Quotes About Women

The fiction, as always, is secondary to the history; the real women are always more complex and more conflicted, greater than the heroines of the novel, just as real women now, as then, are often greater than they are reported, sometimes greater than the world wants them to be.

For women not to fear rape because we can successfully defend ourselves against it is not anachronistic but revolutionary. For women to be considered as potential warriors (in every sense of the word, including its physical representation) is not anachronistic but revolutionary. If realized, it might imply a radical change in modern life.

Encountering gender apartheid and waged slavery shook me to my roots more than half a century ago in Afghanistan. Oh, the women of Afghanistan, the women of the Muslim world. I was no feminist -- but now, thinking back, I see how much I learned there, how clearly their condition taught me to see gender discrimination anywhere and, above all, taught me to see how cruel oppressed women could be to each other. They taught me about women everywhere.

Then, if women are to have the same duties as men, they must have the same nurture and education? Yes. The education which was assigned to the men was music and gymnastic. Yes. Then women must be taught music and gymnastic and also the art of war, which they must practise like the men? That is the inference, I suppose. I

Education, I said, and nurture: If our citizens are well educated, and grow into sensible men, they will easily see their way through all these, as well as other matters which I omit; such, for example, as marriage, the possession of women and the procreation of children, which will all follow the general principle that friends have all things in common, as the proverb says. That

The first of the two loves has a noble purpose, and delights only in the intelligent nature of man, and is faithful to the end, and has no shadow of wantonness or lust. The second is the coarser kind of love, which is a love of the body rather than of the soul, and is of women and boys as well as of men.

And if so, my friend, I said, there is no special faculty of administration in a state which a woman has because she is a woman, or which a man has by virtue of his sex, but the gifts of nature are alike diffused in both; all the pursuits of men are the pursuits of women also, but in all of them a woman is inferior to a man. Very true. Then

She had asked the older women: What is that fire? And they had replied: It is we who are burning.

Quién, de los oficiales de entonces, puede negar que te dé a las mujeres rusas la mejor y más valiosa recompensa?

Every woman knows there are only two kinds of men: those who feel and those who pretend. Always remember, my dear, though only the former can be loved, only the latter can be trusted. It is passion that blackens eyes, not calculation.

Helplessness. If women were hope´s oldest companions, it was due to helplessness. Certainly women often exerciced dreadful power over a single hearth, but the world between hearths belonged to men.

Women watched their allies as much as their enemies, if they wished to prevent trouble and keep their power. Especially if all of their subordinates and peers were men. Unfair, perhaps, but practical.

And most of all, it's such a young male thing to say, this automatic assumption of safety. Women, even girls of Lanny's age, don't think that way. Parents don't. Older people don't. It reveals a certain blind, entitled ignorance to how dangerous the world really is.

Some say that women should not read, for they may be led astray into impurity, as if our women are not fit guardians of their own worthiness.

I think, is a maddening thing to say on so many levels. As if the Internet is a fantasy world, inhabited by imaginary people. As if we're ordinary people in the first place. And most of all, it's such a young male thing to say, this automatic assumption of safety. Women, even girls of Lanny's age, don't think that way. Parents don't. Older people don't. It reveals a certain blind, entitled ignorance to how dangerous the world really is.

The big media blitzes almost exclusively happen for missing children, teen girls, and adult women. White and pretty, preferably. It's rare to see the major networks covering a missing young woman of color as a priority.

The one taken underwater of Mel's garden of women

In the healing ways of women that remained mysterious to [him] even as he watched them do their work, tears were followed by reminiscences that brought a smile and soothed, and hope was always found to be the flower that bloomed from every seed of hopelessness.

and women merely because of the way that they treated us. They had anxieties we could never understand. He said that we of the hidden had our burdens, but those who lived in the open carried far heavier burdens than ours, which was true.

Over the years, he'd been bitten three times, and every dog that had ever crossed his path had looked at him as though it wanted not only to bite him but to tear out his throat. All dogs looked at him the way wise cops looked at him, the way attractive women with street smarts looked at him, the way mothers with tender young daughters looked at him: with suspicion, disgust, and contempt.

I'm referring to feelings! Women aren't afraid to face their feelings. Men are so terrified of emotion they hold it inside until they're totally bent out of shape.

You know if it'd been three wise women searching for the newborn babe, they would have asked for directions much sooner, found the stable, swept it out, and had a meal waiting by the time Mary and Joseph arrived.

The best sex takes us somewhere. Somewhere warm and expansive, a paradise of lust and happiness. Sex is and can be and should be but only very rarely is an act of communion with something bigger than ourselves. Men fuck and women make love, people say, but we men make love when we fuck a woman we adore: it's the same thing to us. We mean it sincerely. I had places inside me only Cathy could fill with her body, and I made her happy with my body more than I ever thought I could.

As ambitious women, we need to tell one another our stories. We need to tell the truth about our lives.