Women Quotes

Look at these magnificent women, I thought, created in such misogynistic and hierarchical societies, yet they are the subversive centers around which the plot is shaped. Everything is supposed to revolve around the male hero. But it is the active presence of these women that changes events and diverts the man's life from its traditional course, that shocks him into changing his very mode of existence. In the classical Iranian narrative, active women dominate the scene; they make things happen.

~ Azar Nafisi

Even the mild-mannered Sophia Western of Tom Jones and Richardson's annoyingly pious Clarissa Harlow distinguished themselves by saying no to the authority of their parents, their societies, and norms and demanding to marry the man they chose. Perhaps it was exactly because women were deprived of so much in their real lives that they became so subversive in the realm of fiction, refusing the authority imposed on them, breaking out of old structures, not submitting.

~ Azar Nafisi

To be “out of touch” with a society in which women have internalized their subjugation is an admirable thing.

~ Mona Eltahawy

The syndicate was successful in including an officer and two other crew members in its plan. Sheikh employed old ways of enticing by wine, women and money to use them.

~ Ravi Ranjan Goswami

I sometimes wonder how powerful are those Fortune 500 CEOs who can can’t even change the way that list looks (leave aside how the world looks). And, I wonder what message do we send to our young girls, in classrooms across the world, who work as hard as our young boys but see only 20 CEOs out of those 500 who look like them.

~ Sharad Vivek Sagar

Also the fact that he's a guy. A girl screws around like Lotto and she's like diseased. Untouchable. But a guy can stick it to a million places and everyone just thinks he's doing what boys do.

~ Lauren Groff

a feminist is just someone who recognizes power structures that keep people from having the fullest life they can.

~ Lauren Groff

Faith had always told herself that she was not like other ladies. But neither, it seemed, were other ladies.

~ Frances Hardinge

He existed in his own terms and I followed it without hesitation.

~ Pushpa Rana

A feminist is any woman who tells the truth about her life.

~ Virginia Woolf

I remember, around age ten, beholding the scene in The Shining in which the hot young woman whom Jack Nicholson is lewdly embracing in the haunted hotel bathroom ages rapidly in his arms, screeching from nubile chick to putrefying corpse within seconds. I understood that the scene was supposed to represent some kind of primal horror. This was The Shining, after all. But the image of that decaying, cackling crone, her arms outstretched in desire toward the man who is backing away, has stayed with me for three decades, as a type of friend. She’s part baths-ghost, part mad-Naomi. She didn’t get the memo about being beyond wanting or being wanted. Or perhaps she just means to scare the shit out of him, which she does.

~ Maggie Nelson

Why do I need to have reasons? When someone decides to have a baby, people don't go around asking what her reasons are.

~ Emily Giffin

You’re looking for sexual tidbits as a female child, and the only ones that present themselves depict child rape or other violations (all my favorite books in my preteen years: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Clan of the Cave Bear, The World According to Garp, as well as the few R-rated movies I was allowed to see—Fame, most notably, with its indelible scene of Irene Cara being asked to take her shirt off and suck her thumb by a skeezy photographer who promises to make her a star), then your sexuality will form around that fact. There is no control group. I don’t even want to talk about “female sexuality” until there is a control group. And there never will be.

~ Maggie Nelson

Women often find great roles in revolution, simply because the rules fall apart and everyone has agency, anyone can act. As they did in Egypt, where liberty leading the masses was an earnest young woman in a black hijab.

~ Rebecca Solnit

I have become the woman I hardly dared imagine I could be. There are parts I don’t love—until a few years ago, I had no idea that you could have cellulite on your stomach—but not only do I get along with me most of the time now, I am militantly and maternally on my own side. Left to my own devices, would I trade this for firm thighs, fewer wrinkles, a better memory? You bet I would. That is why it’s such a blessing that I’m not left to my own devices.

~ Anne Lamott

When posing for a photograph, spinsters should avoid looking desperate or deprived. A serene smile will show that your circumstances are by choice and not for lack of beauty or character. -Miss Gertrude Hasslebrink, 1878

~ Margaret Brownley

The Old Testament records the sage words of an old woman in addressing two younger ones: 'The Lord grant', said Naomi, 'that ye may find rest, each of you, in the house of her husband!' Who ever heard of a woman finding rest in the house of her husband? And yet, and yet ! The restless hearts are not the hearts of wives and of mothers, as many a lonely woman knows. There is no more crushing load than the load of a loveless life. It is a burden that is often beautifully and graciously borne, but its weight is a very real one. The mother may have a bent form, a furrowed brow, and worn, thin hands ; but her heart found its rest for all that. Naomi was an old woman; she knew the world very well, and her words are worth weighing. Heavy luggage is Christ's strange cure for weary hearts.

~ F.w. Boreham

Miss Betsy is looking at me. Some jealousy sure, but every woman have that in them

~ Marlon James

There is nothing that anyone can get past a forty-five-year-old woman.” We laugh hard, the first honest sound I make that afternoon, or in many days, each of us feeling the ravages of experience, our debt to enduring. We are not to be fucked with. We rule. Even as we age and help our children push past us, as we worry about the estimate for the roof, forget things we meant to do, regard our widening bodies, we rule. We’ve returned again and again to our original selves for another look; we have refined our purpose. Changes we thought we’d been resisting have anyway been wrought, and they have made us unbreakable.

~ Susanna Sonnenberg

We need an army of white-haired, wild-eyed radicals cutting a swath against the sexism that crosses our paths. It is a good antidote to the larger community’s apparent belief that older women are slightly dotty, grandmotherly, benign souls.

~ Shari Graydon

Headstrong is just a word, Katie - a word others call you when you don't do what they want.

~ Jennifer Donnelly

Getting married is easy, having sex is easier, but findings someone who can stimulate your mind and make love to your soul, that is rare.

~ Habeeb Akande

Wolves and women wed for life.

~ George R.r. Martin

I am a puzzle and a conundrum and a thunderstorm.

~ Brian Doyle

All men are fools, and all men are knights where women are concerned.

~ George R.r. Martin

When sisters stand shoulder to shoulder, who stands a chance against us?

~ Pam Brown

She has this curious heavy grace, like something out of its element making do in a heavier medium. Like she should be living in water.

~ Keri Hulme

Ministry is when the people who hear you, don't want more of you; they want more of Him because of what you've said. When you point them to God's fire instead of trying to get attention for yourself-that's ministry.

~ Priscilla Shirer

A rose can never be a sunflower, and a sunflower can never be a rose. All flowers are beautiful in their own way, and that's like women too.

~ Miranda Kerr

Try being an indie author, a minority author, a woman, and a person with health issues in the world of traditional - that's where you are clearly 'different' and marginalized. I am all of that, yet I am still here and smiling. Life is good!

~ Kailin Gow

I was amazed at how strong women were when they were angry.

~ Robin Hobb

Women and cats do what they do, there is nothing a man can do about it

~ Robert A. Heinlein

the girl with a moustache they called me every now and thenIt's about time you wax your arms those who cared saidI faced the fears of the dreaded thread on my faceTo succumb every other week to the world's ways

~ Sanhita Baruah

Ever wanted more. After all, women weren’t equal to men. They were better. Certainly not in strength or their skill in killing things, but when it came to propagation women absolutely trounced men. Men could bring some chips to the party, but that shindig was always going down in the belly of a woman. And considering that the hardest part of gathering food now was finding a parking spot, strength and killing things were significantly less high on the list of key survival traits.

~ Matt K. Turner

But a lady forced is never a lady won

~ Gregory Benford

No woman should build her life waiting for a man to come along and save her. It's a tragic waste of brains and talent.

~ Stephanie Grace Whitson

Stop making someone else's looks your #goals. By all means aspire to be a better version of your current self, but don't glorify others when you yourself are glorious.

~ Miya Yamanouchi

i am watersoft enoughto offer lifetough enoughto drown it away

~ Rupi Kaur

You don’t need princes to save you. I don’t have a lot of patience for stories in which women are rescued by men.

~ Neil Gaiman

There’s something painfully beautiful about a woman who loves without condition. Heart filled with cracks from mistrust and disappointment and yet she loves as if her heart knows nothing of betrayal. For the strength and faith she holds, in spite reasons not to hold, she deserves love. But fu** it, she finds love within herself.

~ Ahimsa Murfi