“She liked money as well as most women, and accepted it with no little satisfaction.”
“All women are beautiful but beautiful women are rare.”
“Women love a man in uniform because it shows he has a job and will follow orders.”
“We forgot how to know when we learned how to please.”
“There is no sin in adding extra sheen to your everyday outfits. Be your own sunshine.”
“Be Audacious”
“It begins quietly in certain female children: the fear of death, taking as its form dedication to hunger, because a woman s body is a grave; it will accept anything.”
“Ships at a distance have every man s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the same horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men. Now, women forget all those things they don t want to remember, and remember everything they don t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.”
“That’s the glory of being a man. An ugly face isn’t the end of you.”
“We weren’t born distrusting and fearing ourselves. That was part of our taming. We were taught to believe that who we are in our natural state is bad and dangerous. They convinced us to be afraid of ourselves. So we do not honor our own bodies, curiosity, hunger, judgment, experience, or ambition. Instead, we lock away our true selves. Women who are best at this disappearing act earn the highest praise: She is so selfless. Can you imagine? The epitome of womanhood is to lose one’s self completely. That is the end goal of every patriarchal culture. Because a very effective way to control women is to convince women to control themselves.”
“We have a saying in my country that a beautiful woman deserves love. (...) Ugly women do not? asked the queen as if genuinely curious.”
“A woman who holds her head up too high, is trying to breathe from her own pollution.”
“It is convenient for the old men to blame Eve. To insist we are damned because a country girl talked to the snake one afternoon long ago. Children must starve in Somalia for that, and old women be abandoned in our greatest cities. It’s why we will finally be thrown into the lakes of molten lead. Because she was confused by happiness that first time anyone said she was beautiful. Nevertheless, she must be the issue, so people won’t notice that rocks and galaxies, mathematics and rust are also created in His image.”
“The one charm about the past is that it is the past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen. They always want a sixth act, and as soon as the interest of the play is entirely over, they propose to continue it. If they were allowed their own way, every comedy would have a tragic ending, and every tragedy would culminate in a farce. They are charmingly artificial, but they have no sense of art.”
“I ve spoken of the patient Peter who was obsessively forced to make conquests with women, to seduce and then to abandon them, until he was at last able to experience how he himself had repeatedly been abandoned by his mother.”
“She will outstrip all praise and make it halt behind her.”
“Women are wonderfully practical, murmured Lord Henry, much more practical than we are. In situations of that kind we often forget to say anything about marriage, and they always remind us.”