Quotes About Women

N]ow that I am drawing to the close of this work, in which I have spoken of so many important things done by the Americans, to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply: To the superiority of their women.

And now, As I come near the end of this book in which I have recorded so many considerable achievements of the Americans, if I am asked how we should account for the unusual prosperity and growing strength of this nation, I would reply that they must be attributed to the superiority of their woman.

Women know things that men will never know. We keep the best secrets. We tell the best stories.

Weapons are kept from women, but such a naming suggests that perhaps men fear our talents in war as well as our desire for peace.

Three hundred years ago people believed in the devil. They believed if an incident could not be explained, then the cause was something wicked, and that cause was often a woman who was said to be a witch. Women who did as they pleased, women with propriety, women who had enemies, women who took lovers, women who knew about the mysteries of childbirth, all were suspect (…)

Men will be men, Maureen told me when I wondered aloud where my father went in the evenings. Don't complain, she advised. That's how women find their freedom. When there's no one else at home.

On some nights it was best to remember the past, and not shut it in a drawer. Three hundred years ago people believed in the devil. They believed if an incident could not be explained, then the cause was something wicked, and that cause was often a woman who was said to be a witch. Women who did as they pleased, women with property, women

How lucky they'd been to be raised by women who taught them what was most important in this world. Read as many books as you can. Choose courage over caution. Take time to visit libraries. Look for light in the darkness. Have faith in yourself. Know that love is what matters most.

We can offer women what they want most of all, cures for the most common ailments of this world... When children are ailing or babies refuse to be born, when men are unfaithful, when the sky is empty of rain, when the amulets buried beneath holy wall upon instructions of the minim offer not solace and all entreaties to the priests for guidance fail, when the rituals they offer bring no comfort and no consolation, they come to us.

Tell a witch to go, and she'll plant her feet on the ground and stay exactly where she is. Instead of doing as she's told, she'll take a knife to her arm and let her blood drip onto the ground, and in that way she will claim the earth for herself and for her daughters and for all the daughters who follow her. It is the future she's claiming, the right to be a woman who can do as she pleases.

Women here in Massachusetts had been drowned and beaten and hanged, especially if they were found to have access to books other than the Bible, for the Puritans had been convinced that they alone had the ear of God.

It was a dangerous world for women, and more dangerous for a woman whose very bloodline would have her do not as she was ordered, but as she pleased.

If we had no hurt and no sin to speak of, we'd be angels, and angels can't love the way men and women do.

Women pitied her, but went on their way; they had their own troubles to attend to, and mercy was a scarce commodity.

THE WOMEN FROM THE congregation might appear delicate and ladylike, but on this island strength was a necessity. Most of these women could climb onto a roof before a storm to make certain that the shutters at every window were bolted shut, they could cook over an outdoor fire, kill chickens and wild waterfowl, do what they must should the tolerance of our people fade in yet another country.

Be cautious, be sure of yourself, be careful of outsiders, beware of women who have the nerve to meet your eyes, who think they're your equals, who do as they please, who please you as well, who will never do as they're told. Maria glanced behind her when they reached the sea.

Those women who could read were revered and feared, for they were the most skilled in love magic.

Before they knew it, time would speed up and the future would appear on a street corner or in a park, and there they'd be, grown women who'd forgotten how long a summer could last.

If a woman doesn't write her own history, there are very few who will.

For more than two hundred years, the Owens women have been blamed for everything that has gone wrong in town.

A woman alone who could read and write was suspect. Words were magic. Books were not to be trusted. What men could not understand, they wished to burn.

our mother recalled it. But the nun's language in these matters—matters of the body, of the flesh, what went on between women and men—

She pushed open the door to the restaurant. More lunchtime bustle, mostly women in hats with their coats thrown over the backs of chairs, the satiny linings and the fur collars and cuffs, the perfume and the elegant curves of the women's backs as they leaned forward across the small tables, all giving the hint of a boudoir to the busy place. She

There is a change coming I think in the lives of girls and women. Yes. But it is up to us to make it come. All women have had up till now has been their connection with men. All we have had. No more lives of our own, really, than domestic animals. He shall hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force, a little closer than his dog, a little dearer than his horse. Tennyson wrote that. It's true. Was true. You will want to have children, though.