Women Quotes - Page 59

Free women," said Anna, wryly. She added, with an anger new to Molly, so that she earned another quick scrutinizing glance from her friend: "They still define us in terms of relationships with men, even the best of them.

Doris Lessing

You must go further than I did," Nedra said. "You know that.""Further?""With your life. You must become free."She did not explain it; she could not. It was not a matter of living alone, though in her case this had been necessary. The freedom she meant was self-conquest. It was not a natural state. It was meant only for those who would risk everything for it, who were aware that without it life is only appetites until the teeth are gone.

James Salter

She could just pack up and leave, but she does not visualize what's beyond ahead.

Núria Añó

[F]rom my years of understanding ... I happily chose this kind of life in which I yet live [i.e., unmarried], which I assure you for my own part hath hitherto best contented myself and I trust hath been most acceptable to God. From the which if either ambition of high estate offered to me in marriage by the pleasure and appointment of my prince ... or if the eschewing of the danger of my enemies or the avoiding of the peril of death ... could have drawn or dissuaded me from this kind of life, I had not now remained in this estate wherein you see me. But so constant have I always continued in this determination ... yet is it most true that at this day I stand free from any other meaning that either I have had in times past or have at this present.

Elizabeth I

I love man as my fellow; but his scepter, real, or usurped, extends not to me, unless the reason of an individual demands my homage; and even then the submission is to reason, and not to man.

Mary Wollstonecraft

It really is something ... that men disapprove even of our doing things that are patently good. Wouldn't it be possible for us just to banish these men from our lives, and escape their carping and jeering once and for all? Couldn't we live without them? Couldn't we earn our living and manage our affairs without help from them? Come on, let's wake up, and claim back our freedom, and the honour and dignity that they have usurped from us for so long. Do you think that if we really put our minds to it, we would be lacking the courage to defend ourselves, the strength to fend for ourselves, or the talents to earn our own living? Let's take our courage into our hands and do it, and then we can leave it up to them to mend their ways as much as they can: we shan't really care what the outcome is, just as long as we are no longer subjugated to them.

Moderata Fonte

[I]n the end this shall be for me sufficient, that a marble stone shall declare that a Queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin.

Elizabeth I

I Became a free woman when I decided to stop dreaming, freedom that is waiting for nothing .. and anticipation is a state of slavery" - Ahlam (Chaos of the Senses)

Ahlam Mosteghanemi

No nation can rise to the height of glory unless your women are side by side with you. We are victims of evil customs. It is a crime against humanity that our women are shut up within the four walls of the houses as prisoners. There is no sanction anywhere for the deplorable condition in which our women have to live.

Muhammad Ali Jinnah

This is what it means to be a woman in this world. Every step is a bargain with pain. Make your black deals in the black wood and decide what you’ll trade for power. For the opposite of weakness, which is not strength but hardness. I am a trap, but so is everything. Pick your price. I am a huckster with a hand in your pocket. I am freedom and I will eat your heart.

Catherynne M. Valente

There are some who want to get married and others who don't. I have never had an impulse to go to the altar. I am a difficult person to lead.

Greta Garbo

If I follow the inclination of my nature, it is this: beggar-woman and single, far rather than queen and married.

Elizabeth I

It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are in some degree independent of men.

Mary Wollstonecraft

If all men are born free, how is it that all women are born slaves?

Mary Astell

I am not an angel," I asserted; "and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself.

Charlotte Brontë

I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.

Audre Lorde

I do not think, sir, you have any right to command me, merely because you are older than I, or because you have seen more of the world than I have; your claim to superiority depends on the use you have made of your time and experience.

Charlotte Brontë

They were doers and thinkers and lovers and seekers and givers, but dreamers, most dangerously of all.

Taiye Selasi

The insinuation that without a female president women cannot pursue and achieve their dreams is not only false but recalls the ever-condenscending liberal attitude towards women: "We know what women want, even if they do not.

Alyssa Bornhorst

They say Alexander the Great slept with 'The Iliad' beneath his pillow. Though I have never led an army, I am a wanderer. During the waning moon, I cradle Homer’s 'Odyssey' as if it were the sweet body of a woman.

Roman Payne

Alexander the Great slept with 'The Iliad' beneath his pillow. During the waning moon, I cradle Homer’s 'Odyssey' as if it were the sweet body of a woman.

Roman Payne

Girls with poison necklacesto save themselves from torture.Just as women wear amuletswhich hold their rolled up fortunestranscribed on ola leaf.

Michael Ondaatje

Knights do protect ladies, but only to keep them from being abducted by other knights.

Steven Pinker

I've got one thing to say: I killed a lot of germans, and I'm only sorry I didn't kill more.

Nancy Wake

Perhaps there is something good that had come from this war: everything has been turned around, all the unfairness made grimly plain. It has given us everyday women a voice - dared us to stand up for ourselves, and to stand up for others. We have less to lose in this world of chaos and death, after all.

Jennifer Ryan

This peculiar connexion between a certain view of woman and the European conception of war has had profound consequences for morality, education, and politics.

Denis de Rougemont

Without war there are no heroes.""What harm would that be?""Oh, Lavinia, what a woman's question that is.

Ursula K Le Guin

Men see objects, women see the relationship between objects. Whether the objects need each other, love each other, match each other. It is an extra dimension of feeling we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real women - and abusrd. I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellow-men. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness. To death.

John Fowles

Organizations like the UN do a lot of good, but there are certain basic realities they never seem to grasp ...Maybe the most important truth that eludes these organizations is that it's insulting when outsiders come in and tell a traumatized people what it will take for them to heal.You cannot go to another country and make a plan for it. The cultural context is so different from what you know that you will not understand much of what you see. I would never come to the US and claim to understand what's going on, even in the African American culture. People who have lived through a terrible conflict may be hungry and desperate, but they are not stupid. They often have very good ideas about how peace can evolve, and they need to be asked.That includes women. Most especially women ...To outsiders like the UN, these soldiers were a problem to be managed. But they were our children.

Leymah Gbowee

Women deserve better than organizations bearing the names of racist rapists funding million dollar campaigns on subway trains. These wealthy middle aged white men tell us what to do with our bodies while they wage wars and kill other people's babies.

Sonya Renee Taylor

When we take your person into account, you who are a young maiden, to whom God gives the strength and power to be the champion who casts the rebels down and feeds France with the sweet, nourishing milk of peace, here indeed is something quite extraordinary! For if God performed such a great number of miracles through Joshua who conquered many a place and cast down many an enemy, he, Joshua, was a strong and powerful man. But, after all, a woman – a simple shepherdess – braver than any man ever was in Rome! As far as God is concerned, this was easily accomplished. But as for us, we never heard tell of such an extraordinary marvel, for the prowess of all the great men of the past cannot be compared to this woman's whose concern it is to cast out our enemies. This is God's doing: it is He who guides her and who has given her a heart greater than that of any man.

Christine de Pizan

I do not believe in using women in combat, because females are too fierce.

Margaret Mead

Always, it is the poor people who pay. And always, it is the poor people's women who pay the most.

David Mitchell

Oh! What honour for the female sex! It is perfectly obvious that God has special regard for it when all these wretched people who destroyed the whole Kingdom – now recovered and made safe by a woman, something that 5000 men could not have done – and the traitors [have been] exterminated. Before the event they would scarcely have believed this possible.

Christine de Pizan

And since a novel has this correspondence to real life, its values are to some extent those of real life. But it is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex; naturally this is so. Yet is it the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are "important"; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes "trivial." And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.

Virginia Woolf

Not that she's a political animal, she's just an ordinary woman, but as a woman she's of the view that you don't bring children into the world to have them shot.

Hans Fallada

[Patricia Highsmith] was a figure of contradictions: a lesbian who didn't particularly like women; a writer of the most insightful psychological novels who, at times, appeared bored by people; a misanthrope with a gentle, sweet nature.

Andrew Wilson

Irritatingly angry people have no sense of humor when wearing their “angry pants.

Cathy Burnham Martin

Pay to go inside Neruda's homeA body lies there with no dome.But right there in the front hallLean a fairy against the icy wall.Oh Endless enigmas had the bard!Nice and large and calm backyardEnds In the middle of a rare roomRare portrait of revelishing gloom.Up climbing at the weird snail stairDoes make you grasp for some air.And there's a room with bric-a-brac:Old and precious books all in a pack.Dare saying what I liked most of all?Enjoyed seeing visitors having a ball!

Ana Claudia Antunes

I believe all people are assholes. You won't find anyone that you like. You'll just find someone you dislike a little less than the last asshole. And I can't wait for that day. To have a woman that I can say I dislike a little less than all the other assholes.

Travis J. Dahnke

In the first place, Cranford is in possession of the Amazons; all the holders of houses above a certain rent are women. If a married couple come to settle in the town, somehow the gentleman disappears; he is either fairly frightened to death by being the only man in the Cranford parties, or he is accounted for by being with his regiment, his hip, or closely engaged in business all the week in the great neighbouring commercial town of Drumble, distant only twenty miles on a railroad. In short, whatever does become of the gentlemen, they are not at Cranford.

Elizabeth Gaskell

I envy the tireless intimacy of women’s friendship, its lastingness, and its unbendable strength.

Pat Conroy

As an adult, most of my friends are women . . . they, too, had that moment when they realized they were all the “other girls,” and that every girl in the world is, too.

Mara Wilson

Forgiveness is the only battery that can power our relationship with God and other men like us.

Bamigboye Olurotimi

Women helped each other in ways small and large every day, without thinking, and that was what kept them going even when the world came up with new and exciting ways to crush them.

Alyssa Cole

I can’t imagine anything more life-giving, more comforting, or more fun than being curled up andsurrounded by a group of women who know you deeply, and love you relentlessly.

Stephanie May Wilson

The solitude of women's minds is regrettable, I said to myself, it's a waste to be separated from each other without procedures, without tradition.

Elena Ferrante

Far too long hath there been a slave and a tyrant concealed in a woman. On that account woman is not yet capable of friendship: she knoweth only love. In a woman's love there is injustice and blindness to all she doth not love. And even in woman's conscious love, there is always surprise and lightening and night , along with the light.

Friedrich Neitzsche

In a general sense, I admit to valuing the worldviews of men under the age of 40 and women over the age of 30.

Criss Jami

Sharing secrets is the way in which women tie themselves together, for it reveals complicity and trust. Holding secrets shows trustworthiness and a sort of quite defiance. It is a natural thing for a female to hold secrets within her breast until the time is ripe to release them. Does it not follow the way in which her body is formed? A woman is made with that dark and mysterious recess that can grow a child safely until the child is ready to come out onto the birthing bed. And like birthing, secrets present themselves in many ways. some slip easily into the world, others must be torn out, if the body is unwilling.

Kathleen Kent

It occurs to me that she is not unique--that all women compare lives. We are aware of whose husband works more, who helps more around the house, who makes more money, who is having more sex. We compare our children, taking note of who is sleeping through the night, eating their vegetables, minding their manners, getting into the right schools. We know who keeps the best house, throws the best parties, cooks the best meals, has the best tennis game. We know who among us is the smartest, has the fewest lines around her eyes, has the best figure--whether naturally or artificially. We are aware of who works full-time, who stays at home with the kids, who manages to do it all and make it look easy, who shops and lunches while the nanny does it all. We digest it all and then discuss with our friends. Comparing and then confiding; it is what women do.The difference, I think, lies in why we do it. Are we doing it to gauge our own life and reassure ourselves that we fall within the realm of normal? Or are we being competitive, relishing others' shortcomings so that we can win, if only by default?

Emily Giffin

(Response to King Erik XIV of Sweden's proposal of marriage:)"[W]hile we perceive ... the zeal and love of your mind towards us is not diminished, yet in part we are grieved that we cannot gratify your Serene Highness with the same kind of affection. And that indeed does not happen because we doubt in any way of your love and honour, but, as often we have testified both in words and writing, that we have never yet conceived a feeling of that kind of affection towards anyone.We therefore beg your Serene Highness again and again that you be pleased to set a limit to your love, that it advance not beyond the laws of friendship for the present nor disregard them in the future. ... We certainly think that if God ever direct our hearts to consideration of marriage we shall never accept or choose any absent husband how powerful and wealthy a Prince soever. But that we are not to give you an answer until we have seen your person is so far from the thing itself that we never even considered such a thing. I have always given both to your brother ... and also to your ambassador likewise the same answer with scarcely any variation of the words, that we do not conceive in our heart to take a husband but highly commend this single life, and hope that your Serene Highness will no longer spend time in waiting for us.

Elizabeth I

But that would leave Paxton to fend for herself, and the last thing any woman wanted in this kind of situation was to look around and see all the people who could help her doing nothing.

Sarah Addison Allen

It felt as though they were the only people in the world, two young women about to bury the symbol of their helplessness, as if that's all it would take to make them whole again.

Sarah Addison Allen

That men of this kind despise women, though a not uncommon belief, is one which hardly appears to be justified. Indeed, though naturally not inclined to 'fall in love' in this direction, such men are by their nature drawn rather near to women, and it would seem that they often feel a singular appreciation and understanding of the emotional needs and destinies of the other sex, leading in many cases to a genuine though what is called 'Platonic' friendship. There is little doubt that they are often instinctively sought after by women, who, without suspecting the real cause, are conscious of a sympathetic chord in the homogenic which they miss in the normal man.

Edward Carpenter

This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea.

Margaret Atwood

Listen to me, Amin," I said slowly. "Listen to me very carefully. Nothing is the same. Nothing will ever be the same again. There lives on this earth a woman who can be my friend and my lover. Do you understand that? Do you understand what a marvelous thing that is?""A friend is a friend," Uthman interrupted, "and a woman is a woman. You can't have them in one person. The whole world knows that.""If that's what the whole world knows, ...then the whole world is wrong. I believed the whole world, and I lost her.

Barbara Cohen

Love is the luckiest tenant in the world, living in the hearts of men and women rent free.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Women are the best thieves you will ever meet; they steal your heart and your last name, but never get to spend the night in jail.

Matshona Dhliwayo

If men could be bought like clothes at an outlet, only then would women always get what they bargained for.

Matshona Dhliwayo

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Women Quotes - Page 59

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