Quotes About Spinster

Miss Climpson's active mind quickly conjured up a picture of the rabbit-fair-haired and a little paunchy, with a habit of saying, I'll ask the wife. Miss Climpson wondered why Providence saw fit to create such men. For Miss Climpson, men were intended to be masterful, even though wicked or foolish. She was a spinster made and not born- a perfectly womanly woman.

There is no detective in England equal to a spinster lady of uncertain age with plenty of time on her hands.

There is no detective in England equal to a spinster lady of uncertain age with plenty of time on her hands." He

A 'career woman,' Sylvie said, as if the two words had no place in the same sentence. A spinster, she added, contemplating the word. Ursula wondered why her mother was working so hard to rile her. Perhaps you will never marry, Sylvie said, as if in conclusion, as if Ursula's life was as good as over. Would that be such a bad thing? 'The unmarried daughter,' Ursula said, tucking into an iced fancy. It was good enough for Jane Austen.

Judge Sedgwick's daughter, Catharine. She was a spinster and a novelist in the early 1800s and the author of A New England Tale

When a gently born spinster has little money, her choices are few. She might receive an offer of marriage, but it's unlikely to be from a wealthy man, so she'll have a hard life trying to make ends meet for her growing family.

Then why don't you marry him? Sally laughed. I don't want to jump into anything. 'Marry in haste, repent at leisure.' I can get married any time. Her trained objectivity made her add, Well, any time within the next five years. I'll be something of a spinster if I'm not married by then.

She could feel herself pressing the details into memory, saving them like dried flowers kept in a spinster's chest, relics of a past that might have been, of a future that never was.

An old maid, that's what I'm to be. A literary spinster, with a pen for a spouse, a family of stories for children, and twenty years hence a morsel of fame, perhaps…

dull—she did not, with equal longing, wish to be a part of the whispering spinster chorus at the edge of other, more interesting lives. She

The deceits which her spinster's sentimentality has practiced on her original good judgment are legendary and colossal; she has this way of speaking of children's hearts as if they were something holy; it is hard for a parent to know what to say.

After all, if spinster chaperons required their own spinster chaperons there simply wouldn't be enough to go around.

And she's certainly a good cook." Miss Betts sighed. "The epitaph of the spinster.

There is no detective in England equal to a spinster lady of uncertain age with plenty of time on her hands.

Most parents would not allow more than one daughter to remain unmarried. So if one daughter had already declared herself a spinster, her sister had to conduct a marriage ceremony with a dead man, called marrying a tablet, to retain her independence. These women later told historians that "it was not so easy to find an unmarried dead man to marry," so when one did become available, they vied with one another "to be the one who would get to marry him.

It is not easy to be a woman, is it? Especially a spinster.

Roo was a confirmed spinster, devoted birdwatcher and, to the chagrin of many of her relatives, a card-carrying liberal Democrat

Tabitha is classical spinster—similar to Tituba, the Caribbean servant at Salem, Massachusetts, who allegedly taught the spells and charms that led Sarah Good and nineteen others to be burned or hanged for witchcraft. And "Tabitha" would be long associated with single women—tabbies, tabby cats, would become common nineteenth-century single nicknames—and with witches.

Until the mid-seventies, the traditional or classic lesbian was always a spinster and often a tweedy intellectual, with a stark glamour that titillated men and women alike. This is the woman that feminists destroyed when they pressured the media for 'positive images' of lesbians.

There is perhaps no more rewarding romance heroine than she who is not expected to find love. The archetype comes in many disguises - the wallflower, the spinster, the governess, the single mom - but always with one sad claim: Love is not in her cards.

I think female solitude is a mental condition as well as a physical state. You can be married and a spinster. I think spinster is an identity every woman can claim, if she will... I feel like a lot of women, or a lot of feminists, joke about taking to the sea or living alone in a cottage as this kind of fun freedom.

I think there may be lots of different types of librarians,' Catherine said thoughtfully. She had the air of someone who'd seen a whole new range of possibilities and found she liked them more than she'd expected. 'There's the sharing librarian, and the motherly librarian, and the spinster librarian, and the archivist librarian, and the adventurous librarian like you — there's nothing that says I can't be a murderous librarian.

At heart I am a librarian, a bird-watcher, a transcendentalist, a gardener, a spinster, a monk.

So Laura is placed for us: mushrooms, crushed flowers, country matters. In London she will miss the greenhouse with its glossy tank, the appleroom, everything "earthy and warm." Laura is an anomaly in the world of easy literary symbolism: she is a spinster, completely uninterested in men. Nevertheless she belongs irrevocably to the sources of life: to earth, seeds, bulbs.