WOMEN QUOTES XVII

quotations about women

To know a mature woman is to know more than her body. It is to know her dreams and her secrets. It is to know that a dance is a fight, and a fight is a dance, and that passion and compassion beat in the same breast.

DOUGLAS CARLTON ABRAMS

The Lost Diary of Don Juan

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Any woman may act the part of a coquette successfully who has the reputation without the scruples of modesty. If a woman passes the bounds of propriety for our sakes, and throws herself unblushingly at our heads, we conclude it is either from a sudden and violent liking, or from extraordinary merit on our parts, either of which is enough to turn any man's head who has a single spark of gallantry or vanity in his composition.

WILLIAM HAZLITT

Characteristics

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Those philosophers who believe in the absolute logic of truth have never had to discuss it on close terms with a woman.

CESARE PAVESE

This Business of Living, February 19, 1937


A woman well bred and well taught, furnished with the additional accomplishments of knowledge and behaviour, is a creature without comparison. Her society is the emblem of sublimer enjoyments, her person is angelic, and her conversation heavenly. She is all softness and sweetness, peace, love, wit, and delight. She is every way suitable to the sublimest wish, and the man that has such a one to his portion, has nothing to do but to rejoice in her, and be thankful.

DANIEL DEFOE

The Education of Women

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No man with any sense assumes that a woman's words mean to her exactly what they mean to him.

REX STOUT

The Mother Hunt


Woman's great strength lies in being late or absent. Presence immediately reveals the weak points of our beloved; when she is absent she become one of the sylph-like figures of our adolescence whom we endowed with perfection.

ANDRÉ MAUROIS

An Art of Living


See, I will always have this penchant for what I call kamikaze women. I call them kamikazes because they, you know they crash their plane, they're self-destructive. But they crash into you, and you die along with them.

WOODY ALLEN

Husbands and Wives

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Woman loves or hates: she knows no middle course.

PUBLILIUS SYRUS

The Moral Sayings of Publilius Syrus


As such portraits as we have are almost invariably of the male sex, who strut more prominently across the stage, it seems worthwhile to take as a model one of those many women who cluster in the shade. For a study of history and biography convinces any right minded person that these obscure figures occupy a place not unlike that of the showman's hand in the dance of the marionettes; and the finger is laid upon the heart.

VIRGINIA WOOLF

"Phyllis and Rosamond", The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf

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A woman's love, like lichens upon a rock, will still grow where even charity can find no soil to nurture itself.

CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE

Intuitions and Summaries of Thought


The burning gaze of a young woman, such as hath tasted man, shall not escape me; for I have a spirit keen to mark these things.

AESCHYLUS

fragment, Toxotides

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If you're a woman, it's almost impossible to establish a relationship. You're too much for everybody. It's too much. The woman always has to play this role of being fragile and dependent. And if you're not, they're fascinated by you, but only for a little while. And then they want to change you and crush you. And then they leave.

MARINA ABRAMOVIC

The Guardian, May 12, 2014

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Oh! too convincing -- dangerously dear --
In woman's eye the unanswerable tear!

LORD BYRON

The Corsair

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A woman's beauty does not belong to her alone. It is part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it.

J. M. COETZEE

Disgrace

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The original oppression of Woman was based on crude denigration. She caused Man to fall, so she became a scapegoat. No, not a scapegoat which might be blameless but a culprit richly deserving of whatever suffering Man chose thereafter to heap on her. That is Woman in the Book of Genesis. Out here, our ancestors, without the benefit of hearing about the Old Testament, made the very same story differing only in local color. At first the Sky was very close to the Earth. But every evening Woman cut off a piece of the Sky to put in her soup pot, or in another version, she repeatedly banged the top end of her pestle carelessly against the Sky whenever she pounded millet or, as in yet another rendering -- so prodigious is Man's inventiveness, she wiped her kitchen hands in the Sky's face. Whatever the detail of Woman's provocation, the Sky moved away in anger, and God with it.

CHINUA ACHEBE

Anthills of the Savannah

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A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.

U2

"Tryin' to Throw Your Arms Around the World"

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It has been our experience that women usually prefer thin, undernourished, flatchested females, dressed to the teeth, as a concept of "feminine beauty" -- and that men prefer exactly the opposite: voluptuous, well-rounded and undressed. The women's idealization of woman is actually a male counterpart, competing with man in society; man's view of women is far more truly feminine.

HUGH HEFNER

The Realist, May, 1961

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No man was ever taken to hell by a woman unless he already had a ticket in his pocket.

REX STOUT

Some Buried Caesar

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Certainly, it is more reasonable to devote one's life to women than to postage stamps or old snuff-boxes, even to pictures or statues. But the example of other collections should be a warning to us to diversify, to have not one woman only but several.

MARCEL PROUST

The Guermantes Way

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Ah! What pleasure it must be to a woman to suffer for the one she loves!

HONORE DE BALZAC

Père Goriot

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