Quotes About Women

Don't worry about the faithlessness of women—you've got a Spanish wife now—famous for their faithfulness! (See Encyclopedias, histories, guide books.)

Seems to me you have escaped the fatality of repetition in your destiny by escaping cruelty in women. As I escaped mine by finding you, in place of my former penchant for dead or half-dead men! Did I leave my face powder & engagement book chez toi?

I share with Henry an anger not at the imperfection of women, but at the foulness of living itself.

What I detest about these books of maxims is that they are so platitudinously true. A la Molière, Aesop, La Rochefoucauld—Shakespeare. They apply to all women, and that must include you too. But somehow it doesn't ring true to me. But it's disquieting.

You are much much greater on women. Céline is arid.

There is a curious contradiction between those who complain that we have too many novels obsessed with the incapacity to achieve relationships and those who constantly upbraid the writers who deal exclusively with personal relationship. Men write about alienation and women about relationships. Feminine writing is often attacked as small, subjective, personal. The impotence to relate to another is the impotence to love others, and from this impotence to crime is a natural step.

It seemed to her that he was ready to live and die for emotional errors as women did, but that men he did not call them emotional errors; he called them history, philosophy, metaphysics....

Alva embodied a curious contradiction in that she felt she cared deeply for women as a class while nursing venomous contempt for the women she actually knew.

Surely the freedom of women must mean more to us than the freedom of pimps.

Freedom is not an abstaction, nor is a little of it enough. A little more is not enough either. Having less, being less, empoverished in freedom and rights, women then invariably have less self-respect: less self-respect than any human being needs to live a brave and honest life.

Male dominance in society always means that out of public sight, in the private, ahistorical world of men with women, men are sexually dominating women.

Women intend to save themselves when sacrificing some women, but only the freedom of all women protects any woman.

The intelligence of women is not out in the world, acting on its own behalf; it is kept small, inside the home, acting on behalf of another. This is true even when the woman works outside the home, because she is segregated into women's work, and her intelligence does not have the same importance as the lay of her ass.

The Right in the United States today is a social and political movement controlled almost totally by men but built largely on the fear and ignorance of women.

Men hate intelligence in women. It cannot flame; it cannot burn; it cannot burn out and end up in ashes, having been consumed in adventure. It cannot be cold, rational, ice; no warm womb would tolerate a cold, icy, splendid mind. It cannot be ebullient and it cannot be morbid; it cannot be anything that does not end in reproduction or whoring. It cannot be what intelligence is: a vitality of mind that acts directly in and on the world, without mediation.

I love the literature that these men created; but I will not live my life as if they are real and I am not. Nor will I tolerate the continuing assumption that they know more about women than we know about ourselves.

The new pornography industry is held, by leftist males, to be inherently radical. Sex is claimed by the Left as a leftist phenomenon; the trade in women is most of sex. The politics of liberation are claimed as indigenous to the Left by the Left; central to the politics of liberation is the mass-marketing of material that depicts women being used as whores.

I am one of those serious women.

pornography is the orchestrated destruction of women's bodies and souls; rape, battery, incest, and prostitution animate it; dehumanization and sadism characterize it; it is war on women, serial assaults on dignity, identity, and human worth; it is tyranny. Each woman who has survived knows from the experience of her own life that pornography is captivity—the woman trapped in the picture used on the woman trapped wherever he's got her.

I listened; I wrote; I learned. I do not know why so many women trusted me enough to speak to me, but underneath anything I write one can hear the percussive sound of their heartbeats. If one has to pick one kind of pedagogy over all others, I pick listening. It breaks down prejudices and stereotypes; it widens self-imposed limits; it takes one into another's life, her hard times and, if there is any, her joy too.

It was the pornographers, not feminists, who punished women in the public square, as puritans had, for being sexual.

What I've learned is that women suffer from terrible shame and the shame comes from having been complicit in abuse because one wants to live.

For me, being a lesbian means three things— First, it means that I love, cherish, and respect women in my mind, in my heart, and in my soul. This love of women is the soil in which my life is rooted. It is the soil of our common life together. My life grows out of this soil. In any other soil, I would die. In whatever ways I am strong, I am strong because of the power and passion of this nurturant love.

Will feminism be a political movement that confronts the power of men over women in order to dismantle that power; or will feminism be a lifestyle choice, a post-modernist fad, a cyclically noted fashion?