WOMEN QUOTES XVIII

quotations about women

No man with any sense assumes that a woman's words mean to her exactly what they mean to him.

REX STOUT

The Mother Hunt


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

Tags: Marcel Proust


The fickleness of the women I love is only equaled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The Philanderer

Tags: George Bernard Shaw


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


I had long since given up trying to extract from a woman as it were the square root of her unknown quantity, the mystery of which a mere introduction was generally enough to dispel.

MARCEL PROUST

Sodom and Gomorrah

Tags: Marcel Proust


If you want to stay single, look for a perfect woman.

KEN ALSTAD

Savvy Sayin's

Tags: Ken Alstad


Oh! too convincing -- dangerously dear --
In woman's eye the unanswerable tear!

LORD BYRON

The Corsair

Tags: Lord Byron


A woman's lot is made for her by the love she accepts.

GEORGE ELIOT

Felix Holt


It has been our experience that women usually prefer thin, undernourished, flatchested females, dressed to the teeth, as a concept of "feminine beauty" -- and that men prefer exactly the opposite: voluptuous, well-rounded and undressed. The women's idealization of woman is actually a male counterpart, competing with man in society; man's view of women is far more truly feminine.

HUGH HEFNER

The Realist, May, 1961

Tags: Hugh Hefner


It is usual for a woman, even though she may ardently desire to give herself to a man, to feign reluctance, to simulate alarm or indignation. She must be brought to consent by urgent pleading, by lies, adjurations, and promises. I know that only professional prostitutes are accustomed to answer such an invitation with a perfectly frank assent -- prostitutes, or simple-minded, immature girls.

STEFAN ZWEIG

Letter from an Unknown Woman

Tags: Stefan Zweig


Merely external emancipation has made of the modern woman an artificial being.... Now, woman is confronted with the necessity of emancipating herself from emancipation, if she really desires to be free.

EMMA GOLDMAN

"The Tragedy of Women's Emancipation", Anarchism and Other Essays


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

Tags: Doris Lessing


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

Tags: Kobo Abe


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"

Tags: Li Bai


A girl should be two things: who and what she wants.

COCO CHANEL

The Gospel According to Coco Chanel

Tags: Coco Chanel


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

Tags: Henrik Ibsen


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

LEWIS F. KORNS

Thoughts


Women are like that they don't acquire knowledge of people we are for that they are just born with a practical fertility of suspicion that makes a crop every so often and usually right they have an affinity for evil for supplying whatever the evil lacks in itself for drawing it about them instinctively as you do bed-clothing in slumber fertilizing the mind for it until the evil has served its purpose whether it ever existed or no.

WILLIAM FAULKNER

The Sound and the Fury

Tags: William Faulkner


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


Most of the women claimed to be emancipated and independent, as indeed they were in the sense that they were earning their own living. But they paid for it by the suppression of the mainsprings of their natures; fear of public opinion robbed them of love and intimate comradeship. It was pathetic to see how lonely they were, how starved for male affection, and how they craved children. Lacking the courage to tell the world to mind its own business, the emancipation of the women was frequently more of a tragedy than traditional marriage would have been. They had attained a certain amount of independence in order to gain their livelihood, but they had not become independent in spirit or free in their personal lives.

EMMA GOLDMAN

Living My Life

Tags: Emma Goldman