Females Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Females. Here they are! All 100 of them:

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Whatever you are physically...male or female, strong or weak, ill or healthy--all those things matter less than what your heart contains. If you have the soul of a warrior, you are a warrior. All those other things, they are the glass that contains the lamp, but you are the light inside.
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Cassandra Clare (Clockwork Angel (The Infernal Devices, #1))
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Books are a poor substitute for female companionship, but they are easier to find.
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Patrick Rothfuss (The Wise Man’s Fear (The Kingkiller Chronicle, #2))
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The female mind is certainly a devious one, my lord." Vetinari looked at his secretary in surprise. "Well, of course it is. It has to deal with the male one.
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Terry Pratchett (Unseen Academicals (Discworld, #37; Rincewind, #8))
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So, why do you write these strong female characters? Because you’re still asking me that question." [Equality Now speech, May 15, 2006]
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Joss Whedon
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Aren’t they supposed to be hiring someone else to train me full-time anyway?” β€œYes,” he said, getting up and pulling her to her feet along with him,β€œ and I’m worried that if you get into the habit of making out with your instructors, you’ll wind up making out with him, too.” β€œ Don’t be sexist. They could find me a female instructor.” β€œIn that case you have my permission to make out with her, as long as I can watch.
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Cassandra Clare (City of Fallen Angels (The Mortal Instruments, #4))
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If any female feels she need anything beyond herself to legitimate and validate her existence, she is already giving away her power to be self-defining, her agency.
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bell hooks (Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics)
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Instead of warning pregnant women not to drink,I think female alcoholics ought to be told not to fuck
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George Carlin
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We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls, you can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful. Otherwise, you would threaten the man. Because I am female, I am expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. Now marriage can be a source of joy and love and mutual support but why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don’t teach boys the same? We raise girls to see each other as competitors not for jobs or accomplishments, which I think can be a good thing, but for the attention of men. We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (We Should All Be Feminists)
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There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Women and Economics)
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Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a female β€” whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male.
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Simone de Beauvoir
β€œ
Newsflash, ladies: We can’t read your thoughts. And frankly, I’m not entirely sure I’d want to. The female mind is a scary place to be.
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Emma Chase (Tangled (Tangled, #1))
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I do not want to be the leader. I refuse to be the leader. I want to live darkly and richly in my femaleness. I want a man lying over me, always over me. His will, his pleasure, his desire, his life, his work, his sexuality the touchstone, the command, my pivot. I don’t mind working, holding my ground intellectually, artistically; but as a woman, oh, God, as a woman I want to be dominated. I don’t mind being told to stand on my own feet, not to cling, be all that I am capable of doing, but I am going to be pursued, fucked, possessed by the will of a male at his time, his bidding.
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AnaΓ―s Nin
β€œ
I have chosen to no longer be apologetic for my femaleness and my femininity. And I want to be respected in all of my femaleness because I deserve to be.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (We Should All Be Feminists)
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A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.
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Naomi Wolf (The Beauty Myth)
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I write almost always in the third person, and I don't think the narrator is male or female anyway. They're both, and young and old, and wise and silly, and sceptical and credulous, and innocent and experienced, all at once. Narrators are not even human - they're sprites.
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Philip Pullman
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Yes, my consuming desire is to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regularsβ€”to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recordingβ€”all this is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always supposedly in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night...
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Sylvia Plath (The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath)
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Are you a female dog?" "What?" Massie asked. "Why?" "Because you are acting like a real bitch!
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Lisi Harrison (The Clique (The Clique, #1))
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Do not consider me now as an elegant female intending to plague you, but as a rational creature speaking the truth from her heart.
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Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)
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He knew he was being overbearing as hell, but he couldn't help it. He was a bonded male. With his pregnant female. There were few things on the planet more aggressive or dangerous. And those bastards were called hurricanes and tornadoes.
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J.R. Ward (Lover Awakened (Black Dagger Brotherhood, #3))
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It is a well-documented fact that guys will not ask for directions. This is a biological thing. This is why it takes several million sperm cells... to locate a female egg, despite the fact that the egg is, relative to them, the size of Wisconsin.
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Dave Barry
β€œ
Have you ever fought an opponent you had no defense against? Like a fire breather or an acid spitter?" "Once I faced a female with diamond skin," Nix said breathlessly. "I was transfixed - even as she was choking the life out of me." "Really?" "No, I saw that character on X-Men. I just wanted to commiserate. Alas, I have no weaknesses.
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Kresley Cole (Pleasure of a Dark Prince (Immortals After Dark, #8))
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Women make up one half of society. Our society will remain backward and in chains unless its women are liberated, enlightened and educated.
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Saddam Hussein (The Revolution and Woman in Iraq)
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In the future, there will be no female leaders. There will just be leaders.
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Sheryl Sandberg (Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead)
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Colin decided then and there that the female mind was a strange and incomprehensible organ - one which no man should even attempt to understand. There wasn't a woman alive who could go from point A to B without stopping at C, D, X, and 12 along the way.
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Julia Quinn (Romancing Mister Bridgerton (Bridgertons, #4))
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Many of my movies have strong female leads- brave, self-sufficient girls that don't think twice about fighting for what they believe with all their heart. They'll need a friend, or a supporter, but never a savior. Any woman is just as capable of being a hero as any man.
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Hayao Miyazaki
β€œ
Passed over one of those mountains, where a winged male stood beside a heavily pregnant female, gazing at those very stars. Fae.
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Sarah J. Maas (Kingdom of Ash (Throne of Glass, #7))
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But boys will be boys, our favorite phrase that excuses so many things, while the only thing we have for the opposite gender is women, said with disdain and punctuated with an eye roll.
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Mindy McGinnis (The Female of the Species)
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Usually when you see females in movies, they feel like they have these metallic structures around them, they are caged by male energy.
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BjΓΆrk
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Jem seemed to look through her then, as if he were seeing something beyond her, beyond the corridor, beyond the Institute itself. "Whatever you are physically," he said, "male or female, strong or weak, ill or healthy--all those things matter less than what your heart contains. If you have the soul of a warrior, you are a warrior. All those other things, they are the glass that contains the lamp, but you are the light inside." He smiled them, seeming to have come back to himself, slightly embarrassed. "That's what I believe.
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Cassandra Clare (Clockwork Angel (The Infernal Devices, #1))
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Female friendships that work are relationships in which women help each other belong to themselves.
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Louise Bernikow
β€œ
And one more thing. About my name β€” Artemis β€” you were right. In London, it is generally a female name, after the Greek goddess of archery. But every now and then a male comes along with such a talent for hunting that he earns the right to use the name. I am that male. Artemis the hunter. I hunted you.
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Eoin Colfer (The Eternity Code (Artemis Fowl, #3))
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You assume that it has to be a male god who finds a human female attractive? How sexist is that?
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Rick Riordan (The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, #1))
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Man...heats up like a lightbulb: red hot in the twinkling of an eye and cold again in a flash. The female, on the other hand...heats up like an iron. Slowly, over a low heat, like tasty stew. But then, once she has heated up, there's no stopping her.
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Carlos Ruiz ZafΓ³n (The Shadow of the Wind (The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, #1))
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Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust.
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bell hooks (Communion: The Female Search for Love (Love Song to the Nation, 2))
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You don’t owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don’t owe it to your mother, you don’t owe it to your children, you don’t owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked β€˜female’.
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Erin McKean
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And certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it.
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George Eliot (Middlemarch)
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At some point during almost every romantic comedy, the female lead suddenly trips and falls, stumbling helplessly over something ridiculous like a leaf, and then some Matthew McConaughey type either whips around the corner just in the nick of time to save her or is clumsily pulled down along with her. That event predictably leads to the magical moment of their first kiss. Please. I fall ALL the time. You know who comes and gets me? The bouncer.
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Chelsea Handler (My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands)
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V shook his head. β€œRemember what you saw in that clearing, cop? How’d you like that anywhere near a female you loved?” Butch put down the Bud without drinking from it. His eyes traveled over Rhage’s body. β€œWe’re going to need a shitload of steel,” the human muttered.
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J.R. Ward (Lover Eternal (Black Dagger Brotherhood, #2))
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Female fireflies draw in strange males with dishonest signals and eat them; mantis females devour their own mates. Female insects, Kya thought, know how to deal with their lovers.
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Delia Owens (Where the Crawdads Sing)
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You see it in all animals - the female of the species is more deadly than the male.' 'Except humans.
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Mindy McGinnis (The Female of the Species)
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A cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience.
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Naomi Wolf
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I had just heard tales that the Valkyrie were large warriors, akin to Amazons.” β€œIf you’re the sole survivor of an army attacked by us, are you going to say we had our asses handed to us by petite, nubile females, or by she-monsters who can bench Buicks?
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Kresley Cole (No Rest for the Wicked (Immortals After Dark, #2))
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Of all the evils for which man has made himself responsible, none is so degrading, so shocking or so brutal as his abuse of the better half of humanity; the female sex.
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Mahatma Gandhi
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They say there is no light without dark, no good without evil, no male without female, no right without wrong. That nothing can exist if it's direct opposite does not also exist.
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Laurell K. Hamilton (Incubus Dreams (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, #12))
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Obviously, as an adult I realize this girl-on-girl sabotage is the third worst kind of female behavior, right behind saying "like" all the time and leaving your baby in a dumpster.
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Tina Fey (Bossypants)
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You are the most dangerous kind of female the world can ever know. You carry the seeds for your own destruction and the destruction of everyone who loves you. And a great many will love you for your beautiful face for your seductive body; but you will fail them all because you will believe they all fail you first. You are an idealist of the worst kind - the romantic idealist. Born to destroy and self destruct.
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V.C. Andrews (Fallen Hearts (Casteel, #3))
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Now, should we treat women as independent agents, responsible for themselves? Of course. But being responsible has nothing to do with being raped. Women don’t get raped because they were drinking or took drugs. Women do not get raped because they weren’t careful enough. Women get raped because someone raped them.
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Jessica Valenti (The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women)
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Never run from one such as me, female. You will no’ get away - and we like it.
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Kresley Cole (A Hunger Like No Other (Immortals After Dark, #1))
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Guns are our friends because in a country without guns, I'm what's known as "prey." All females are.
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Ann Coulter (If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans)
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The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says: "It's a girl.
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Shirley Chisholm
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For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.
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Rudyard Kipling
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According to Aristophanes in Plato's The Banquet, in the ancient world of legend there were three types of people. In ancient times people weren't simply male or female, but one of three types : male/male, male/female or female/female. In other words, each person was made out of the components of two people. Everyone was happy with this arrangment and never really gave it much thought. But then God took a knife and cut everyone in half, right down the middle. So after that the world was divided just into male and female, the upshot being that people spend their time running around trying to locate their missing half.
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Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)
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What's with the beard and the horse mane? You look like Rent-a-Villain." The volhv's eyes widened. He raised his hand at me. "Well you don't look... female... in your pants." "That's a hell of an insult. Did you think of it all by yourself or did you ask your god for help?
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Ilona Andrews (Magic Slays (Kate Daniels, #5))
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I disapprove of matrimony as a matter of principle.... Why should any independent, intelligent female choose to subject herself to the whims and tyrannies of a husband? I assure you, I have yet to meet a man as sensible as myself! (Amelia Peabody)
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Elizabeth Peters (Crocodile on the Sandbank (Amelia Peabody #1))
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Wolf, are you asking me to be ... your alpha female?" He hesitated. Scarlet couldn't help it - she burst into laughter. "Oh - I'm sorry. That was mean. I know I shouldn't tease you about this." Still grinning, she made to retract her hand, but he was suddenly gripping it, refusing to relinquish the touch. "You just look so scared, like I'm going to disappear any minute. We're stuck on a spaceship, Wolf. I'm not going anywhere." His lips twitched, his nervousness beginning to ease away, though his hand stayed tense over hers. "Alpha female," he murmured. "I sort of like that." Beaming, Scarlet gave a mild shrug. "It could grow on me.
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Marissa Meyer (Scarlet (The Lunar Chronicles, #2))
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Butch repositioned the Sox cap, and as his wrist passed by his nose, he got another whiff of himself. "Ah, V. . . listen, there is something a little weird going down on me." "What?" "I smell like men's cologne." "Good for you. Females dig that kind of thing." "Vishous, I smell like Obsession for Men, only I'm not WEARING any, you feel me?" There was silence on the line. Then, "Humans don't bond." "Oh, really. You want to tell that to my central nervous system and my sweat glands? They'd appreciate the news flash, I'm sure.
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J.R. Ward (Lover Revealed (Black Dagger Brotherhood, #4))
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We teach girls shame. β€œClose your legs. Cover yourself.” We make them feel as though being born female they’re already guilty of something. And so, girls grow up to be women who cannot say they have desire. They grow up to be women who silence themselves. They grow up to be women who cannot say what they truly think. And they grow up β€” and this is the worst thing we do to girls β€” they grow up to be women who have turned pretense into an art form.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (We Should All Be Feminists)
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So,’ she said cautiously, 'is all this your way of telling me you’re the villain?’ His chuckle was dark. 'I’m definitely not the hero.’ 'I already knew that,’ Tella said. 'It’s my story, so clearly I’m the hero.
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Stephanie Garber (Legendary (Caraval, #2))
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My first words, as I was being born [...] I looked up at my mother and said, 'that's the last time I'm going up one of those.
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Stephen Fry
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Butch: -I hear ya. No one's biz but yours. One question though Vishous: -What Butch: -When the females tie you down, do they paint your toe-nails and shit? Or just do your makeup? Wait... they tickle your pits with feather, right?
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J.R. Ward (Lover Revealed (Black Dagger Brotherhood, #4))
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the wounded child inside many males is a boy who, when he first spoke his truths, was silenced by paternal sadism, by a patriarchal world that did not want him to claim his true feelings. The wounded child inside many females is a girl who was taught from early childhood that she must become something other than herself, deny her true feelings, in order to attract and please others. When men and women punish each other for truth telling, we reinforce the notion that lies are better. To be loving we willingly hear the other’s truth, and most important, we affirm the value of truth telling. Lies may make people feel better, but they do not help them to know love.
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bell hooks (All About Love: New Visions)
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True best friends never fail on understanding, forgiving, and being there for one another no matter what situation that they might be in or having with one another because of the fact of that no matter if it’s two males or females love should always be there as if brothers or sisters if their what we call best friends.
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Jonathan Anthony Burkett (Friends 2 Lovers: The Unthinkable (Volume 1))
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...he had a way of taking your hand which made it clear he'd have to be the one to let go.
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Alice Hoffman (Local Girls)
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He sighs. "I miss the days when females could be ordered around and they'd have no choice." "Sure that wasn't just a myth? I'm pretty sure nobody ever ordered my mom around - ever." "You're probably right. The unruliness of the women in your family must go back for generations. You're like a plague upon the land.
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Susan Ee (World After (Penryn & the End of Days, #2))
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Being the only female in what was basically a boys’ club must have been difficult for her. Miraculously, she didn’t compensate by becoming hard or quarrelsome. She was still a girl, a slight lovely girl who lay in bed and ate chocolates, a girl whose hair smelled like hyacinth and whose scarves fluttered jauntily in the breeze. But strange and marvelous as she was, a wisp of silk in a forest of black wool, she was not the fragile creature one would have her seem.
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Donna Tartt (The Secret History)
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A woman is human. She is not better, wiser, stronger, more intelligent, more creative, or more responsible than a man. Likewise, she is never less. Equality is a given. A woman is human.
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Vera Nazarian (The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration)
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As my mother once said: The boys throw stones at the frogs in jest. But the frogs die in earnest.
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Joanna Russ (The Female Man)
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Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. From the moment I was conceived I was doomed to sprout breasts and ovaries rather than penis and scrotum; to have my whole circle of action, thought and feeling rigidly circumscribed by my inescapable feminity. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars--to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording--all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yet, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night...
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Sylvia Plath (The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath)
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It seems that the young woman made some indelicate suggestion of a threesome...When I got there, Miss Nash was standing by the hot tub in a small bikini, pointing the business end of a SIG-Sauer P-226 at her fella and concerned members of the hotel staff, while dunking the scantily clad female's head under the water and asking, "Who's diving for clams now, bitch?
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Ilona Andrews (Magic Bleeds (Kate Daniels, #4))
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I know what it's like when you can't get no one to listen to you. When what you say don't matter. I half think every girl knows what it's like to be silenced.
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A.C. Gaughen (Scarlet (Scarlet, #1))
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All children should be taught to unconditionally accept, approve, admire, appreciate, forgive, trust, and ultimately, love their own person.
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Asa Don Brown
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But where do you live mostly now?" With the lost boys." Who are they?" They are the children who fall out of their perambulators when the nurse is looking the other way. If they are not claimed in seven days they are sent far away to the Neverland to defray expanses. I'm captain." What fun it must be!" Yes," said cunning Peter, "but we are rather lonely. You see we have no female companionship." Are none of the others girls?" Oh no; girls, you know, are much too clever to fall out of their prams.
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J.M. Barrie (Peter Pan)
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A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another.... One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object -- and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.
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John Berger (Ways of Seeing)
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Because I wanted you." He turned from the window to face me. "More than I ever wanted anything in my life," he added softly. I continued staring at him, dumbstruck. Whatever I had been expecting, it wasn't this. Seeing my openmouthed expression, he continued lightly. "When I asked my da how ye knew which was the right woman, he told me when the time came, I'd have no doubt. And I didn't. When I woke in the dark under that tree on the road to Leoch, with you sitting on my chest, cursing me for bleeding to death, I said to myself, 'Jamie Fraser, for all ye canna see what she looks like, and for all she weighs as much as a good draft horse, this is the woman'" I started toward him, and he backed away, talking rapidly. "I said to myself, 'She's mended ye twice in as many hours, me lad; life amongst the MacKenzies being what it is, it might be as well to wed a woman as can stanch a wound and set broken bones.' And I said to myself, 'Jamie, lad, if her touch feels so bonny on your collarbone, imagine what it might feel like lower down...'" He dodged around a chair. "Of course, I thought it might ha' just been the effects of spending four months in a monastery, without benefit of female companionship, but then that ride through the dark together"--he paused to sigh theatrically, neatly evading my grab at his sleeve--"with that lovely broad arse wedged between my thighs"--he ducked a blow aimed at his left ear and sidestepped, getting a low table between us--"and that rock-solid head thumping me in the chest"--a small metal ornament bounced off his own head and went clanging to the floor--"I said to myself..." He was laughing so hard at this point that he had to gasp for breath between phrases. "Jamie...I said...for all she's a Sassenach bitch...with a tongue like an adder's ...with a bum like that...what does it matter if she's a f-face like a sh-sh-eep?" I tripped him neatly and landed on his stomach with both knees as he hit the floor with a crash that shook the house. "You mean to tell me that you married me out of love?" I demanded. He raised his eyebrows, struggling to draw in breath. "Have I not...just been...saying so?
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Diana Gabaldon (Outlander (Outlander, #1))
β€œ
There’s a Greek legendβ€”no, it’s in something Plato wroteβ€”about how true lovers are really two halves of the same person. It says that people wander around searching for their other half, and when they find him or her, they are finally whole and perfect. The thing that gets me is that the story says that originally all people were really pairs of people, joined back to back, and that some of the pairs were man and man, some woman and woman, and others man and woman. What happened was that all of these double people went to war with the gods, and the gods, to punish them, split them all in two. That’s why some lovers are heterosexual and some are homosexual, female and female, or male and male.
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Nancy Garden (Annie on My Mind)
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What is a Wanderess? Bound by no boundaries, contained by no countries, tamed by no time, she is the force of nature’s course.
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Roman Payne (The Wanderess)
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When men are oppressed, it's a tragedy. When women are oppressed, it's tradition.
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Letty Cottin Pogrebin (Deborah, Golda, and Me: Being Female and Jewish in America)
β€œ
The Black female is assaulted in her tender years by all those common forces of nature at the same time that she is caught in the tripartite crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogical hate and Black lack of power. The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerence. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.
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Maya Angelou (I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Maya Angelou's Autobiography, #1))
β€œ
You are so young, Lyra, too young to understand this, but I shall tell you anyway and you'll understand it later: men pass in front of our eyes like butterflies, creatures of a brief season. We love them; they are brave, proud, beautiful, clever; and they die almost at once. They die so soon that our hearts are continually racked with pain. We bear their children, who are witches if they are female, human if not; and then in the blink of an eye they are gone, felled, slain, lost. Our sons, too. When a little boy is growing, he thinks he is immortal. His mother knows he isn't. Each time becomes more painful, until finally your heart is broken. Perhaps that is when Yambe-Akka comes for you. She is older than the tundra. Perhaps, for her, witches' lives are as brief as men's are to us.
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Philip Pullman (The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, #1))
β€œ
I myself cried when I got angry, then became unable to explain why I was angry in the first place. Later I would discover this was endemic among female human beings. Anger is supposed to be "unfeminine" so we suppress it -until it overflows. I could see that not speaking up made my mother feel worse. This was my first hint of the truism that depression is anger turned inward; thus women are twice as likely to be depressed. My mother paid a high price for caring so much, yet being able to do so little about it. In this way, she led me toward am activist place where she herself could never go.
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Gloria Steinem (My Life on the Road)
β€œ
Visionary feminism is a wise and loving politics. It is rooted in the love of male and female being, refusing to privilege one over the other. The soul of feminist politics is the commitment to ending patriarchal domination of women and men, girls and boys. Love cannot exist in any relationship that is based on domination and coercion. Males cannot love themselves in patriarchal culture if their very self-definition relies on submission to patriarchal rules. When men embrace feminist thinking and practice, which emphasizes the value of mutual growth and self-actualization in all relationships, their emotional well-being will be enhanced. A genuine feminist politics always brings us from bondage to freedom, from lovelessness to loving.
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bell hooks
β€œ
Shit. . . this was a bad idea. A pure-blooded, bonded male vampire about to watch his shellan feed someone else. Holy hell, when the Scribe Virgin had suggested Beth come down, V had assumed it was for ceremonial purposes, not so she could be a vein. But what was the choice? Butch was going to suck Marissa dry and not have enough and there wasn't another female in the house who could do the job: Mary was still human and Bella was pregnant. Besides, like dealing with Rhage or Z would be any easier? For the beast, they'd need a tranq gun the size of a cannon and Z. . . well, shit.
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J.R. Ward (Lover Revealed (Black Dagger Brotherhood, #4))
β€œ
What's this about?" "Finally. Interest," was the only response. "If this is one of your tricks..." Like the time Torin had ordered hundreds of blow-up dolls and placed them throughout the fortress, all because Paris had foolishly complained about the lack of female companionship in town. The plastic "ladies" had stared our from every corner, their wide eyes and let-me-suck-you mouths taunting everyone who passed them. Things like that happened when Torin was bored.
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Gena Showalter (The Darkest Night (Lords of the Underworld, #1))
β€œ
It is obvious that many women have appropriated feminism to serve their own ends, especially those white women who have been at the forefront of the movement; but rather than resigning myself to this appropriation I choose to re-appropriate the term β€œfeminism,” to focus on the fact that to be β€œfeminist” in any authentic sense of the term is to want for all people, female and male, liberation from sexist role patterns, domination, and oppression.
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bell hooks (Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism)
β€œ
I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is so whatever the sex of the author may be. All novels are or should be written for both men and women to read, and I am at a loss to conceive how a man should permit himself to write anything that would be really disgraceful to a woman, or why a woman should be censured for writing anything that would be proper and becoming for a man.
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Anne BrontΓ« (The Tenant of Wildfell Hall)
β€œ
A consequence of female self-love is that the woman grows convinced of social worth. Her love for her body will be unqualified, which is the basis of female identification. If a woman loves her own body, she doesn't grudge what other women do with theirs; if she loves femaleness, she champions its rights. It's true what they say about women: Women are insatiable. We are greedy. Our appetites do need to be controlled if things are to stay in place. If the world were ours too, if we believed we could get away with it, we would ask for more love, more sex, more money, more commitment to children, more food, more care. These sexual, emotional, and physical demands would begin to extend to social demands: payment for care of the elderly, parental leave, childcare, etc. The force of female desire would be so great that society would truly have to reckon with what women want, in bed and in the world.
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Naomi Wolf (The Beauty Myth)
β€œ
You can love someone down to their core and they can love you right back just as hard, and if you traded diaries you’d learn things you never suspected. There’s a part of everyone deep down inside of them not meant for you. And the sooner you learn that, the easier your life is gonna be.
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Mindy McGinnis (The Female of the Species)
β€œ
To diminish the worth of women, men had to diminish the worth of the moon. They had to drive a wedge between human beings and the trees and the beasts and the waters, because trees and beasts and waters are as loyal to the moon as to the sun. They had to drive a wedge between thought and feeling...At first they used Apollo as the wedge, and the abstract logic of Apollo made a mighty wedge, indeed, but Apollo the artist maintained a love for women, not the open, unrestrained lust that Pan has, but a controlled longing that undermined the patriarchal ambition. When Christ came along, Christ, who slept with no female...Christ, who played no musical instrument, recited no poetry, and never kicked up his heels by moonlight, this Christ was the perfect wedge. Christianity is merely a system for turning priestesses into handmaidens, queens into concubines, and goddesses into muses.
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Tom Robbins (Jitterbug Perfume)
β€œ
My grandmother's greatest gift was tolerance. Now, in the old days, Indians used to be forgiving of any kind of eccentricity. In fact, weird people were often celebrated. Epileptics were often shamans because people just assumed that God gave seizure-visions to the lucky ones. Gay people were seen as magical too. I mean, like in many cultures, men were viewed as warriors and women were viewed as caregivers. But gay people, being both male and female, were seen as both warriors and caregivers. Gay people could do anything. They were like Swiss Army knives! My grandmother had no use for all the gay bashing and homophobia in the world, especially among other Indians. "Jeez," she said, Who cares if a man wants to marry another man? All I want to know is who's going to pick up all the dirty socks?
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Sherman Alexie (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian)
β€œ
The ultimate sexist put-down: the prick which lies down on the job. The ultimate weapon in the war between the sexes: the limp prick. The banner of the enemy's encampment: the prick at half-mast. The symbol of the apocalypse: the atomic warhead prick which self-destructs. That was the basic inequity which could never be righted: not that the male had a wonderful added attraction called a penis, but that the female had a wonderful all-weather cunt. Neither storm nor sleet nor dark of night could faze it. It was always there, always ready. Quite terrifying, when you think about it. No wonder men hated women. No wonder they invented the myth of female inadequacy.
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Erica Jong (Fear of Flying)
β€œ
Think of all the women you know who will not allow themselves to be seen without makeup. I often wonder how they feel about themselves at night when they are climbing into bed with intimate partners. Are they overwhelmed with secret shame that someone sees them as they really are? Or do they sleep with rage that who they really are can be celebrated or cared for only in secret?
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bell hooks (Communion: The Female Search for Love (Love Song to the Nation, 2))
β€œ
16 Things Romance Readers Are Tired Of Hearin 1. All Romance books are exactly the same. 2. The endings are so predictable. 3. You know romance doesn't happen like that in real life. 4. You're setting unrealistic expectations for yourself about love. 5. Real men don't have abs like that. 6.So you think you're going to go on a lot of dates? 7. So you think you're going to fall in love with an ex-boyfriend? 8. ...or a billionaire? 9. ...or a duke? 10. So you'll stop reading romances when you have a boyfriend, right? 11. It's basically mommy porn, right? 12. I could write a romance book. 13. Do you only read female authors? 14. I saw the Notebook once. 15. Is Danielle Steel your favorite author? 16. Do you read REAL books?
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Bookbub Bulletin
β€œ
These days, however, I am much calmer - since I realised that it’s technically impossible for a woman to argue against feminism. Without feminism, you wouldn’t be allowed to have a debate on women’s place in society. You’d be too busy giving birth on the kitchen floor - biting down on a wooden spoon, so as not to disturb the men’s card game - before going back to quick-liming the dunny. This is why those female columnists in the Daily Mail - giving daily wail against feminism - amuse me. They paid you Β£1,600 for that, dear, I think. And I bet it’s going in your bank account, and not your husband’s. The more women argue loudly, against feminism, the more they both prove it exists and that they enjoy its hard-won privileges.
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Caitlin Moran (How to Be a Woman)
β€œ
I have been to many religious services over the years. Each one I go to only reinforces my general impression that religions have much, much more in common than they like to admit. The beliefs are almost always the same; it's just that the histories are different. Everybody wants to believe in a higher power. Everybody wants to belong to something bigger than themselves, and everybody wants company in doing that. They want there to be a force of good on earth, and they want an incentive to be a part of that force. They want to be able to prove their belief and their belonging, through rituals and devotion. They want to touch the enormity. It's only in the finer points that it gets complicated and contentious, the inability to realize that no matter what our religion or gender or race or geographic background, we all have about 98 percent in common with each other. yes, the differences between male and female are biological, but if you look at the biology as a matter of percentage, there aren't a whole lot of things that are different. Race is different purely as a social construction, not as an inherent difference. And religion--whether you believe in God or Yahweh or Allah or something else, odds are that at heart you want the same things. For whatever reason, we like to focus on the 2 percent that's different, and most of the conflict in the world comes from that.
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David Levithan (Every Day (Every Day, #1))
β€œ
Tayla cursed under her breath. "I was just explaining to Eidolon that Sin is a Smurfette." Wraith swung his big body around to study Sin with blue eyes that were very different from Shade's, E's. and Lore's. Sin's, too. "Nah. Smurfette is way hotter." "What the fuck is a Smurfette?" Eidolon was seriously getting annoyed now. "There's this cartoon called The Smurfs," Tayla explained, slowly, as though Eidolon were the child here. "They're these little blue people, and they're all male. But one day a female shows up. She shouldn't exist, but she does." Eidolon considered that for a second. "How did she get there?" "An evil wizard named Gargamel made her," Tayla said. "In a lab or something." "So you're suggesting that an evil wizard made Sin?" "Of course not, silly. I'm just saying she's a Smurfette. A lone female amongst males." Eidolon frowned. "Did the Smurfette mate with the males?" "Dude." Wraith grimaced. "It's a cartoon.
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Larissa Ione (Ecstasy Unveiled (Demonica, #4))
β€œ
Perhaps it is no wonder that the women were first at the Cradle and last at the Cross. They had never known a man like this Man - there never has been such another. A prophet and teacher who never nagged at them, never flattered or coaxed or patronised; who never made arch jokes about them, never treated them either as "The women, God help us!" or "The ladies, God bless them!"; who rebuked without querulousness and praised without condescension; who took their questions and arguments seriously; who never mapped out their sphere for them, never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female; who had no axe to grind and no uneasy male dignity to defend; who took them as he found them and was completely unself-conscious. There is no act, no sermon, no parable in the whole Gospel that borrows its pungency from female perversity; nobody could possibly guess from the words and deeds of Jesus that there was anything "funny" about woman's nature.
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Dorothy L. Sayers (Are Women Human? Astute and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society)
β€œ
A slut is someone, usually a woman, who’s stepped outside of the very narrow lane that good girls are supposed to stay within. Sluts are loud. We’re messy. We don’t behave. In fact, the original definition of β€œslut” meant β€œuntidy woman.” But since we live in a world that relies on women to be tidy in all ways, to be quiet and obedient and agreeable and available (but never aggressive), those of us who color outside of the lines get called sluts. And that word is meant to keep us in line.
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Jaclyn Friedman
β€œ
if, in the beginning, there were so few people on the face of the earth, and now there are so many, where did all those new souls come from?" The answer is simple. In certain reincarnations, we divide into two. Our souls divide as do crystals and start, cells and plants." Our soul divides into two, and those souls are in turn transformed into two and so, within a few generations, we are scattered over a large part of the earth. We form part of what the Alchemists call the Anima Mundi, the sould of the world; the truth is that if the Anima Mundi were merely to keep dividing, it would keep growing, but it would also become gradually weaker. That is why, as well as dividing into two, we also find ourselves. And the process of finding ourselves is called love. Because when a sould divides, it always divides into a male part and a female part. In each life, we feel a mysterious boligation to find at least one of those soul mates. The greater love that seperated them feels pleased with the Love that brings them together again. But how will i know who my soul mate is? By taking risks. By rising failure, disappointment, disillusion, but never ceasing in your search for love. As long as you keep looking, you will triumph in the end.
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Paulo Coelho (Brida)
β€œ
Maybe I couldn’t make it. Maybe I don’t have a pretty smile, good teeth, nice tits, long legs, a cheeky arse, a sexy voice. Maybe I don’t know how to handle men and increase my market value, so that the rewards due to the feminine will accrue to me. Then again, maybe I’m sick of the masquerade. I’m sick of pretending eternal youth. I’m sick of belying my own intelligence, my own will, my own sex. I’m sick of peering at the world through false eyelashes, so everything I see is mixed with a shadow of bought hairs; I’m sick of weighting my head with a dead mane, unable to move my neck freely, terrified of rain, of wind, of dancing too vigorously in case I sweat into my lacquered curls. I’m sick of the Powder Room. I’m sick of pretending that some fatuous male’s self-important pronouncements are the objects of my undivided attention, I’m sick of going to films and plays when someone else wants to, and sick of having no opinions of my own about either. I’m sick of being a transvestite. I refuse to be a female impersonator. I am a woman, not a castrate.
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Germaine Greer (The Female Eunuch)
β€œ
Fireflies out on a warm summer's night, seeing the urgent, flashing, yellow-white phosphorescence below them, go crazy with desire; moths cast to the winds an enchantment potion that draws the opposite sex, wings beating hurriedly, from kilometers away; peacocks display a devastating corona of blue and green and the peahens are all aflutter; competing pollen grains extrude tiny tubes that race each other down the female flower's orifice to the waiting egg below; luminescent squid present rhapsodic light shows, altering the pattern, brightness and color radiated from their heads, tentacles, and eyeballs; a tapeworm diligently lays a hundred thousand fertilized eggs in a single day; a great whale rumbles through the ocean depths uttering plaintive cries that are understood hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, where another lonely behemoth is attentively listening; bacteria sidle up to one another and merge; cicadas chorus in a collective serenade of love; honeybee couples soar on matrimonial flights from which only one partner returns; male fish spray their spunk over a slimy clutch of eggs laid by God-knows-who; dogs, out cruising, sniff each other's nether parts, seeking erotic stimuli; flowers exude sultry perfumes and decorate their petals with garish ultraviolet advertisements for passing insects, birds, and bats; and men and women sing, dance, dress, adorn, paint, posture, self-mutilate, demand, coerce, dissemble, plead, succumb, and risk their lives. To say that love makes the world go around is to go too far. The Earth spins because it did so as it was formed and there has been nothing to stop it since. But the nearly maniacal devotion to sex and love by most of the plants, animals, and microbes with which we are familiar is a pervasive and striking aspect of life on Earth. It cries out for explanation. What is all this in aid of? What is the torrent of passion and obsession about? Why will organisms go without sleep, without food, gladly put themselves in mortal danger for sex? ... For more than half the history of life on Earth organisms seem to have done perfectly well without it. What good is sex?... Through 4 billion years of natural selection, instructions have been honed and fine-tuned...sequences of As, Cs, Gs, and Ts, manuals written out in the alphabet of life in competition with other similar manuals published by other firms. The organisms become the means through which the instructions flow and copy themselves, by which new instructions are tried out, on which selection operates. 'The hen,' said Samuel Butler, 'is the egg's way of making another egg.' It is on this level that we must understand what sex is for. ... The sockeye salmon exhaust themselves swimming up the mighty Columbia River to spawn, heroically hurdling cataracts, in a single-minded effort that works to propagate their DNA sequences into future generation. The moment their work is done, they fall to pieces. Scales flake off, fins drop, and soon--often within hours of spawning--they are dead and becoming distinctly aromatic. They've served their purpose. Nature is unsentimental. Death is built in.
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Carl Sagan (Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors: Earth Before Humans by ANN DRUYAN' 'CARL SAGAN (1992-05-03))