Quotes from Nancy Friday

If you believe in the maternal instinct and fail at mother love, you fail as a woman. It is a controlling idea that holds us in an iron grip.

The debt of gratitude we owe our mother and father goes forward, not backward. What we owe our parents is the bill presented to us by our children.

I think the thing I miss most in our age is our manners. It sounds so old-fashioned in a way. But even bad people had good manners in the old days, and manners hold a community together, and manners hold a family together; in a way, they hold the world together.

When I stopped seeing my mother with the eyes of a child, I saw the woman who helped me give birth to myself.

To say something nice about themselves this is the hardest thing in the world for people to do.

I like the company of men. I've never been welcome in those groups, but then I would no more go to a consciousness-raising group and talk about my intimate life with my husband than fly to the moon. I never understood all that.

Because society would rather we always wore a pretty face, women have been trained to cut off anger.

All my writing has been an effort to sort out the paradoxes of my life.

To say something nice about yourself, this is the hardest thing in the world for people to do. They'd rather take their clothes off.

Women's behavior in handling beauty, even before feminism, was to deny they had any. Don't hate me because I'm beautiful.

I think biologically we are attracted to more than one person, but given society and our needs, monogamy works better.

Spontaneous love admits errors, hesitations and human failings. It can be tested and repaired.

Inside every adult male is a denied little boy.

When is enough enough? In envy's eyes, enough never is. Somebody else always has something we want.

No man can be really free in bed with a woman who is not.

Blaming mother is just a negative way of clinging to her still.

If women really want equality, we have to wipe the slate clean. It no longer matters in the largest sense what men did to us for the last 200 or 300 years.

When I stopped seeing my mother through the eyes of a child, I saw the woman who helped me give birth to myself.

The older I get...the more of my mother I see in myself.

Oh, I know all about my mother and me,' you may say. 'All that business with my mother was over years ago.' You don't and it wasn't.

Fantasy isn't something you run out of.

Because society would rather we always wore a pretty face, women have been trained to cut off anger.

To say something nice about yourself, this is the hardest thing in the world for people to do. They'd rather take their clothes off.

No man can be really free in bed with a woman who is not.