quotations about women
Why couldn't I be more like other girls my age? Take Mrs. Brown's niece. She spent every waking hour sizing up this beau or that, stitching tea towels and petticoats and putting aside a little each month for a set of Spode Buttercup dishes.
KIRBY LARSON
Hattie Ever After
You gotta respect a girl who realizes that romantic relationships are built on lies and goes to town with it!
PETE ABRAMS
"That Which Redeems", Sluggy Freelance, August 26, 2004
What man can pretend to know the riddle of a woman's mind?
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
Don Quixote
Be delicate, little wife-woman. Never be without your veil, without many veils. Veil yourself in a thousand veils, all shimmering and glittering with costly textures and precious jewels. Never let the last veil be drawn. Against the morrow array yourself with more veils, ever more veils, veils without end. Yet the many veils must not seem many. Each veil must seem the only one between you and your hungry lover who will have nothing less than all of you. Each time he must seem to get all, to tear aside the last veil that hides you. He must think so. It must not be so. Then there will be no satiety, for on the morrow he will find another last veil that has escaped him.
JACK LONDON
The Valley of the Moon
Women, as they are like riddles in being unintelligible, so generally resemble them in this, that they please us no longer when once we know them.
ALEXANDER POPE
"Thoughts on Various Subjects"
Women are seldom silent. Their beauty is forever speaking for them.
PHILIP MOELLER
Helena's Husband
The fear of women is the beginning of knowledge.
GELETT BURGESS
The Maxims of Methuselah
Miracle woman ...
Your mouth is wine, and all your tender flesh
An easeful meadow for my weariness.
DONALD EVANS
"For the Haunting of Mauna"
I have often wondered that learning is not thought a proper ingredient in the education of a woman of quality or fortune. Since they have the same improvable minds as the male part of their species.
JOSEPH ADDISON
The Guardian, September 8, 1713
That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty, even if they're not much to look at, or even if they're sort of stupid, you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are. Girls. Jesus Christ. They can drive you crazy. They really can.
J. D. SALINGER
The Catcher in the Rye
Great ladies ... are like the best sauces -- it is better not to know how they are made.
OCTAVE MIRBEAU
The Diary of a Chambermaid
I profess not to know how women's hearts are wooed and won. To me they have always been matters of riddle and admiration. Some seem to have but one vulnerable point, or door of access; while others have a thousand avenues, and may be captured in a thousand different ways. It is a great triumph of skill to gain the former, but a still greater proof of generalship to maintain possession of the latter, for man must battle for his fortress at every door and window. He who wins a thousand common hearts is therefore entitled to some renown; but he who keeps undisputed sway over the heart of a coquette is indeed a hero.
WASHINGTON IRVING
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
It is observable that the ladies frequent tragedies more than comedies; the reason may be, that in tragedy their sex is deified and adored, in comedy exposed and ridiculed.
ALEXANDER POPE
"Thoughts on Various Subjects"
Women in London are like the rich silks; they are out of fashion a great while before they wear out.
APHRA BEHN
Oroonoko
But like all the other women I have referred to, she expressed herself with passionate and disarming effrontery.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays
Love is wont to visit Man in the company of Desire; but Woman by himself.
RICHARD GARNETT
De Flagello Myrtes
An unsatisfied woman requires luxury, but a woman who is in love with a man will lie on a board.
ANDRÉ MAUROIS
An Art of Living
Someone once asked me why women don't gamble as much as men do, and I gave the commonsensical reply that we don't have as much money. That was a true but incomplete answer. In fact, women's total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage.
GLORIA STEINEM
attributed, Quote Unquote
No man ever reaches manhood
till a woman's tenderness
is a part of his possession.
EDWIN LEIBFREED
"The Conquerors"
Wretched
Women!
When you are wholly lovely
Man cannot forget either of his two afflictions,
Soul, or body!
MARJORIE ALLEN SEIFFERT
"Ode in the New Mode"