Vicious Women Quotes

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I already unleashed Baghra on Nikolai. He's going to think I stockpile vicious old women.
Leigh Bardugo (Ruin and Rising (The Shadow and Bone Trilogy, #3))
Tell me, Acheron, is there anyone you will ever trust enough to release your soul? (Artemis) You know better. You’ve tutored me too well on how vicious women are. On how much love ruins and destroys. Thank you for the lesson, Artemis. It was just what I needed. And I assure you, it’s one I’ll never forget. (Acheron)
Sherrilyn Kenyon (Acheron (Dark-Hunter, #14))
You’re seventeen! Why do I have to keep reminding you of that? There are soooo many women you haven’t even met yet! Don’t act like you’re tired of the puss-puss, no guy is ever tired of the puss-puss.
Sara Wolf (Lovely Vicious (Lovely Vicious, #1))
Then I gave up trying to please her and simply fucked her, ripping viciously. It was like murder. I didn't care; my cock had gone crazy.
Charles Bukowski (Women)
But us women, well, we like our egos stroked every once in a while and a boy mourning over us is a huge boost
J.L. Paul (Vicious Circles (Wrong Reasons, #2))
In much the same way, motherhood has become the essential female experience, valued above all others: giving life is where it's at. "Pro-maternity" propaganda has rarely been so extreme. They must be joking, the modern equivalent of the double constraint: "Have babies, it's wonderful, you'll feel more fulfilled and feminine than ever," but do it in a society in freefall in which waged work is a condition of social survival but guaranteed to no one, and especially not to women. Give birth in cities where accommodation is precarious, schools have surrendered the fight and children are subject to the most vicious mental assault through advertising, TV, internet, fizzy drink manufacturers and so on. Without children you will never be fulfilled as a woman, but bringing up kids in decent conditions is almost impossible.
Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
The volatile, abusive, and sometimes dangerous reactions that abusers can have when relationships draw to a close have often been considered, especially by psychologists, to be evidence of the man’s “fear of abandonment.” But women have fears of abandonment that are just as great as men’s, yet they rarely stalk or kill their partners after a breakup. Not only that, but many abusers are vicious to their ex-partners even when they do not desire a reunion or when they initiated the breakup themselves.
Lundy Bancroft (Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men)
I have known enough of women to understand they are as duplicitous and vicious as men. If they are capable of being our equals in malice, why not in our better qualities as well? There are no masculine virtues, Veronica. And none sacred to women either. We are all of us just people, and most badly flawed ones at that.
Deanna Raybourn (A Curious Beginning (Veronica Speedwell, #1))
Walk away from every vicious act. Never look back.
Lailah Gifty Akita (Think Great: Be Great! (Beautiful Quotes, #1))
All around us were people I had spent ten years avoiding--shapeless women in wool bathing suits, dull-eyed men with hairless legs and self-conscious laughs, all Americans, all fearsomely alike. These people should be kept at home, I thought; lock them in the basement of some goddamn Elks Club and keep them pacified with erotic movies; if they want a vacation, show them a foreign art film; and if they still aren't satisfied, send them into the wilderness and run them with vicious dogs.
Hunter S. Thompson (The Rum Diary)
Clearly it's not easy for women in modern society, no matter where they live. We still have to go the extra mile to prove that we are equal to men. we have to work longer hours and make more sacrifices. And we must emotionally protect ourselves from unfair, often vicious attacks made on us via the male members of our family.
Benazir Bhutto
I hate Christmas. Everything is designed for families, romance, warmth, emotion and presents, and if you have no boyfriend, no money, your mother is going out with a missing Portuguese criminal and your friends don't want to be your friend anymore, it makes you want to emigrate to a vicious Muslim regime, where at least all the women are treated like social outcasts. Anyway, I don't care. I am going to quietly read a book all weekend and listen to classical music.
Helen Fielding (Bridget Jones’s Diary (Bridget Jones, #1))
I have always tried to avoid talking to pretty girls, because pretty girls have a vicious effect on me in which every part of my brain is shut down except for the part that says unbelievably stupid things and the part that is aware that I am saying unbelievably stupid things.
David Foster Wallace
When my now-adult daughter was a child, another child once hit her on the head with a metal toy truck. I watched that same child, one year later, viciously push his younger sister backwards over a fragile glass-surfaced coffee table. His mother picked him up, immediately afterward (but not her frightened daughter), and told him in hushed tones not to do such things, while she patted him comfortingly in a manner clearly indicative of approval. She was out to produce a little God-Emperor of the Universe. That’s the unstated goal of many a mother, including many who consider themselves advocates for full gender equality. Such women will object vociferously to any command uttered by an adult male, but will trot off in seconds to make their progeny a peanut-butter sandwich if he demands it while immersed self-importantly in a video game. The future mates of such boys have every reason to hate their mothers-in-law. Respect for women? That’s for other boys, other men—not for their dear sons.
Jordan B. Peterson (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos)
Child, you do not know me. You have created a mythical being in my likeness whom you have set up as a god. It is not I. Many times, infant, I have told you that I am no hero, but I think you have not believed me. I tell you now that I am no fit mate for you...My reputation is damaged beyond repair, child. I come from vicious stock, and I have brought no honor to the name I bear. To no women have I been faithful; behind me lies scandal upon sordid scandal...You have seen perhaps the best of me; you have not seen the worst' 'Ah, Monseigneur, you need not have told me this! I know--I have always known, and still I love you. I do not want a boy. I only want Monseigneur.
Georgette Heyer (These Old Shades (Alastair-Audley, #1))
You can introduce him to Ana Kuya.” “I already unleashed Baghra on Nikolai. He’s going to think I stockpile vicious old women.
Leigh Bardugo (Ruin and Rising (The Shadow and Bone Trilogy, #3))
She was a woman still controlled by the traumas of her girlhood. It made more sense to put her three-year-old self in the dock. As Dr Byford explained, she was really the victim of a vicious, peculiarly female psycological disorder: she felt one thing and did another. She was a stranger to herself. And were they still like that, she wondered - these new girls, this new generation? Did they still feel one thing and do another? Did they still only want to be wanted? Were they still objects of desire instead of - as Howard might put it - desiring subjects? No, she could see no serious change. Still starving themselves, still reading women's magazines that explicitly hate women, still cutting themselves with little knives in places they think can't be seen, still faking their orgasms with men they dislike, still lying to everybody about everything.
Zadie Smith (On Beauty)
Well, but you affirm that virtue is only elicited by temptation; - and you think that a woman cannot be too little exposed to temptation, or too little acquainted with vice, or anything connected therewith – It must be, either, that you think she is essentially so vicious, or so feeble-minded that she cannot withstand temptation, - and though she may be pure and innocent as long as she is kept in ignorance and restraint, yet, being destitute of real virtue, to teach her how to sin is at once to make her a sinner...
Anne Brontë (The Tenant of Wildfell Hall)
This wasn’t what she expected. Never, in her wildest dreams. This... this was the Blood Queen of Garbhán Isle? Scourge of the Madron lands? Destroyer of Villages? Demon Killer of Women and Children? She who had blood pacts with the darkest of gods? This was Annwyl the Bloody? Talaith watched, fascinated, as Annwyl held onto Morfyd the Witch’s wrists. Morfyd — the Black Witch of Despair, Killer of the Innocent, Annihilator of Souls, and all around Mad Witch of Garbhán Isle or so she was called on the Madron lands — had actually tried to sneak up on Annwyl to put ointment on the nasty wound the queen had across her face. But as soon as the warrior saw her, she squealed and grabbed hold of her. Now Annwyl lay on her back, Morfyd over her, trying her best to get Annwyl to stop being a ten year old. “If you just let me—” “No! Get that centaur shit away from me, you demon bitch!” “Annwyl, I’m not letting you go home to my brother looking like that. You look horrific.” “He’ll have to love me in spite of it. Now get off!” ... “Ow!” “Crybaby.” No, this isn’t what Talaith expected. Annwyl the Blood Queen was supposed to be a vicious, uncaring warrior bent on revenge and power. She let her elite guard rape and and pillage wherever they went, and she used babies as target practice while their mothers watched in horror. That’s what she was supposed to be and that’s what Talaith expected to find. Instead, she found Annwyl. Just Annwyl. A warrior who spent most of her resting time reading or mooning over her consort. She was silly, charming, very funny, and fiercely protective of everyone. Her elite guard, all handpicked by Annwyl, were sweet, vicious fighters and blindingly loyal to their queen.
G.A. Aiken (About a Dragon (Dragon Kin, #2))
Women fascinate me. They are almost always underestimated, which makes them potentially some of the most lethal opponents.
Nikki St. Crowe (Their Vicious Darling (Vicious Lost Boys, #3))
...This is a place of learning where very few learn anything of value. That you, who have courage and intelligence, are held in contempt by most of your kind here because you have no sorcery... I have seen you protect others, though they consider you to be weaker than they. I have seen a very few decent people, like the boy we took from the tower. I have seen women trade pleasure for coin to feed their children, and others do the same so that they could ignore their children while making themselves foolish with wines and powders. I have seen men who labor as long as the sun is up go home to wives who hold them in contempt for never being there. I have seen men beat and use those whom they should protect, even their own children. I have seen your kind place others of their own in slavery. I have seen them fighting to be free of the same. I have seen men of the law betray it, men who hate the law be kind. I have seen gentle defenders, sadistic healers, creators of beauty scorned while craftsmen of destruction are worshiped. Your Kind, Aleran, are the most vicious and gentle, most savage and noble, most treacherous and loyal, most terrifying and fascinating creatures I have ever seen.
Jim Butcher (Academ's Fury (Codex Alera, #2))
Sylvia was an early literary manifestation of a young woman who takes endless selfies and posts them with vicious captions calling herself fat and ugly. She is at once her own documentarian and the reflexive voice that says she is unworthy of documentation. She sends her image into the world to be seen, discussed, and devoured, proclaiming that the ordinariness or ugliness of her existence does not remove her right to have it.
Alana Massey (All the Lives I Want: Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers)
I feel enormously blessed to be a successful black woman writer in this culture, but I have found my small fame, such as it is, to be very isolating... because I think that especially for black women, the more we rise from the bottom, the more we move and journey, the more we are the targets of the most brutal and vicious attacks.
bell hooks
By the following morning, Anthony was drunk. By afternoon, he was hungover. His head was pounding, his ears were ringing, and his brothers, who had been surprised to discover him in such a state at their club, were talking far too loudly. Anthony put his hands over his ears and groaned.Everyone was talking far too loudly. “Kate boot you out of the house?” Colin asked, grabbing a walnut from a large pewter dish in the middle their table and splitting it open with a viciously loud crack. Anthony lifted his head just far enough to glare at him. Benedict watched his brother with raised brows and the vaguest hint of a smirk. “She definitely booted him out,” he said to Colin. “Hand me one of those walnuts, will you?” Colin tossed one across the table. “Do you want the crackers as well?” Benedict shook his head and grinned as he held up a fat, leather-bound book. “Much more satisfying to smash them.” “Don’t,” Anthony bit out, his hand shooting out to grab the book, “even think about it.” “Ears a bit sensitive this afternoon, are they?” If Anthony had had a pistol, he would have shot them both, hang the noise. “If I might offer you a piece of advice?” Colin said, munching on his walnut. “You might not,” Anthony replied. He looked up. Colin was chewing with his mouth open. As this had been strictly forbidden while growing up in their household, Anthony could only deduce that Colin was displaying such poor manners only to make more noise. “Close your damned mouth,” he muttered. Colin swallowed, smacked his lips, and took a sip of his tea to wash it all down. “Whatever you did, apologize for it. I know you, and I’m getting to know Kate, and knowing what I know—” “What the hell is he talking about?” Anthony grumbled. “I think,” Benedict said, leaning back in his chair, “that he’s telling you you’re an ass.” “Just so!” Colin exclaimed. Anthony just shook his head wearily. “It’s more complicated than you think.” “It always is,” Benedict said, with sincerity so false it almost managed to sound sincere. “When you two idiots find women gullible enough to actually marry you,” Anthony snapped, “then you may presume to offer me advice. But until then ...shut up.” Colin looked at Benedict. “Think he’s angry?” Benedict quirked a brow. “That or drunk.” Colin shook his head. “No, not drunk. Not anymore, at least. He’s clearly hungover.” “Which would explain,” Benedict said with a philosophical nod, “why he’s so angry.” Anthony spread one hand over his face and pressed hard against his temples with his thumb and middle finger. “God above,” he muttered. ‘‘What would it take to get you two to leave me alone?” “Go home, Anthony,” Benedict said, his voice surprisingly gentle.
Julia Quinn (The Viscount Who Loved Me (Bridgertons, #2))
Susan had often been told that women should not show anger. She’d concluded early on that this meant she should not emulate Nathaniel, whose rare but spectacular rages were always short-lived, but rather Justin, who was coldly vicious and could hold a grudge forever.
K.J. Charles (Gilded Cage (Lilywhite Boys, #2))
Elle slammed the reindeer cookie cutter down and viciously yanked the extra dough from around it. Her mother, brother, and sisters all stopped to stare at her. “Whoa. Put the reindeer down gently and step away from Santa,
Kathleen Brooks (Chosen for Power (Women of Power, #1))
Dickward had the kind of smirk that would make women moan his name even when he was in another continent. He was happily married to Emilia LeBlanc-Spencer and strictly off the market. Shame they rocked the happily-in-love vibe.
L.J. Shen (Bane (Sinners of Saint, #4))
You're afraid of smart women, aren't you?' She had used this ploy before, having heard via the female bush telegraph that it was unanswerable. She was right though. I was leery of them. Art and Mike said taking an intellectual woman into your home was like taking in a baby raccoon. They were both amusing for a while but soon became randomly vicious and learned how to open the refrigerator.
Charles Portis (Gringos)
He was richer than God, married to one of the most beautiful women in our zip code and a doting father. He won the battle, the war and conquered every obstacle that had stood in his way. He had nothing to prove and reeked of contentment.
L.J. Shen (Bane (Sinners of Saint, #4))
“We are frequently referred to as the gentler sex. Foolish notion. Women are far more vicious than men. We are simply better at disguising it.” —The Dowager Marchioness of Wallingham to the Countess of Berne after a particularly spiteful Thursday luncheon.
Elisa Braden (The Madness of Viscount Atherbourne (Rescued from Ruin, #1))
Women fascinate me. They are almost always underestimated, which makes them potentially some of the most lethal opponents. Like walking up to a jungle cat thinking you’re going to give its head a gentle little pat and instead it bites off your whole goddamn arm.
Nikki St. Crowe (Their Vicious Darling (Vicious Lost Boys, #3))
There's no being out too late in Whileaway, or up too early, or in the wrong part of town, or unescorted. You cannot fall out of the kinship web and become sexual prey for strangers, for there is no prey and there are no strangers -- the web is world-wide. In all of Whileaway there is no one who can keep you from going where you please (though you may risk your life, if that sort of thing appeals to you), no one who will follow you and try to embarrass you by whispering obscenities in your ear, no one who will attempt to rape you, no one who will warn you of the dangers of the street, no one who will stand on street corners, hot-eyed and vicious, jingling loose change in his pants pocket, bitterly bitterly sure that you're a cheap floozy, hot and wild, who likes it, who can't say no, who's making a mint off it, who inspires him with nothing but disgust, and who wants to drive him crazy.
Joanna Russ (The Female Man)
Italian men understand and appreciate women of volatile temperament." "I hate you," she said again, unable to think of anything more vicious to say in the state she was in.
Lynne Graham (Angel of Darkness)
I have heard ballads of great battles, and poems about the beauty of a charge and the grace of a leader. But I did not know that war was nothing more than butchery, as savage and unskilled as sticking a pig in the throat and leaving it to bleed to make the meat tender. I did not know that the style and nobility of the jousting arena had nothing to do with this thrust and stab. Just like killing a screaming piglet for bacon after chasing it round the sty. And I did not know that war thrilled men so: they come home laughing like schoolboys after a prank; but they have blood on their hands and a smear of something on their cloaks and the smell of smoke in their hair and a terrible ugly excitement on their faces. I understand now why they break into convents, force women against their will, defy sanctuary to finish the killing chase. They arouse in themselves a wild vicious hunger more like animals than men. I did not know war was like this. I feel I have been a fool not to know, since I was raised in a kingdom at war and am the daughter of a man captured in battle, the widow of a night, the wife of a merciless solider. But I know now.
Philippa Gregory
Fear was like a vicious weed. Once it took root some part of it always lingered, even when it was pulled out again and again. It corrupted even the gentlest of hearts, turning them cold as stone and twice as hard.
Jillian Eaton (A Gentle Grace (Wedded Women Quartet, #4))
THERE ARE countless women in the world. At times it’s more than I can bear to think about: that there should be so many and they all start out the way they do, with all the brightness and their own invisible worlds and secret languages and what else they have, and that we ruin everything. And I have been mangled by vicious killers in my time, but I haven’t ever doubted it was only that someone had killed them first. Someone like me.
Nico Walker (Cherry)
Then they’re fools. Women are some of the most vicious fighters I’ve ever seen and can be just as capable as any man.” “Makes sense. In nature, the female is likely to be the meaner one of the species, especially when it comes to the young,” Shea said.
T.A. White (Pathfinder's Way (The Broken Lands, #1))
Men like to categorize women.” I curl my lip. “Into convenient little boxes like ‘hot’, or ‘cute’, or ‘beautiful’. It’s easy for them. It’s never been easy for me.”   “So this particular girl,” the man leads. “She’s none of those?”   “She’s all of those,” I say, a little too quickly for my own liking. “And more than those, and at the same time she’s none of those. She is exactly herself, no more and no less.
Sara Wolf (Savage Delight (Lovely Vicious, #2))
At the time, I thought the point was about representation: there should be more women chefs covered by the food media, just as there should be more people of color. But no, we’re talking about something much more vicious. It’s not just about the glass ceiling or equal opportunity. It’s about people being threatened, undermined, abused, and ashamed in the workplace. It’s embarrassing to admit how long it took me to grasp that.
David Chang (Eat a Peach)
The gods are being kind to me in my old age. Most beautiful women are either good, stupid or vicious. And you are the marvellous exception. Lovely as a goddess, clever as an Athenian and a bad hat like myself, yet one who still has decent feelings. I’m going to kiss the lips off you once we land in France.
Dennis Wheatley (Contraband (Gregory Sallust Book 1))
We claim we are not emotional, yet we are so sensitive that a vicious word from a cruel woman can leave the most manly of us impotent! A cutting statement can undermine the strength, vigor, and vitality of even the strongest of men. Most women greatly underestimate the power of their words to magnify or crush their husbands’ strength.
T.D. Jakes (T.D. Jakes Speaks to Men, 3-in-1)
In vain the young man gave him details of all his obscenities with his women, M. de Charlus was only struck by how little they amounted to. For that matter that was not only the result of insincerity, for nothing is more limited than vice. In that sense one can really use a common expression and say that one is always turning in the same vicious circle.
Marcel Proust (In Search of Lost Time [volumes 1 to 7])
Clearly Holt knows nothing about the might of women.
Nikki St. Crowe (Their Vicious Darling (Vicious Lost Boys, #3))
Holt is just one year younger than Giselle, but he thinks he’s the one in charge because he’s a man. Clearly Holt knows nothing about the might of women.
Nikki St. Crowe (Their Vicious Darling (Vicious Lost Boys, #3))
It felt as if her own body betrayed her. Her body wanted this vicious and cynical man so badly that it was willing to respond to his every need.
Tatiana Vedenska (Two Months and Three Days (Sinister Romance, #1))
When one looks at the horizon above any body of water for long enough, they often find self-reflection in the distance.
Kenton Geer (Vicious Cycle: Whiskey, Women, and Water)
My mother's advertising firm specialized in women's accessories. All day long, under the agitated and slightly vicious eye of Mathilde, she supervised photo shoots where crystal earrings glistened on drifts of fake holiday snow, and crocodile handbags-unattended, in the back seats of deserted limousines-glowed in coronas of celestial light. She was good at what she did; she preferred working behind the camera rather than in front of it; and I knew she got a kick out of seeing her work on subway posters and on billboards in Times Square. But despite the gloss and sparkle of the job (champagne breakfasts, gift bags from Bergdorf's) the hours were long and there was a hollowness at the heart of it that-I knew-made her sad.
Donna Tartt (The Goldfinch)
The people turn out to be—well, people; a collective noun for all those individual men and women, none of them perfect, some of them downright vicious, most of them monumentally stupid. As stupid as the emperor, the great hereditary lords, the priestly hierarchs, the General Staff and the Lords of the Admiralty, the merchant princes and the organised crime barons.
K.J. Parker (Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City (The Siege, #1))
Russia was a genuine great power, but with a tragic flaw. Its vicious, archaic autocracy had to be emasculated for any type of better system to emerge. Unmodern in principle, let alone in practice, the autocracy died a deserving death in the maelstrom of the Anglo-German antagonism, the bedlam of Serbian nationalism, the hemophilia bequeathed by Queen Victoria, the pathology of the Romanov court, the mismanagement by the Russian government of its wartime food supply, the determination of women and men marching for bread and justice, the mutiny of the capital garrison, and the defection of the Russian high command. But the Great War did not break a functioning autocratic system; the war smashed an already broken system wide open.
Stephen Kotkin (Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928)
We do not have to be forgiven by the men of God, she shouts, for protecting our children from the depraved actions of vicious men who are often the very same men we are meant to ask for forgiveness.
Miriam Toews (Women Talking)
You know about women who work in bars.” “What about them?” Bing asked. “Whores,” Manx said. “Almost all of them. At least until their looks go, and in the case of Lily Carter’s mother they’re going fast.
Joe Hill
The past twenty years was all about "being fierce". I think we're tired of that now. I think women everywhere are asking why we have to grow claws to share this planet. Why do we have to grow fangs to stay here? We're tired of the fierceness, the viciousness. We want to get back in touch with our tenderness, we want comfort, we want to embrace and to be embraced. And I'm here for it, I'm here for this, I am so ready.
C. JoyBell C.
For all that, I don’t think Gypsies ought to be likened to birds of ill-omen. They return evil for evil, and good for good. One hundredfold. Their powers seem to exceed them. I knew some in Spain who could read the stars; in Germany, who could heal burns; in the Camargue, who tended horses and could lessen the birthing pains of both women and beasts. There are some human beings who are not bound by human laws. The sad thing is perhaps they’re not all aware of it. Meanwhile, here’s an idea I volunteer: the day when the borders of Europe and elsewhere become, as they once were, open to the movement of nomadic tribes that some regard as ‘worrisome’, it would be interesting if researchers qualified in astronomy (yes, indeed), with calenders and terrestrial and celestial maps to hand, were to examine the routes travelled by wandering Gypsies. Maybe they’ll discover that these slow and apparently aimless journeys are related to cosmic forces. Like wars. And migrations. The Gypsies were persecuted, in France and elsewhere, with cyclical regularity in a vicious, inept and stupid manner. Almost as much as the Jews.
Jacques Yonnet (Paris Noir: The Secret History of a City)
Mother Nature had blessed her with the customary rear-end one expects of a Brazilian smokeshow. However, her chest was ornamented by a beautiful set of bolt-ons, arguably the only thing man has crafted better than the hand of God.
Kenton Geer (Vicious Cycle: Whiskey, Women, and Water)
For the longest time the romantic explanation for low rates of female infection endured: Possession of a womb, it was supposed, conferred a gentleness which simply could not bear the viciousness of a lycanthropic heart. Female werewolves, masculine idiocy maintained, must be killing themselves in crazy numbers...It's quite extraordinary, given the wealth of historical evidence to the contrary, how long this fallacy of the gentler sex lasted, but the twentieth century (years before Myra and the girls of Abu Ghraib put their two penn'orth in) pretty much did away with it. Now we know: If women don't catch the werewolf bug, it's certainly not because they're sugar and spice and all things nice.
Glen Duncan (The Last Werewolf (The Last Werewolf, #1))
Fire, fire! The branches crackle and the night wind of late autumn blows the flame of the bonfire back and forth. The compound is dark; I am alone at the bonfire, and I can bring it still some more carpenters' shavings. The compound here is a privileged one, so privileged that it is almost as if I were out in freedom -- this is an island of paradise; this is the Marfino "sharashka" -- a scientific institute staffed with prisoners -- in its most privileged period. No one is overseeing me, calling me to a cell, chasing me away from the bonfire, and even then it is chilly in the penetrating wind. But she -- who has already been standing in the wind for hours, her arms straight down, her head drooping, weeping, then growing numb and still. And then again she begs piteously "Citizen Chief! Please forgive me! I won't do it again." The wind carries her moan to me, just as if she were moaning next to my ear. The citizen chief at the gatehouse fires up his stove and does not answer. This was the gatehouse of the camp next door to us, from which workers came into our compound to lay water pipes and to repair the old ramshackle seminary building. Across from me, beyond the artfully intertwined, many-stranded barbed-wire barricade and two steps away from the gatehouse, beneath a bright lantern, stood the punished girl, head hanging, the wind tugging at her grey work skirt, her feet growing numb from the cold, a thin scarf over her head. It had been warm during the day, when they had been digging a ditch on our territory. And another girl, slipping down into a ravine, had crawled her way to the Vladykino Highway and escaped. The guard had bungled. And Moscow city buses ran right along the highway. When they caught on, it was too late to catch her. They raised the alarm. A mean, dark major arrived and shouted that if they failed to catch the girl, the entire camp would be deprived of visits and parcels for whole month, because of her escape. And the women brigadiers went into a rage, and they were all shouting, one of them in particular, who kept viciously rolling her eyes: "Oh, I hope they catch her, the bitch! I hope they take scissors and -- clip, clip, clip -- take off all her hair in front of the line-up!" But the girl who was now standing outside the gatehouse in the cold had sighed and said instead: "At least she can have a good time out in freedom for all of us!" The jailer had overheard what she said, and now she was being punished; everyone else had been taken off to the camp, but she had been set outside there to stand "at attention" in front of the gatehouse. This had been at 6 PM, and it was now 11 PM. She tried to shift from one foot to another, but the guard stuck out his head and shouted: "Stand at attention, whore, or else it will be worse for you!" And now she was not moving, only weeping: "Forgive me, Citizen Chief! Let me into the camp, I won't do it any more!" But even in the camp no one was about to say to her: "All right, idiot! Come on it!" The reason they were keeping her out there so long was that the next day was Sunday, and she would not be needed for work. Such a straw-blond, naive, uneducated slip of a girl! She had been imprisoned for some spool of thread. What a dangerous thought you expressed there, little sister! They want to teach you a lesson for the rest of your life! Fire, fire! We fought the war -- and we looked into the bonfires to see what kind of victory it would be. The wind wafted a glowing husk from the bonfire. To that flame and to you, girl, I promise: the whole wide world will read about you.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956 (Abridged))
Toxic Masculinity, Violence against Women and Children, Racism, are all pernicious diseases prevalent in our world. Along with pandemics, we need to get rid of these vicious negativities as well. We have to make this World change for the better.
Avijeet Das
In the beginning, I’d assumed I’d be able to count on females to fight battles with me. Because girl power! And solidarity. And a strong, mutual hatred of our periods. But it turned out women in the workplace could be just as vicious, if not more so, than men.
Rachel Higginson (The Difference Between Us (Opposites Attract #2))
But maybe it would have been better if I’d experienced this while I was still young,” Tokai said. “Then I would have developed love antibodies.” I didn’t think things were that simple. I knew a few people who, far from developing love antibodies, carried around a dormant but vicious disease.
Haruki Murakami (Men Without Women)
I am a scholar and a pupil who has been lulled to sleep by the meagre fire of a mind too humble. I have been too much burned, and my injured mind has accumulated too much passion; for tormenting itself with the defending of our sex, my mind sighs, conscious of its obligation. For all things — those deeply rooted inside us as well as those outside us — are being laid at the door of our sex. In addition, I, who have always held virtue in high esteem and considered private things as secondary importance, shall wear down and exhaust my pen writing against those men who are garrulous and puffed up with false pride. I shall not fail to obstruct tenaciously their treacherous snares. And I shall strive a war of vengeance against the notorious abuse of those who fill everything with noise, since armed with such abuse, certain insane and infamous men bark and bare their teeth in vicious wrath at the republic of women, so worthy of veneration.
Laura Cereta (Collected Letters of a Renaissance Feminist)
Fishermen don’t play to fold. They will always play the bluff no matter how hard things get. We throw the dice no matter how broke or how leveraged we may be. Like any true gambler, we know the dice will eventually get hot again if we throw them hard enough. It’s just a matter of surviving long enough to throw them enough times to find a winning streak
Kenton Geer (Vicious Cycle: Whiskey, Women, and Water)
Women are born with an inherent strength. One can observe this by how young girls always mature faster than the boys in the same age group. But, boys grow up to be men. And most men feel intimidated by the strength of women. Unfortunately, those types of men will try to break strong women. They view women's strength as intimidating. It's a vicious cycle.
Mitta Xinindlu
You can spend a lifetime at sea. Your present and past surround you as sure as the salt air. One does not stare out to the horizon and eventually not see themselves staring back. The farther we go out to sea, the deeper we go inside our mind. The spirit of the ocean is a living, breathing thing, as alive as any of the creatures who inhabit her waters above and below.
Kenton Geer (Vicious Cycle: Whiskey, Women, and Water)
Anna loves Ted, but she does not want him in a way that causes her to suffer; she does not want him desperately, despite herself. And it turns out that is how Ted has always wanted to be wanted: the way he has always wanted women. The way Anna wanted Marco, and he wanted Anna, and Rachel (or so it seems, in retrospect) wanted him. In the absence of this painful wanting, Ted has trouble getting hard.
Kristen Roupenian (You Know You Want This)
I had a lot of losing in my life lately, but this would be a loss that I just couldn’t bear. The world is full of women—I had a chance to survive that. But a fish of this caliber was truly something special. I have seen a lot of women in my life, and none of them have ever had me yelling at the top of my lungs in excitement at first glance. Wonder women are rare, wonder fish are twice as rare. This fact was not lost on me.
Kenton Geer (Vicious Cycle: Whiskey, Women, and Water)
What happened? Frask thought. Well, I spread vicious rumors about your mother, which culminated in her firing, which led directly to her state of penury, which led to an eventual return to Hastings, which led to your mother screaming at me in the women’s bathroom, which led to the discovery that we’d both been sexually assaulted, which led to our inability to get our PhDs, which led to unfulfilling careers in a company led by a handful of incompetent assholes
Bonnie Garmus (Lessons in Chemistry)
We got to the casino and ordered some drinks. We then walked around, drinking and losing. We had some drinks at the craps table and lost money there. We had some drinks at the slot machines and lost a little more over there. Our drinking and money lasted longer at the blackjack tables, but even there our drinks and winning streak dried up. The more we drank, the flirtier we became. Although I was hemorrhaging money like crazy, I was the luckiest guy in the casino.
Kenton Geer (Vicious Cycle: Whiskey, Women, and Water)
The sea may be your lover, but she is not your friend. You cannot safely turn your back to her. Her loyalty is that of an ex- wife, her characteristics more of a new mistress; she will bring you to your highest peaks, but beware for on the other side of the high ground lie valleys of unspeakable misery. Her mind games are second to none. She will lead you down darker alleys of your mind than you ever knew existed within. She will make you question all that you are.
Kenton Geer (Vicious Cycle: Whiskey, Women, and Water)
The more she sees him as the primary source of her good feelings, the more she will need him to be the center of her life. Remember, the misogynist's jealousy and possessiveness have already seriously limited her world, which further enhances his importance to her. It is a vicious cycle. The more dependent she becomes, the more important he becomes. The more important he is, the more she is willing to give up for him, so that there is less left in her life that is free of him.
Susan Forward (Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them: When Loving Hurts and You Don't Know Why)
I followed all the advice my mind could compute and digested it to the best of my ability. I’d run, work out, eat healthy, and then swallow a fifth of whiskey. The man cave below my home began to look like a recycling center for Crown Royal and Jack Daniels distilleries. I discovered that empty whiskey bottles made an eerily satisfying thud when stacked up like cordwood. The sturdy glass was much thicker and stronger than my own skin, and I admired their resilience to outside forces.
Kenton Geer (Vicious Cycle: Whiskey, Women, and Water)
And, even now, as he paced the streets, and listlessly looked round on the gradually increasing bustle and preparation for the day, everything appeared to yield him some new occasion for despondency. Last night, the sacrifice of a young, affectionate, and beautiful creature, to such a wretch, and in such a cause, had seemed a thing too monstrous to succeed; and the warmer he grew, the more confident he felt that some interposition must save her from his clutches. But now, when he thought how regularly things went on, from day to day, in the same unvarying round; how youth and beauty died, and ugly griping age lived tottering on; how crafty avarice grew rich, and manly honest hearts were poor and sad; how few they were who tenanted the stately houses, and how many of those who lay in noisome pens, or rose each day and laid them down each night, and lived and died, father and son, mother and child, race upon race, and generation upon generation, without a home to shelter them or the energies of one single man directed to their aid; how, in seeking, not a luxurious and splendid life, but the bare means of a most wretched and inadequate subsistence, there were women and children in that one town, divided into classes, numbered and estimated as regularly as the noble families and folks of great degree, and reared from infancy to drive most criminal and dreadful trades; how ignorance was punished and never taught; how jail-doors gaped, and gallows loomed, for thousands urged towards them by circumstances darkly curtaining their very cradles' heads, and but for which they might have earned their honest bread and lived in peace; how many died in soul, and had no chance of life; how many who could scarcely go astray, be they vicious as they would, turned haughtily from the crushed and stricken wretch who could scarce do otherwise, and who would have been a greater wonder had he or she done well, than even they had they done ill; how much injustice, misery, and wrong, there was, and yet how the world rolled on, from year to year, alike careless and indifferent, and no man seeking to remedy or redress it; when he thought of all this, and selected from the mass the one slight case on which his thoughts were bent, he felt, indeed, that there was little ground for hope, and little reason why it should not form an atom in the huge aggregate of distress and sorrow, and add one small and unimportant unit to swell the great amount.
Charles Dickens (Nicholas Nickleby)
Other victims of neurotic dependency are battered wives. The fact that they are so often financially dependent upon the men who beat them makes for a vicious kind of entrapment. It's emotional dependency, though that puts a double lock on the trap. "There's a kind of panic that many women have about being able to make it in any way other than being dependent on their husbands (...) They've been taught their whole lives that they can't. It's a conditioning process." In situations in which they have no effect on their environments, animals begin to give up. (...) the same thing happens to humans. Stay long enough in a situation in which you feel you have no control, and you will simply stop responding. It's called learned helplessness. (...) Having been "shaped" to believe there is nothing she can do about the situation, the battered wife goes on being battered.Only after she begins to disengage from her belief in her own helplessness can she break out of the vicious cycle of dependency and its brutal effect on her life.
Colette Dowling (The Cinderella Complex: Women's Hidden Fear of Independence)
Paint thinner is the boatyard’s morning dew. The stringent smell awakens the mind of a sailor as spring flowers awaken the mind of a poet. The boatyard, a reflection of your life, reminds us that the least desirable jobs often prove to be the most important and fulfilling. The harder the task, the more one feels rewarded when accomplishing it. Paint erratically splatters on skin in the same fashion that the stars come to fill up the night sky, the constellations on your forearms telling of the most recent project.
Kenton Geer (Vicious Cycle: Whiskey, Women, and Water)
Insisting that Jack the Ripper killed prostitutes also makes the story of a vicious series of murders slightly more palatable. Just as it did in the nineteenth century, the notion that the victims were “only prostitutes” perpetuates the belief that there are good women and bad women, madonnas and whores. It suggests that there is an acceptable standard of female behavior, and those who deviate from it are fit to be punished. Equally, it reasserts the double standard, exonerating men from wrongs committed against such women.
Hallie Rubenhold (The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper)
I am profoundly antifeminist, because it's a phony movement. To begin with, it's Marxist-Leninist in origin. It wants to have its cake and eat it too. It wants "independence" for women―government-funded independence, supported by taxes. Extorted from whom? From men, whose equals they claim to be. But men did not get established in this country with the help of the government. If women want to be equal―and of course, potentially they are―then they should achieve it on their own, and not as a vicious parasitical pressure group.
Ayn Rand (Ayn Rand Answers: The Best of Her Q & A)
Suggesting the standard high-carbohydrate diet purely to keep women out of ketosis results in hyperglycemia and the need for medication, usually insulin, which often results in excess weight gain. With weight gain comes a worsening of peripheral insulin resistance, which results in higher blood sugar and the need for ever increasing doses of insulin and medication. It’s a vicious cycle. Plus, the majority of macrosomic babies are born to mothers with excessive weight gain and prepregnancy obesity, not gestational diabetes.[148]
Lily Nichols (Real Food for Gestational Diabetes: An Effective Alternative to the Conventional Nutrition Approach)
You have to imagine what it was like to be on the receiving end of vicious antagonism: sneering, contempt, ridicule, slights about one’s intelligence, integrity and motives. In those days, women even ran the risk of dismissal for their opinions. And this treatment came from other women, as well as men. In fact, “in-fighting” between various schools of nurses who had some sort of training in midwifery was particularly nasty. One eminent lady – the matron of St Bartholomew’s Hospital – branded the aspiring midwives as “anachronisms, who would in the future be regarded as historical curiosities”. The medical opposition seems to have arisen mainly from the fact that “women are striving to interfere too much in every department of life”.* Obstetricians also doubted the female intellectual capacity to grasp the anatomy and physiology of childbirth, and suggested that they could not therefore be trained. But the root fear was – guess what? – you’ve got it, but no prizes for quickness: money. Most doctors charged a routine one guinea for a delivery. The word got around that trained midwives would undercut them by delivering babies for half a guinea! The knives were out.
Jennifer Worth (Call the Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times (The Midwife Trilogy #1))
And then what happened?" What happened? Frask thought. Well, I spread vicious rumors about your mother, which culminated in her firing, which led directly to her state of penury, which led to an eventual return to Hastings, which led to your mother screaming at me in the women's bathroom, which led to the discovery that we'd both been sexually assaulted, which led to our inability to get our PhDs, which led to unfulfilling careers in a company led by a handful of incompetent assholes. That's what happened. But instead she said, "Well, your mom decided it would be more fun to stay at home and have you.
Bonnie Garmus (Lessons in Chemistry)
Prepare a crust of crushed graham crackers mixed with four pats of margarine stolen from the dining hall. Bake it in a Tupperware bowl for about a minute in the microwave, and allow it to cool and harden. Take one full round of Laughing Cow cheese, smash with a fork, and mix with a cup of vanilla pudding until smooth. Gradually mix in one whole container of Cremora, even though it seems gross. Beat viciously until smooth. Add lemon juice from the squeeze bottle until the mixture starts to stiffen. Note: this will use most of the plastic lemon. Pour into the bowl atop the crust, and put on ice in your bunkie’s cleaning bucket to chill until ready to eat.
Piper Kerman (Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison)
Obama refused to say that white anger has distracted whites from solving real problems; that it has kept them from facing up to their own role in their own troubles. Obama dared not suggest that white anger leads some whites to scapegoat black folk, an easier choice than confronting corporate interests and the vicious practices of capital that undermine white people’s lives more than the paltry payoff of affirmative action to black folk and other minorities, including white women. Obama did not hint to white folk that their prejudice has cost them too, and contributes to their own suffering because it keeps them from forging ties to people of color and forming a coalition of conscience that might put an end to the economic bleeding they endure.   Role
Michael Eric Dyson (The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America)
Wealthy queers support initiatives that lock up and murder poor queers, trans* people, and sex workers. Women in positions of power continue to defend and sometimes initiate the vicious assault on abortion and reproductive rights, and then off-load reproductive labor onto the shoulders of care workers, who are predominantly women of color whose employment is often directly tied to their citizenship status. The politics of "leaning in" for a small layer of wealthy women has dovetailed with budget cuts and health care rollbacks that have left poor women at the mercy of misogynist, increasingly lethal anti-reproductive-rights legislation, and left poor, queer and trans* people without access to necessary medical resources like hormones or AIDS medication. Original pamphlet: Who is Oakland. April 2012. Quoted in: Dangerous Allies. Taking Sides.
Tipu's Tiger
Britain is a country that, since World War II, has been on a managed decline. The men live vicariously through their favorite soccer team, celebrating its success with “a few pints” and commiserating over its failings with “a few pints.” And the women—walking muffin tops. Yet they stride around with a terribly misplaced sense of entitlement. Even their TV shows are emblematic of their mediocre mentality. EastEnders and Coronation Street are all about fat, dumb, ugly, poor people. And there begins the vicious cycle of complacent underachievers. Maybe I’m biased because, despite being born in England, I grew up in the US. At least our equivalent TV shows are full of good-looking rich people doing big business deals and dating glamorous women. I wouldn’t mind my kids growing up wanting to be J. R. Ewing, but who the fuck wants to be a pub landlord in Essex?
John LeFevre (Straight to Hell: True Tales of Deviance, Debauchery, and Billion-Dollar Deals)
...the woman who is a "true woman"—frivolous, infantile, irresponsible, the woman subjugated to man. In both cases, the ruling caste bases its argument on the state of affairs it created itself. The familiar line from George Bernard Shaw sums it up: The white American relegates the black to the rank of shoe-shine boy, and then concludes that blacks are only good for shining shoes. The same vicious circle can be found in all analogous circumstances: when an individual or a group of individuals is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he or they *are* inferior. But the scope of the verb *to be* must be understood; bad faith means giving it a substantive value, when in fact it has the sense of the Hegelian dynamic: *to be* is to have become, to have been made as one manifests oneself. Yes, women in general *are* today inferior to men; that is their situation provides them with fewer possibilities: the question is whether this state of affairs must be perpetuated.
Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex)
It is sad to think that the love of a mother can possess villainous aspects. Little as was the space occupied by Cosette, it seemed to her as though it were taken from her own, and that that little child diminished the air which her daughters breathed. This woman, like many women of her sort, had a load of caresses and a burden of blows and injuries to dispense each day. If she had not had Cosette, it is certain that her daughters, idolized as they were, would have received the whole of it; but the stranger did them the service to divert the blows to herself. Her daughters received nothing but caresses. Cosette could not make a motion which did not draw down upon her head a heavy shower of violent blows and unmerited chastisement. The sweet, feeble being, who should not have understood anything of this world or of God, incessantly punished, scolded, ill-used, beaten, and seeing beside her two little creatures like herself, who lived 270 Les Miserables in a ray of dawn! Madame Thenardier was vicious with Cosette. Eponine and Azelma were vicious. Children at that age are o
Victor Hugo
A respectable old man gives the following sensible account of the method he pursued when educating his daughter. "I endeavoured to give both to her mind and body a degree of vigour, which is seldom found in the female sex. As soon as she was sufficiently advanced in strength to be capable of the lighter labours of husbandry and gardening, I employed her as my constant companion. Selene, for that was her name, soon acquired a dexterity in all these rustic employments which I considered with equal pleasure and admiration. If women are in general feeble both in body and mind, it arises less from nature than from education. We encourage a vicious indolence and inactivity, which we falsely call delicacy; instead of hardening their minds by the severer principles of reason and philosophy, we breed them to useless arts, which terminate in vanity and sensuality. In most of the countries which I had visited, they are taught nothing of an higher nature than a few modulations of the voice, or useless postures of the body; their time is consumed in sloth or trifles, and trifles become the only pursuits capable of interesting them. We seem to forget, that it is upon the qualities of the female sex, that our own domestic comforts and the education of our children must depend. And what are the comforts or the education which a race of beings corrupted from their infancy, and unacquainted with all the duties of life, are fitted to bestow? To touch a musical instrument with useless skill, to exhibit their natural or affected graces, to the eyes of indolent and debauched young men, who dissipate their husbands' patrimony in riotous and unnecessary expenses: these are the only arts cultivated by women in most of the polished nations I had seen. And the consequences are uniformly such as may be expected to proceed from such polluted sources, private misery, and public servitude.
Mary Wollstonecraft (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman)
But now, when he thought how regularly things went on, from day to day, in the same unvarying round; how youth and beauty died, and ugly griping age lived tottering on; how crafty avarice grew rich, and manly honest hearts were poor and sad; how few they were who tenanted the stately houses, and how many of those who lay in noisome pens, or rose each day and laid them down each night, and lived and died, father and son, mother and child, race upon race, and generation upon generation, without a home to shelter them or the energies of one single man directed to their aid; how, in seeking, not a luxurious and splendid life, but the bare means of a most wretched and inadequate subsistence, there were women and children in that one town, divided into classes, numbered and estimated as regularly as the noble families and folks of great degree, and reared from infancy to drive most criminal and dreadful trades; how ignorance was punished and never taught; how jail-doors gaped, and gallows loomed, for thousands urged towards them by circumstances darkly curtaining their very cradles’ heads, and but for which they might have earned their honest bread and lived in peace; how many died in soul, and had no chance of life; how many who could scarcely go astray, be they vicious as they would, turned haughtily from the crushed and stricken wretch who could scarce do otherwise, and who would have been a greater wonder had he or she done well, than even they had they done ill; how much injustice, misery, and wrong, there was, and yet how the world rolled on, from year to year, alike careless and indifferent, and no man seeking to remedy or redress it; when he thought of all this, and selected from the mass the one slight case on which his thoughts were bent, he felt, indeed, that there was little ground for hope, and little reason why it should not form an atom in the huge aggregate of distress and sorrow, and add one small and unimportant unit to swell the great amount.
Charles Dickens (Nicholas Nickleby)
In a typically vicious remark, Miloš Zeman, the Czech president, warned that the influx of refugees would deprive Europeans ‘of women’s beauty since they will be shrouded in burkas from head to toe, including the face’.
Patrick Kingsley (The New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis)
Judges give judgment according to their own advantage, doing manifest wrong to poor innocents to please others. Notaries alter sentences, and for money lose their deeds. Some make false monies; others counterfeit false weights. Some abuse their parents, yea corrupt their own sisters; others make long libels and pasquils, defaming men of good life, and extol such as are lewd and vicious. Some rob one, some another:{252} magistrates make laws against thieves, and are the veriest thieves themselves. Some kill themselves, others despair, not obtaining their desires. Some dance, sing, laugh, feast and banquet, whilst others sigh, languish, mourn and lament, having neither meat, drink, nor clothes.{253} Some prank up their bodies, and have their minds full of execrable vices. Some trot about{254} to bear false witness, and say anything for money; and though judges know of it, yet for a bribe they wink at it, and suffer false contracts to prevail against equity. Women are all day a dressing, to pleasure other men abroad, and go like sluts at home, not caring to please their own husbands whom they should. Seeing men are so fickle, so sottish, so intemperate, why should not I laugh at those to whom{255} folly seems wisdom, will not be cured, and perceive it not?
Robert Burton (The Anatomy of Melancholy (Complete))
popularised by Americans and Canadians, where ‘needle dancers’ could be found. ‘Vicious Drug Powder – Cocaine Driving Hundreds Mad – Women and Aliens Prey on Soldiers’; London was ‘In Grip Of The Drug Craze’ at ‘Secret “Coke” Parties of “Snow Snifters” ’. The police bore witness to the phenomenon, associating it with thieves, sodomites, ‘retailers of Malthusian appliances [i.e. contraceptives], quack medicines and that class of offensive literature’.
Philip Hoare (Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century)
Fear is a vicious circle that makes you fearful. This is a fake pursuit, a following after lies you’ve heard or told yourself and chosen to believe because they give you an excuse to do nothing, to live small, to stay hidden.
Elizabeth S. Eiler (Singing Woman: Voices of the Sacred Feminine)
My Fish Speakers are a temporary army in every sense. While they can be violent and vicious, women are profoundly different from men in their dedication to battle. The cradle of genesis ultimately predisposes them to behavior more protective of life. They have proved to be the best keepers of the Golden Path.
Frank Herbert
Some readers found my depiction of Lyndon Johnson the man as stunning. Johnson was a course, crude, loudmouthed bully with an insatiable appetite for cigarettes, alcohol, and women. Far from the civil rights-crusading statesman that the media likes to portray, Johnson was epically corrupt, greedy, vain, manipulative, ambitious, vindictive, and nasty. LBJ was a sadist who enjoyed the discomfort of the people who worked for him and reveled in being viciously abusive to his rabidly loyal staff. Richard
Roger Stone (The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ)
Strangling fear surged up his throat. Amy, skirts flying, blond hair a gleaming target, was running in a straight line for the wagons, Loretta right behind her. Between the opposing forces. The white, spying the women, had stopped shooting, but in his peripheral vision Hunter saw a brave aim his rifle. “Ka, no!” Hunter zigzagged his mount into the man’s line of fire. “No!” With a vicious kick, Hunter sent his black into a mighty forward lunge, gaining several yards on the advancing warriors, many of whom were from another band. They wouldn’t recognize Amy or Loretta. Unless Hunter could stop the shooting, his woman and her little sister would be killed. When he felt certain everyone in the formation could see him, he wheeled his horse to face them and lifted his rifle high overhead, signaling a cease-fire. Still trailing Amy, Loretta spotted Hunter the moment his horse drew out in front of the others. Heaving for air, she stumbled to a stop and glanced over her shoulder. Hunter, broad back to the wagons, sat tall on his stallion, waving his rifle above his head. As if in a dream, she whirled. The sight of Hunter making a target of himself would be painted in full color across the canvas of her mind for the rest of her life.
Catherine Anderson (Comanche Moon (Comanche, #1))
I know all women are supposed to be strong enough now to strangle presidents and patriarchies between their powerful thighs, but it doesn't work that way. Many of us were actually affected, by male systems and male anger, in ways we cannot always articulate or overcome. Sometimes, when the ceiling seems especially low and the past especially close, I think to myself, I did not make it out. I am still there in that place of diminishment, where that voice an octave deeper than mine is telling me what I am. Before I turned thirteen, I had never been part of that class that my father called empty-headed and addressed as "dollface," that our church seemed to see as just bodies. I was simply myself, unique and irreducible. Suddenly I became female, and it was as if a telescope I had been looking through - with a clear eye, up at an unbounded night of stars - had been viciously turned on me. I went to a pinpoint. Does God exist was never a question for me then; do I exist took up the whole of my mind. I did not make it out, but this does. Art goes outside, even if we don't; it fills the whole air, though we cannot raise our voices. This is the secret: when I encounter myself on the page, I am shocked at how forceful I seem. On the page I am strong, because that is where I put my strength. On the page I am everything that I am not, because that is where I put myself. I am no longer whispering through the small skirted shape of a keyhole: the door is knocked down and the roof is blown off and I am aimed once more at the entire wide night.
Patricia Lockwood (Priestdaddy)
After all, in their fears about the vicious consequences of wealth, writers fell back upon stereotypical images of devouring, unreasonable womanhood, images that were as old as Eve herself–something which suggests we might better view such accusations as testimony to the persistence of male anxieties, rather than a simple guide to female behaviour. 13
Amanda Vickery (The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England)
Words knit the skein between and among women. And the language of gesture and expression, all merging to fashion a tapestry that, as every woman understood, could tear in but one direction, by deliberate, vicious effort. A friendship among women knew but one enemy, and that was malice. Thus, the more words, the tighter the weave.
Steven Erikson (Midnight Tides (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #5))
I am not talking here about some lazy faith, where we resign ourselves to the tragic splittings in our lives with an upward turn of the hands or a vicious beating of our breasts. I am talking about believing that we have the power to actually transform our experience, change our lives, save our lives. Otherwise, why this book? It is the faith of activists I am talking about.
Cherríe L. Moraga (This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color)
As a sharp illustration of this, there was a very good article20 on the revcom.us site about this capitalist who had investments in Bangladesh but who wanted to be a socially-conscious capitalist. This article ran down all the ways in which he tried to do things differently, do them in a way that would not so viciously exploit the women working in the plants that he owned—not have them in such horrific conditions, give them more social benefits—and how he was forced to give that up by this very driving force of anarchy, by the competition from other capitalists doing things in more efficient, more ruthless ways. So even though he was a good-hearted capitalist—and that may sound like an oxymoron (a contradiction in terms), but he was actually a good-hearted capitalist—still, he couldn’t keep up his “kind capitalism” because of the basic dynamics of what drives capitalism.
Bob Avakian (THE NEW COMMUNISM: The science, the strategy, the leadership for an actual revolution, and a radically new society on the road to real emancipation)
As a society, we face a vicious tangle of income inequality exacerbated by unchecked bigotry that has been allowed to seep into every community.
Mikki Kendall (Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot)
Women fascinate me. They are almost always underestimated, which makes them potentially some of the most lethal opponents
Nikki St. Crowe (Their Vicious Darling (Vicious Lost Boys, #3))