Quotes About Support

Sisterhood," she said, "is about being together with other women in a cause that allows all women to make the individual choices they want. Because as long as women are separate from one another, organized around competition—like in a children's game where only one person gets to be the princess—then it will be the rare woman who is not in the end narrowed and limited by our society's idea of what a woman should be.

Everyone needs a wife; even wives need wives.

No one ever told you that in moment of crisis, family was allowed to trump friendship.

But all she could feel was that he was her friend, her wonderful and gifted friend.

high-fiving one another without evident irony.

Marriage, I don't think, is like that. It's something else. It's a thing in which you get to see your closest friend become more of who she already is.

If Jules or Ash needed to see each other, then the two husbands stepped aside. It almost seemed gratifying to the men to step aside in those moments, remembering what women could have together that men rarely could.

the Siamese-twinship of marriage

Parents were the ones who handed you law school admission test study guides unprompted, and when you responded with revulsion or rage, they defensively said, "But I just wanted you to have something to fall back on.

Friends don't let friends wear beards without mustaches.

Wives tend, they hover. Their ears are twin sensitive instruments, satellites picking up the slightest scrape of dissatisfaction. Wives bring broth, we bring paper clips, we bring ourselves and our pliant, warm bodies. We know just what to say to the men who for some reason have a great deal of trouble taking consistent care of themselves or anyone else.

It's funny how you can go for a long time in life not needing someone, and then you meet them and you suddenly need them all the time.

Now they were gathering because the world was unbearable, and they themselves were not.

It's so wonderful that all of you have so much more freedom than I did. But along with that freedom can sometimes come a sense that you don't need other women. And that isn't true.

Everyone needs a wife; even wives need wives. Wives tend, they hover. Their ears are twin sensitive instruments, satellites picking up the slightest scrape of dissatisfaction. Wives bring broth, we bring paper clips, we bring ourselves and our pliant, warm bodies. We know just what to say to the men who for some reason have a great deal of trouble taking consistent care of themselves or anyone else.

Joe once told me he felt a little sorry for women, who only got husbands. Husbands tried to help by giving answers, being logical, stubbornly applying force as though it were a glue gun. Or else they didn't try to help at all, for they were somewhere else entirely, out walking in the world by themselves. But wives, oh wives, when they weren't being bitter or melancholy or counting the beads on their abacus of disappointment, they could take care of you with delicate and effortless ease.

She clung marsupially,

Jules had had five sessions with a disheveled social worker named Melinda, who was as kind as the kindest mother, nodding in sympathy while Jules railed against the stupidity of college life. Later, she would barely remember what Melinda had said to her, but at the time her presence had been soothing and necessary,

No one told you that in moments of crisis, family was allowed to trump friendship.

They crossed the Smith campus in clusters, these girls, as though they might simply tip over if forced to stand alone.

Will you be okay? I do not mean in a cosmic sense.

What sort of man would stay with her and not be threatened by her excesses, her rage, her spirit, her skill? Who was he, this phantom, unthreatened husband who was still attractive and strong himself? Maybe he lived under a rock somewhere, sliding out once in a while to celebrate the big ideas of his brilliant wife, before returning to the shadows.

You needed to find a way to make your world dynamic, Greer knew. Sometimes you couldn't do it yourself. Someone had to see something in you and speak to you in a way that no one else ever had.

That's your shadow, my mom told me once. You need it more than you think.