Quotes by British Authors - Page 635

I remembered a definition of chivalry I'd heard once: a man protecting a woman against every man but himself.
James Anderson
My name is Nathan, just twenty-three and given to the curation of stories. I listen, retain, then polish and release them over the fire at night, when the others hush and lean forward in their desire to hear of the past. They crave romance, particularly when autumn sets in and cold nights await them, and so I speak of Alice, and Bethany, and Sarah, and Val, and other dead women who all once had lustrous hair and never a bad word on their plump lips. I can remember this is not how they were; I knew them, I knew them! Only six years have passed and yet I mythologize them as if it is six thousand. I am not culpable. Language is changing, like the earth, like the sea. We live in lonely, fateful flux, outnumbered and outgrown.
Aliya Whiteley
It makes you love vividly, work intensely, and realize that, in the scheme of things, you really don't have time to sit on the sofa in your undies watching Homes Under the Hammer.
Caitlin Moran
The aphorism "If you want something done, ask a busy woman" is in direct acknowledgment of the efficiency boot camp parenthood puts you through.
Caitlin Moran
And it's time people told the truth about beautiful women. They do not shimmer down staircases. They do not descend, as was once supposed, from on high, attached to nothing other than wings.
Zadie Smith
You don’t need princes to save you. I don’t have a lot of patience for stories in which women are rescued by men.
Neil Gaiman
Barnby always dismissed the idea of intelligence in a woman as no more than a characteristic to be endured.
Anthony Powell
Daydreams of wealth or women must have given Carolo that faraway look which never left him; sad and silent, he contemplated huge bank balances and voluptuous revels.
Anthony Powell
... motherhood is a game you must enter with as much energy, willingness, and happiness as possible.
Caitlin Moran
She ignored my observation. This generally happens with me. Show me a woman, I sometimes say, and I will show you someone who is going to ignore my observations.
P.G. Wodehouse
Getting married is easy, having sex is easier, but findings someone who can stimulate your mind and make love to your soul, that is rare.
Habeeb Akande
A feminist is any woman who tells the truth about her life.
Virginia Woolf
The Old Testament records the sage words of an old woman in addressing two younger ones: 'The Lord grant', said Naomi, 'that ye may find rest, each of you, in the house of her husband!' Who ever heard of a woman finding rest in the house of her husband? And yet, and yet ! The restless hearts are not the hearts of wives and of mothers, as many a lonely woman knows. There is no more crushing load than the load of a loveless life. It is a burden that is often beautifully and graciously borne, but its weight is a very real one. The mother may have a bent form, a furrowed brow, and worn, thin hands ; but her heart found its rest for all that. Naomi was an old woman; she knew the world very well, and her words are worth weighing. Heavy luggage is Christ's strange cure for weary hearts.
F.W. Boreham
Faith had always told herself that she was not like other ladies. But neither, it seemed, were other ladies.
Frances Hardinge
She had that kind of undeniable femininity that few women achieve, bogged down as we are by other things.
Kate Pullinger
Until our own time, history focussed on man the achiever; the higher the achiever the more likely it was that the woman who slept in his bed would be judged unworthy of his company. Her husband's fans recoiled from the notion that she might have made a significant contribution towards his achievement of greatness. The possibility that a wife might have been closer to their idol than they could ever be, understood him better than they ever could, could not be entertained.
Germaine Greer
Becoming a woman felt a bit like becoming famous. For, from being benevolently generally ignored – the base-line existence of most children – a teenage girl is suddenly fascinating to others, and gets bombarded with questions: What size are you? Have you done it yet? Will you have sex with me? Have you got ID? Do you want to try a puff of this? Are you seeing anyone? Have you got protection? What’s your signature style? Can you walk in heels? Who are your heroes? Are you getting a Brazilian? What porn do you like? Do you want to get married? When are you going to have kids? Are you a feminist? Were you just flirting with that man? What do you want to do? WHO ARE YOU?All ridiculous questions to ask of a 13-year-old simply because she now needs a bra. They might as well have been asking my dog. I had absolutely no idea.
Caitlin Moran
Maybe exercise and sport can be something we do for ourselves. For fun! For Happiness! For clear thinking! Because physical activity should be something integral to our being alive. And it is the essential part that really concerns us here, not the bit about how many millimetres it might shave off your inside thigh measurements.
Anna Kessel
Some say that happy women are immaterial.
Mina Loy
If you want to run for Prime Minister, you can. If you don’t, that’s wonderful, too. Shave your armpits, don’t shave them, wear flats one day, heels the next. These things are so irrelevant and surface to what it is all really about, and I wish people wouldn’t get caught up in that. We want to empower women to do exactly what they want, to be true to themselves, to have the opportunities to develop.
Emma Watson
The saddest thing a girl can do is dumb herself down for a guy.
Emma Watson
When at 15, my girlfriends started dropping out of their beloved sports teams, because they didn’t want to appear muscle-y, when at 18, my male friends were unable to express their feelings, I decided that I was a feminist.
Emma Watson
[of Nan Goldin] In an afterword to Ballad written in 2012, she declared: ‘I decided as a young girl I was going to leave a record of my life and experience that no one could rewrite or deny.
Olivia Laing
I want to be a Renaissance Woman. I want to paint, and I want to write, and I want to act, and I just want to do everything.
Emma Watson
The Eastern potentate who declared that women were at the bottom of all mischief, should have gone a little further and seen why it is so. It is because women are never lazy. They don’t know what it is to be quiet. They are Semiramides, and Cleopatras, and Joan of Arcs, Queen Elizabeths, and Catharine the Seconds, and they riot in battle, and murder, and clamour, and desperation. If they can’t agitate the universe and play at ball with hemispheres, they’ll make mountains of warfare and vexation out of domestic molehills; and social storms in household teacups. Forbid them to hold forth upon the freedom of nations and the wrongs of mankind, and they’ll quarrel with Mrs Jones about the shape of a mantle or the character of a small maid-servant. To call them the weaker sex is to utter a hideous mockery. They are the stronger sex, the nosier, the more persevering, the most self-assertive sex.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
At heart, women are creatures of darkness all the time.
Robert Aickman
But an ordinary day can mark the beginning of an extraordinary journey!
Elizabeth George
... a whole day’s tête-à-tête between two women can never end without a quarrel.
Jane Austen
Surely we want to get to a point where women can be strong and powerful and not sexy. Or only sexy when they feel like it, not as a requirement to getting media coverage or being valued.
Anna Kessel
I think too often we forget that girls can like sport; we are not biologically programmed to detest it, we are - in the main - conditioned against it. But shouldn’t we try to change that?
Anna Kessel
This is a battlefield, Faith! Women find themselves on battlefields, just as men do. We are given no weapons, and cannot be seen to fight. But fight we must, or perish.
Frances Hardinge
She is yet like a diamond on a heap of broken glass.
Mina Loy
The psychology of adultery has been falsified by conventional morals, which assume, in monogamous countries, that attraction to one person cannot coexist with affection for another. Everybody knows that this is untrue.
Bertrand Russell
She was a pious Buddhist and every day in her prayers asked Buddha not ro reincarnate her as a woman. "Let me become a cat or dog, but not a woman," was her constant murmur as she shuffled around the house, oozing apology with every step.
Jung Chang
Every time she went home she found herself being criticized. She was accused of being "too attached to her family," which was condemned as a "bourgeois habit," and had to see less and less of her own mother.
Jung Chang
Having studied the toxic biological effects of wireless radio frequency (RF) radiation, I find it amazing that women will willfully strap on two radio frequency antennas to their breasts in the form of an underwired bra. The wireless industry knows the underwired bra as a dipole antenna or doublet.
Steven Magee
It is a mother's duty to teach her daughters about the uses of blood, particularly a magical daughter.
Zen Cho
Mother says there are locked rooms inside all women, kitchen of love, bedroom of grief, bathroom of apathy. Sometimes, the men, they come with keys, and sometimes the men, they come with hammers.
Warsan Shire
Throughout her life, Highsmith looked for women whom she could worship. Sex was far from the most important factor in any relationship; rather, it was this near-divine quality for which she yearned.
Andrew Wilson
He perceived too in these still hours how little he had understood her hitherto. He had been blinded, — obsessed. He had been seeing her and himself and the whole world far too much as a display of the eternal dualism of sex, the incessant pursuit. Now with his sexual imaginings newly humbled and hopeless, with a realization of her own tremendous minimization of that fundamental of romance, he began to see all that there was in her personality and their possible relations outside that. He saw how gravely and deeply serious was her fine philanthropy, how honest and simple and impersonal her desire for knowledge and understandings. There is the brain of her at least, he thought, far out of Sir Isaac's reach. She wasn't abased by her surrenders, their simplicity exalted her, showed her innocent and himself a flushed and congested soul. He perceived now with the astonishment of a man newly awakened just how the great obsession of sex had dominated him — for how many years? Since his early undergraduate days. Had he anything to put beside her own fine detachment? Had he ever since his manhood touched philosophy, touched a social question, thought of anything human, thought of art, or literature or belief, without a glancing reference of the whole question to the uses of this eternal hunt? During that time had he ever talked to a girl or woman with an unembarrassed sincerity? He stripped his pretences bare; the answer was no. His very refinements had been no more than indicative fig-leaves. His conservatism and morality had been a mere dalliance with interests that too brutal a simplicity might have exhausted prematurely. And indeed hadn't the whole period of literature that had produced him been, in its straining purity and refinement, as it were one glowing, one illuminated fig-leaf, a vast conspiracy to keep certain matters always in mind by conspicuously covering them away? But this wonderful woman — it seemed — she hadn't them in mind! She shamed him if only by her trustful unsuspiciousness of the ancient selfish game of Him and Her that he had been so ardently playing.... He idealized and worshipped this clean blindness. He abased himself before it.
H.G.Wells
Be wise in time. What youth sows, old age must reap....Sow to yourself rather in righteousness: break up your fallow ground, sow not among thorns.
J.C. Ryle
The only path of escape he could conceive as yet for Lady Harman lay through the chivalry of some other man. That a woman could possibly rebel against one man without the sympathy and moral maintenance of another was still outside the range of Mr. Brumley's understanding. It is still outside the range of most men's understandings -- and of a great many women's.
H.G.Wells
This self-reliance, this direct dealing with the world, seemed to him, even in the height of his concern, unwomanly, a deeper injury to his own abandoned assumptions than any he had contemplated.
H.G.Wells
She found Safiye leaning against an oil lantern out in the garden and saw for herself that she wasn't the only foolish woman in the world, or even at that party, for Safiye had Lucy's highly polished bangle in her hand and was turning it this way and that in order to catch fireflies in the billowing, transparent left sleeve of her gown.
Helen Oyeyemi
Yes," she thought, "nature is the refuge and home for women: they have no public career—no aim nor end beyond their domestic circle; but they can extend that, and make all the creations of nature their own, to foster and do good to.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Only give a woman love, and there is nothing she will not venture, suffer, and do.
Wilkie Collins
Women, of their nature, crave for liberty; they will not be ordered around like servants.
Peter Ackroyd
Schopenhauer said only men had the total objectivity necessary for genius, and that you only had to look at a woman’s shape to see that she wasn’t intended for much mental or physical work.
Jacky Fleming
As Darwin said by keeping women at home their achievements were paltry compared to men's which proved women were biologically inferior. And he should know because he was a Genius. You probably learned about him at school.
Jacky Fleming
Men are all very well, and a good husband can be enormously useful, but women like us need something to do.
Daisy Goodwin
I think we need more women in positions of power across the world. I think a lot of the world's problems could be solved if we allowed more contribution from women.
Zayn Malik
I think I’m very blessed to have been raised by so many intelligent and impressive women, and now continuing that on a professional level, having people like Sarah and Nadia to guide me through this new phase of my career, is extremely significant.
Zayn Malik
Dr. Edward Clarke, a Harvard professor, said it was possible for a girl to study hard and do well in everything, but it would damage her health for the rest of her life, and her children would be shriveled.
Jacky Fleming
At her first bleeding a woman meets her power. During her bleeding years she practices it. At menopause she becomes it. Traditional Native American saying
Lucy H. Pearce
The most difficult thing for a wise woman to do is to pretend to be a foolish one.
W Somerset Maugham
Women have been the most intelligent, peaceful and positive influences in my life, I don't want to generalize too much, but definitely in my experience, I've found the whole macho world of male aggression and insecurity to be a lot more difficult to exist in.
Zayn Malik
I have the power to multiplyLike all women, I am more than one
Neil Mach
High magic requires a great clarity of thought, you see, and women's talents do not lie in that direction. Their brains tend to overheat.
Terry Pratchett
Swahili storytellers believe that women are incorrigibly wicked, diabolically cunning and sexually insatiable; I hope this is true, for the sake of the women.
Angela Carter
Me as a woman liking myself, is an act of social defiance!
Hannah Witton