vanity, the novice responds but to one.
And there are terrors, fears, and hesitations — trouble and storm in the love of a woman of thirty years, never to be found in a young girl's love. At thirty years a woman asks her lover to give her back the esteem she has forfeited for his sake; she lives only for him, her thoughts are full of his future, he must have a great career, she bids him make it glorious; she can obey, entreat, command, humble herself, or rise in pride; times without number she brings comfort when a young girl can only make moan.”

Honoré de Balzac book A Woman of Thirty

La jeune fille n'a qu'une coquetterie, et croit avoir tout dit quand elle a quitté son vêtement; mais la femme en a d'innombrables et se cache sous mille voiles; enfin elle caresse toutes les vanités, et la novice n'en flatte qu'une. Il s'émeut d'ailleurs des indécisions, des terreurs, des craintes, des troubles et des orages chez la femme de trente ans, qui ne se rencontrent jamais dans l'amour d'une jeune fille.Arrivée à cet âge, la femme demande à un jeune homme de lui restituer l'estime qu'elle lui a sacrifiée; elle ne vit que pour lui, s'occupe de son avenir, lui veut une belle vie, la lui ordonne glorieuse; elle obéit, elle prie et commande, s'abaisse et s'élève, et sait consoler en mille occasions, où la jeune fille ne sait que gémir.
Source: A Woman of Thirty (1842), Ch. III: At Thirty Years.

Love , Fear , Girl , Lovers

“I have no hesitation in saying that although the American woman never leaves her domestic sphere and is in some respects very dependent within it, nowhere does she enjoy a higher station. And if anyone asks me what I think the chief cause of the extraordinary prosperity and growing power of this nation, I should answer that it is due to the superiority of their women.”

Alexis De Tocqueville book Democracy in America

Book Three, Chapter XII.
Democracy in America, Volume II (1840), Book Three

Women , Thinking , Dependency

“Every man would like to possess all the women in the world, but a woman only wants the man she loves and to whom she is faithful.”

Elfriede Jelinek book Wonderful, Wonderful Times

113
Wonderful, Wonderful Times (1990)

Love , Women , World , Faith

“While it is in no way racist for any author to write a book exclusively about white women, it is fundamentally racist for books to be published that focus solely on the American white woman's experience in which that experience is assumed to be the American woman's experience.”

Bell Hooks (1952) American author, feminist, and social activist

(1981)

Women , Books , Way

“To get a woman, you have to be willing to risk losing her.”

Neil Strauss book The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists

The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists (2005)

“And this is woman's fate:
All her affections are called into life
By winning flatteries, and then thrown back
Upon themselves to perish; and her heart,
Her trusting heart, filled with weak tenderness,
Is left to bleed or break!”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Castilian Nuptuals from The London Literary Gazette (28th September 1822) Poetical Sketches. 3rd series - Sketch the Fourth
The Vow of the Peacock (1835)

Life , Fate , Heart

“I wrote it [Fanny Hill: or, the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure] to prove that one could write so freely about a woman of the town without resorting to the the coarseness the School of Venus [L'Ecole des Filles], which had quite plain words. My printer and publisher certainly were deceived by my avoiding those rank words in the work, which are all that they judge obscenity by.”

John Cleland (1709–1789) British writer

As recounted to James Boswell. 13 April, 1779, in Boswell, Laird of Auchinleck.

Pleasure , School

“At the beginning [of The X-Files] the pay disparity was massive. But that happens all the time in Hollywood. It's, 'Do this for me, I'll get you a job.' All the stuff in the papers today about people in entertainment who have abused their position… it's built into our society. It's easy to miss and it's easy to get used to it. There are things that are intolerable in today's world, in terms of the perception of women. Whether they're vamps or vixens, the expectation that, if a woman is wearing a short skirt, she's 'asking for it.”

Gillian Anderson (1968) American-British film, television and theatre actress, activist and writer

About the wage gap in Hollywood and sexism — Red Online "Life Is Short, Follow your Heart" http://www.redonline.co.uk/red-women/interviews/interview-gillian-anderson-talks-jamie-dornan-pictures (November 10, 2014)
2010s

Women , People , World , Time

“For example, in 2007, one woman received two parking tickets that – together – totaled $152. To date, she has paid $550 in fines and fees to the city of Ferguson. She’s been arrested twice for having unpaid tickets, and spent six days in jail. Yet she still – inexplicably – owes Ferguson $541. And her story is only one of dozens of similar accounts that our investigation uncovered.”

Eric Holder (1951) 82nd Attorney General of the United States

2010s, Update on Investigations in Ferguson (2015)

“The movement of people and ideas is … more than useful; it is sacrosanct. It forms part of the process by which the whole human race becomes both one and diverse, and makes itself more godlike, by affirming in the individual as well as in the species, its preeminence over the particular social and cultural worlds that it builds and inhabits. Both the movement of people and the movement of ideas can unsettle and frighten us, driving us back into ourselves. They can also inspire us to reimagine and to remake our interests, our ideals, and even our identities, by beginning to detach them from the settings with which we habitually associate them. Each of them is therefore an invitation to open ourselves to the new, in a world in which every man and woman has a better chance to become the original that he imagines himself to be.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: Free Trade Reimaginedː The World Division of Labor and the Method of Economics (2007), p. 210

People , World , Imagination , Idea

“There are four stages to marriage. First there's the affair, then there's the marriage, then children, and finally the fourth stage, without which you cannot know a woman, the divorce.”

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate

News summaries (31 December 1969)

Marriage , Children

“I'm like every other woman: a closet full of clothes, but nothing to wear: So I wear jeans.”

Cameron Diaz (1972) American actress

Cameron Diaz on fashionhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/films/2006/12/04/cameron_diaz_the_holiday_2006_interview.shtml

Clothes

“Do you believe that a dead woman can conceive from a live man and bring forth a live child? Do you believe it, any of you mothers? Do you believe it, any of you fathers? No, you know better. Well, if a woman will not produce when she is dead, then the earth cannot produce living things if it was dead. Does the earth conceive? It does, and it brings forth. If it did not, why do you go and put your wheat into the ground? Does it not conceive it? But it does not conceive except you put it there. It conceives and brings forth, and you and I live, both for food and for clothing, silks and satins. What! satin grow? Yes. What produces it? The silkworm produces it. Does the silkworm produce except it conceives? No, it eats of the mulberry tree. Where does the mulberry tree come from? It comes from the earth. Where did the earth come from? From its parent earths. Well, some of you may call that foolish philosophy. But if it is, I will throw out foolish things, that you may gather up wise things. The earth is alive. If it was not, it could not produce: If you find a piece of earth that is dead, you cannot produce anything from it, except you resurrect it and restore it to life.”

Heber C. Kimball (1801–1868) American Mormon leader

Journal of Discourses 6:35-36 (Nov. 8, 1857)

Life , Food , Parent , Tree

“For what's a play without a woman in it?”

Thomas Kyd book The Spanish Tragedy

Act IV, sc. i
The Spanish Tragedy (1592)

“I was happy, but I am now in possession of knowledge that this is wrong. Happiness isn't so bad for a woman. She gets fatter, she gets older, she could lie down, nuzzling a regiment of men and little kids, she could just die of the pleasure. But men are different, they have to own money, or they have to be famous, or everybody on the block has too look up to them from the cellar stairs.”

Grace Paley (1922–2007) American writer and activist

"An Interest in Life" (1959)

Men , Money , Pleasure , Lie

“My views on abortion come from my mom. She was a nurse in surgery for her entire adult life, and used to tell me how terrible it was before Roe vs. Wade—when back-alley abortions often placed the woman's life in danger. Today, some people live under a false premise that, if the government makes something illegal, it will go away. But then the illegal activity is simply controlled by an underground or criminal element. And, in the case of abortion, you will not receive the safety and precautions necessary.”

Jesse Ventura (1951) American politician and former professional wrestler

Source: Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! (2008), Ch. 10 (p. 182)

Life , People , Moms , Falseness

“Burglars! Good gracious!' cried the little woman, springing from the bed in one bound. The word 'burglar' was a terrible one to her, as it is indeed, to every well-constituted woman. 'Robbery' does not sound nearly so awe-inspiring.”

L. Frank Baum (1856–1919) Children's writer, editor, journalist, screenwriter

"The Loveridge Burglary" (1900)
Short stories

Spring

“Islam has never been misunderstood. Islam is the problem. But no one is stating the truth. No one is taking a hard look at the root of terrorism which is the brain washing machine called Islam. Islam is not up to me, is not up to any Muslim – man or woman. Islam is exactly what the prophet Muhammad did and said. In order to understand Islam you have to read the biography of Muhammad. It is very traumatising. It is very shocking. He married his second wife when she was six years old. He was over fifty. […] His third wife was Sophia. She was a Jewish woman. It was well documented, well written in our school books that he attacked her tribe. He killed her father, her brother, and her husband. At the same day, he slept with her. That's what I call Islam.”

Wafa Sultan (1958) American psychistrist

Speech at Restoration Weekend, Palm Beach, Florida 2007 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up3yuQDAWKQ

Truth , Books , School , Understanding

“A couple alleged males attempted to sucker punch a 100-pound woman and missed. And they ended up with their faces smashed in and spending the night in the Pima County Jail, where I'm sure — being good liberals — their views on gay marriage will serve them well.”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

On two protestors who threw pies at her during a speech, on The Sean Hannity Show (22 October 2004).
2004

Marriage , Night

“Was this perhaps life, then?—to have loved one summer in youth and not to have been aware of it until it was over, some sea-wet footprints on the floor and sand in the prints, the fragrance of a woman, soft loving lips in the dusk of a summer night, sea birds; and then nothing more; gone.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Two: The Palace of the Summerland

Love , Life , Youth , Bird

“O, Woman! in our hours of ease,
Uncertain, coy, and hard to please,
And variable as the shade
By the light quivering aspen made;
When pain and anguish wring the brow,
A ministering angel thou!”

Walter Scott Marmion

Canto VI, st. 30.
Marmion (1808)

Pain , Angels , Light

“It is all a matter of comparing one’s own life with something worse and consoling oneself with the relativity of human fortunes. When I was eight or nine I had an experience which came clearly to mind when I read your advice. I used to know a family in a little village near mine: father, mother and sons: they were small landowners and had an inn. Very energetic people, especially the woman. I knew (I had heard) that besides the sons we knew, this woman had another son nobody had seen, who was spoken of in whispers, as if he were a great disgrace for the mother, an idiot, a monster or worse. I remember that my mother referred to this woman often as a martyr, who made great sacrifices for this son, and put up with great sorrows. One Sunday morning about ten, I was sent to this woman’s: I had to deliver some crocheting and get the money. I found her shutting the door, dressed up to go out to mass, she had a hamper under her arm. On seeing me she hesitated then decided. She told me to accompany her to a certain place, and that she would take delivery and give me the money on our return. She took me out of the village, into an orchard filled with rubbish and plaster; in one corner there was a sort of pig sty, about four feet high, and windowless, with only a strong door. She opened the door and I could hear an animal-like howling. Inside was her son, a robust boy of 18, who couldn’t stand up and hence scraped along on his seat to the door, as far as he was permitted to move by a chain linked to his waist and attached to the ring in the wall. He was covered with filth, and his eyes shone red, like those of a nocturnal animal. His mother dumped the contents of her basket – a mixed mess of household leftovers – into a stone trough. She filled another trough with water, and we left. I said nothing to my mother about what I had seen, so great an impression it had made on me, and so convinced was I that nobody would believe me. Nor when I later heard of the misery which had befallen that poor mother, did I interrupt to talk of the misery of the poor human wreck who had such a mother.”

Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) Italian writer, politician, theorist, sociologist and linguist

Gramsci, 1965, p. 737 cited in Davidson, 1977, p. 35.

Life , Money , People , Family

“It is possible, after all, to 'fake' the 'realest' possible 'evidence' of heterosexuality: man or woman, one can participate in heterosexual marriage and even help produce a brood of spawn and still 'turn out' to have been 'living a lie,' to have been 'really' gay or lesbian all along. Precisely because there is no final 'proof' of heterosexuality, heterosexuality must constantly set about trying to prove itself, assert itself, insist on itself. Indeed, as Butler argues, heterosexuality as hegemonic institution is finally nothing more than its own repetitive self-insistence, nothing other than 'a constant and repeated effort to imitate its own idealizations' (Bodies 125). Or, as Janet E. Halley puts it in regard to legalistic constructions of heterosexuality, normative heterosexuality 'is a highly unstable, default characterization for people who have not marked themselves or been marked by other as homosexual.”

Calvin Thomas (critical theorist) (1956) American academic

As Halley continues: 'The resulting class of heterosexuals is a default class, home to those who have not fallen out of it.'
Source: Straight with a Twist (2000), p. 28.

Marriage , People , Lie , Home

“I couldn't portray a women in all her natural loveliness.... I haven't the skill. No one has. I must, therefore, create a new sort of beauty, the beauty that appears to me in terms of volume of line, of mass, of weight, and through that beauty interpret my subjective impression. Nature is mere a pretext for decorative composition, plus sentiment. It suggests emotion, and I translate that emotion into art. I want to express the absolute, not merely the factitious woman.”

Georges Braque (1882–1963) French painter and sculptor

Quote of Braque, late 1908; as cited in The wild men of Paris, Gelett Burgess, https://monoskop.org/images/f/f3/Burgess_Gelett_1910_The_Wild_Men_of_Paris.pdf in 'The Architectural Record', p. 405, May 1910; as cited in Braque, by Edwin Mullins, Thames and Hudson, London 1968, p. 34
1908 - 1920

Women , Beauty , Art , Nature

“A man and a woman who, in their young days, agree to have done with sentimental life thereby renounce the search for adventure, the intoxication of new encounters, and the amazing refreshment produced by falling in love again. Their most vital source of energy is cut off; they are doomed to premature insensibility. Their life, scarcely begun, is finished. Nothing can break the monotony of an existence made up of burdens and duties. No further hope, no surprises, no conquests. Their one love will soon be tainted by the cares of housekeeping and the children's education. They will reach old age without ever having known the joys of youth. Marriage destroys romantic love which alone could justify it.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Marriage

Love , Life , Marriage , Children

“Some friends of mine asked me if I wanted to go to a strip club, and I didn't… want to go. But I ended up going, 'cause—back me up on this, fellas—once you've seen one woman naked, you… wanna see the rest of 'em naked. It can be an old biker chick, you know they're gonna hang down to here. "Wanna see my titties!?" "Yeah, I do!" [cringes] "All right, that's enough, roll 'em back up!" [imitates her rolling her breasts back up and sealing them in place. ] The things that make you go [shudders]”

Ron White (1956) American comedian

They Call Me Tater Salad

“He wants only the simple things: a chair,
someone to pull off his shoes, someone to watch him
while he talks, with admiration and fear, gratitude if
possible, someone in whom to plunge himself for rest
and renewal. These things can best be had by marrying
a woman who has been condemned to death by other
men for wishing to be beautiful. There is a wide
choice.”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

Selected Poems 1976-1986 (1987), Marrying the Hangman

Death , Men , Fear , Beauty

“The joys of marriage are the heaven on earth,
Life's paradise, great princess, the soul's quiet,
Sinews of concord, earthly immortality,
Eternity of pleasures; no restoratives
Like to a constant woman!”

John Ford (dramatist) The Broken Heart

Act II, sc. ii.
The Broken Heart (c. 1625-33)

Life , Marriage , Pleasure , Soul

“Suddenly I remember how she volunteered to replace the young, hysterical woman in her district. It couldn't be because she thought she had any chance of winning. She did it to save the girl, just like I volunteered last year to save Prim. And I decide I want her on my team.”

Suzanne Collins (1962) American television writer and novelist

Katniss Everdeen on Mags, p. 232
The Hunger Games trilogy, Catching Fire (2009)

Girl , Chance

“I reflected, while I chatted with the woman I had been asked to ‘take in’, that civilized man practises a strange ingenuity in wasting on tedious exercises the brief span of his life.”

W. Somerset Maugham book The Moon and Sixpence

Source: The Moon and Sixpence (1919), Ch. 6, p. 22

Life , Exercises

“Woman throughout the ages has been mistress to the law, as man has been its master.”

Freda Adler (1934) Criminologist, educator

Source: Sisters in Crime: The Rise of the New Female Criminal (1975), P. 203.

Age , Law

“Dealing w/ Hamas is like dealing w/ a crazy woman who's trying to kill u - u can only hold her wrists so long before you have to slap her”

Bill Maher (1956) American stand-up comedian

Tweet https://twitter.com/billmaher/statuses/489930991956262913 (17 July 2014)

“Laborin' man an' laborin' woman
Hev one glory an' one shame;
Ev'y thin' thet's done inhuman
Injers all on 'em the same.”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

No. 1, st. 5
The Biglow Papers (1848–1866), Series I (1848)

“The more I thought it over, Kemp, the more I realised what a helpless absurdity an Invisible Man was—in a cold and dirty climate and a crowded civilised city. Before I made this mad experiment I had dreamt of a thousand advantages. That afternoon it seemed all disappointment. I went over the heads of the things a man reckons desirable. No doubt invisibility made it possible to get them, but it made it impossible to enjoy them when they are got. Ambition—what is the good of pride of place when you cannot appear there? What is the good of the love of woman when her name must needs be Delilah? I have no taste for politics, for the blackguardisms of fame, for philanthropy, for sport. What was I to do? And for this I had become a wrapped-up mystery, a swathed and bandaged caricature of a man!”

H. G. Wells book The Invisible Man

Source: The Invisible Man (1897), Chapter 23: In Drury Lane

Love , Disappointment , Sport , Appearance

“He could have known this little girl when she was just a kid. Had an affair with her when she was eleven. … He hasn’t seen her in twelve years. Now she’s twenty-two. It’s a real strange relationship. …This is a resource that you can either mine or not. It's not as blatant as we're talking about. You don't think about it that much. You don't immediately realize how old she was at the time. It would be subtle. She could talk about it. "I was jail bait the last time we were together." She can flaunt it at him, but at the same time she never says, "I was fifteen years old." Even if we don't mention it, when we go to cast the part we're going to end up with a woman who's about twenty-three and a hero who's about thirty- five.”

George Lucas (1944) American film producer

1970s

Girl , Thinking , Time , Parting

“I now receive inquiries of interest for deanships and departmental chairs several times a year. I find myself on committees where I am the only woman and there is one black man. We two tokens greet each other wryly. I am frequently invited to lecture at architecture schools, ‘to be a role model for our girls.’ I am happy to do this for their young women but I would rather be asked purely because my work is interesting.”

Denise Scott Brown (1931) American architect

"Sexism and the star system in architecture"

Women , School , Girl , Time

“I think your piety one of your greatest charms; but then, like all other good things, it may be carried too far. To my thinking, a woman's religion ought not to lessen her devotion to her earthly lord. She should have enough to purify and etherealise her soul, but not enough to refine away her heart, and raise her above all human sympathies.”

Anne Brontë book The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Source: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Ch. XXIII : First weeks of Matrimony; Arthur to Helen

Religion , Soul , Thinking , Heart

“It's not very fashionable nowadays to have a philosophy that demands a lot of life. I tend to be drawn to people who are emotional - now they'd be called 'crazy'. Pollock, Jasper Johns, Toulouse-Lautrec. People said, 'They're off their nut!' Was Faulkner off his nut because he stayed in his house for eight months at a time writing books, and then you'd find him drunk up in a tree, making out with some old black woman? I think that's fuckin' great!”

Ryan Adams (1974) American alt-country/rock singer-songwriter

Blender (August/September 2001)

Life , People , Books , Fashion

“On the movie Monster: "I confess I went into the movie ready to dislike Miss Theron. I'm sick of newspaper articles detailing the amount of time, talent and technical wizardry required to turn some silver-screen beauty into an average-looking woman. There are plenty of average-looking women out there — gritty Britty TV drama seems to be full of them — and it seems excessively unfair that they can't even get a shot at the frumpy roles because Nicole Kidman's hogging the false nose again."”

Mark Steyn (1959) Canadian writer

" Soured dream https://archive.is/20130710195125/archive.spectator.co.uk/article/3rd-april-2004/82/soured-dream", 2 April 2004

Women , Beauty , Time , Falseness

“How strange it was that this other woman, this girl-child, should speak of her son so possessively, should speak of his future as if it were her own future.”

Orson Scott Card Enchantment

Enchantment (1999)

Girl , Future

“It is the responsibility of each of us—every man, woman, and child on this planet—to try to lessen the total amount of suffering in our world. … Speciesism, like racism, is a learned attitude, and both can be unlearned.”

Seba Johnson (1973) Olympic skier

"Taking the Lessons My Mother Taught Me to the African-American Community" http://www.satyamag.com/oct02/johnson.html, Satya (October 2002).

World , Suffering , Learning

“What kind of a society is this where a person can’t express attraction without fearing that they’re going to be murdered for it? If the person who came out with the secret was a Jewish woman or a black woman or an Asian woman, and he went over to her house the next day and killed her because he was so repulsed and she had embarrassed him that way on national television, nobody would be writing stories on the TV show’s responsibility. Everyone would be writing stories about this racist, this anti-Semite.”

Jeffrey Montgomery (1953–2016) American LGBT rights activist and public relations executive

The New York Times, 1995 [Remembering Jeff Montgomery, LGBTQ rights advocate, Ennis, Dawn, LGBTQ Nation, July 19, 2016, 2016-07-19, http://www.lgbtqnation.com/2016/07/remembering-jeff-montgomery-lgbtq-rights-advocate/]

Secret , Fear , Way , Housing

“To have loved and lost, either by that total disenchantment which leaves compassion as the sole substitute for love which can exist no more, or by the slow torment which is obliged to let go day by day all that constitutes the diviner part of love — namely, reverence, belief, and trust, yet clings desperately to the only thing left it, a long-suffering apologetic tenderness — this lot is probably the hardest any woman can have to bear.”

Dinah Craik (1826–1887) English novelist and poet

Source: A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858), Ch. 10

Love , Suffering , Parting

“It is a woman's nature to be constant — to love one and one only, blindly, tenderly, and for ever.”

Anne Brontë book The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Source: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Ch. XXVII : Misdemeanour; Arthur to Helen

Love , Nature

“Now I taught the weeping willow how to cry,
And I showed the clouds how to cover up a clear blue sky.
And the tears that I cried for that woman are gonna flood you Big River.
Then I'm gonna sit right here until I die.”

Johnny Cash (1932–2003) American singer-songwriter

Big River
Song lyrics, Johnny Cash Sings the Songs That Made Him Famous (1958)

Tear , Cry

“Most of the people I do business with are mature businessmen like me, and they are not going to take kindly to being spoken to like a wash woman in the street!! (to Saira Khan during a boardroom showdown).”

Alan Sugar (1947) British business magnate, media personality, and political advisor

The Apprentice, Series 1

People , Business

“Man is completely out of phase with nature. Nature is woman. Man is the intruder. The man who re-attunes himself with nature is the man who de-mans himself or eliminates himself as man.”

Jill Johnston book Lesbian Nation

Lesbian Nation, p. 190.

Nature

“She has been condemned to death by hanging. A man
may escape this death by becoming the hangman, a
woman by marrying the hangman. But at the present
time there is no hangman; thus there is no escape.
There is only a death, indefinitely postponed. This is
not fantasy, it is history.”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

Selected Poems 1976-1986 (1987), Marrying the Hangman

Death , History , Time

“Shall I, wasting in despair,
Die because a woman’s fair?
Or make pale my cheeks with care,
’Cause another’s rosy are?
Be she fairer than the day,
Or the flowery meads in May,
If she be not so to me,
What care I how fair she be?”

George Wither (1588–1667) English poet

The Shepherd's Resolution; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Compare: "If she undervalue me, What care I how fair she be?", Sir Walter Raleigh, Poem.

Despair

“That was perhaps the only woman I have ever loved — no — that I ever should have loved. Ah, well! who can tell? Circumstances rule one. And then — and then — all passes.”

Guy De Maupassant book The Wreck

The Wreck

Love

“A man cannot tell whether a woman is in love with him or his security blanket until she is financially and psychologically independent enough to leave. Until a woman has learned how to leave, even she cannot be sure she has learned to love.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Why Men Are the Way They Are (1988), p. 182.

Love , Learning

“The ultimate beauty secret for a woman getting older is, Don't be too thin! When you are just muscle, you end up being gaunt in the face, and that makes you look older by 5 or 10 years. I don't think of getting older as looking better or worse; it's just different. You change, and that's OK. Life is about change. I don't have anxiety about it, so I'm not running to get Botox. Maybe that will change, but I don't think so. I feel comfortable in my skin and comfortable with aging, so I think it's OK that I get wrinkles.”

Heidi Klum (1973) German model, television host, businesswoman, fashion designer, television producer, and actress

From Self Magazine, December 2010

Life , Secret , Age , Beauty

“Dances an endless illusion, A woman of desire endures in my heart, I wait, O! Almighty cut the net of passion, You are the ultimate Source of light. Gitamohanam,(spiritual Hymns)”

Manmohan Acharya (1967–2013) Poet, lyricist

Hymn-16, verse-2
Spiritual Hymns (2001)

Light , Passion , Waiting , Heart

“It makes a lot of sense to me. She seems to me like a Jewish woman, the way she thinks and behaves.”

Peaches Geldof (1989–2014) British journalist, television presenter and model

Thomas Cohen discussing her Judaism, as quoted in the Jewish Chronicle, 11 April 2014, p. 5
About

Way , Thinking , Sense

“Earlier on today, apparently, a woman rung the BBC and said she heard there was a hurricane on the way… well, if you're watching, don't worry, there isn't!”

Michael Fish

Made during the weather forecast. http://web.archive.org/web/20040929072107/http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/bbcweather/forecasters/michael_fish_1987storm.shtml

Way

“I thought, shivering, that there are things that outweigh comfort, unless one is an old woman or a cat.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Chapter 5 “The Domestication of Hunch” (p. 51)

Cats

“With a woman's selflessness and kindness, I look to end populism and political wrangling between the blue and green camps in the coming (2016 ROC) presidential election against Tsai (Ing-wen).”

Hung Hsiu-chu (1948) Taiwanese politician

Hung Hsiu-chu (2015) cited in " Refreshed Hung Hsiu-chu returns to the fray after time-out http://www.wantchinatimes.com/news-subclass-cnt.aspx?cid=1101&MainCatID=11&id=20150907000042" on Want ChinaTimes, 7 September 2015