“You crawled inside myribs to die. Giant becomes squirrelbecomes a dirt-wet girlfeverishly alive.”— Virginia Petrucci
“Wanderess, Wanderess, weave us a story of seduction and ruse. Heroic be the Wanderess, the world be her muse.”— Roman Payne
“There were many women in the Soviet scientific community, proportionately more so than in the United States. But they tended to occupy menial middle-level positions, and male Soviet scientists, like their American counterparts, were puzzled about a pretty woman with evident scientific competence who forcefully expressed her views.”— Carl Sagan
“She’s not sensual. She doesn’t want affairs. It’s just cold-blooded experiment on her part and the fun of stirring people up and setting them against each other. She dabbled in that too. She’s the sort of woman who’s never had a row with anyone in her life–but rows always happen where she is! She makes them happen. She’s kind of female Iago. She must have drama. But she doesn’t want to be involved herself. She’s always outside pulling strings–looking on–enjoying it!”— Agatha Christie
“You felt she’d done a thousand secret things to her eyes. They needed no haze of cigarette smoke to look at you out of sexy and fathomless, but carried their own along with them. New York must have been for her a city of smoke, its streets the courtyards of limbo, its bodies like wraiths. Smoke seemed to be in her voice, in her movements; making her all the more substantial, more there, as if words, glances, small lewdnesses could only become baffled and brought to rest like smoke in her long hair; remain there useless till she released them, accidentally and unknowingly, with a toss of her head.”— Thomas Pynchon
“The woman is not just a pleasure, nor even a problem. She is a meniscus that allows the absolute to have a shape, that lets him skate however briefly on the mystery, her presence luminous on the ordinary and the grand. Like the odor at night in Pittsburgh’s empty streets after summer rain on maples and sycamore.”— Jack Gilbert
“For my relationships with men to change, I needed to change my relationship to myself as a woman.”— Gloria Ng
“Oh, Al, shut up! Stop criticizing me! First I’m criticized for being a prude and sounding like a social worker or something, then I’m criticized for looking like a cheap broad. How am I supposed to live? Under the water or something, coming up only to say ‘I beg your pardon if I disturb you by coming up for air. I’ll do my best to remain submerged.”— Pamela Moore
“When women turn on women, and take cheap shots at their decisions purely to score political points it serves as proof that feminism, as a movement, is dead and no longer relevant or credible.”— S.E. Cupp
“Few female characters get to be “the Chosen One” in science fiction and fantasy. Leia is as much the child of Darth Vader as Luke is, but only Luke gets to use the force, be recruited by his dad and ultimately save the day. We don’t get impossibly clever female sleuths or the sexy spies with the awesome gadgets. And on the rare occasions that we do get those characters, they’re denigrated as unrealistic Mary Sues.”— Rhiannon Thomas
“Today, we live in a vastly different world. The person more qualified to lead is not the physically stronger person. It is the more intelligent, the more knowledgeable, the more creative, more innovative. And there are no hormones for those attributes. A man is as likely as a woman to be intelligent, innovative, creative. We have evolved. But our ideas of gender have not evolved very much.”— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
“I’m not the marrying kind -“St. Vincent snorted. “No man is. Marriage is a female invention.”— Lisa Kleypas
“The female is, as it were, a mutilated male, and the catamenia are semen, only not pure; for there is only one thing they have not in them, the principle of soul.”— Aristotle
“Getting married is easy, having sex is easier, but findings someone who can stimulate your mind and make love to your soul, that is rare.”— Habeeb Akande
“I have been envious of male characteristics, if not the men themselves. I’m jealous of the ease with which they seem to inhabit their professional pursuits: the lack of apologizing, of bending over backward to make sure the people around them are comfortable with what they’re trying to do. The fact that they are so often free of the people-pleasing instincts. I have watched men order at dinner, ask for shitty wine and extra bread with confidence I could never muster, and thought, what a treat that must be. But I also considered being female such a unique gift, such a sacred joy, in ways that run so deep I can’t articulate them. It’s a special kind of privilege to be born into the body you wanted, to embrace the essence of your gender even as you recognize what you are up against. Even as you seek to redefine it.”— Lena Dunham
“Women are females and men are males. According to gynaecologists, women menstruate every month or so, while men, being male, do not menstruate or suffer during the monthly period. A women, being female, is naturally subject to monthly bleeding. When a women does not menstruate, she is pregnant. If she is pregnant, she becomes, due to pregnancy, less active for about a year.”— Muammar Gaddafi
“A man’s plumbing is like his mind: simple, very few surprises. You ladies, on the other hand…well, God put a lot of thought in making you.”— Khaled Hosseini
“Women that can work a camera with ease often work men just as effortlessly for both require the same commitment to vanity and manipulation.”— Tiffany Madison
“No wonder male religious leaders so often say that humans were born in sin—because we were born to female creatures. Only by obeying the rules of the patriarchy can we be reborn through men. No wonder priests and ministers in skirts sprinkle imitation birth fluid over our heads, give us new names, and promise rebirth into everlasting life.”— Gloria Steinem
“How was she created? I’m not sure if you realize this, but it was in God’s image. How can anybody dare to speak ill of something which bears such a noble imprint?”— Christine de Pizan