Nancy Friday Quotes

The debt of gratitude we owe our mother and father goes forward, not backward. What we owe our parents is the bill presented to us by our children.

When I stopped seeing my mother through the eyes of a child, I saw the woman who helped me give birth to myself.

A woman cannot give a man his sense of maleness. He can desire her, but not identify with her. At best, she can give him a negative identification: I am the opposite of her. This can be very thrilling, but still leaves him deprived of an object of positive identification. (..) other men are brought in to fill the void. They provide contact with an element the inventor, consciously or not, knows he needs to assert himself as fully male. (..) By joining in their sexual games, the woman grants absolution and permission. It isn't so much that these men use women to get to other men as that they need the woman to help break through the guilt barrier that blocks them from their feelings about other men.

To say something nice about yourself, this is the hardest thing in the world for people to do. They'd rather take their clothes off.

Who said "ladies" don't use words like "fuck" and "cunt," or that one doesn't use them around "ladies"? Maybe not when you're having lunch with a lady, but when a lady's fucking, she's not having lunch.

Dreams are the expression of the unconscious while we are asleep.

I like the company of men. I've never been welcome in those groups, but then I would no more go to a consciousness-raising group and talk about my intimate life with my husband than fly to the moon. I never understood all that.

The older I get the more of my mother I see in myself.

It's Friday; you ain't got no job ... you ain't got shit to do

Separation is not the end of love; it creates love.

To say something nice about themselves, this is the hardest thing in the world for people to do.

I'm sure it's why I'm such an odd duck in my feminist generation, because I've always been equally fair to men.

After sex, men fear too much intimacy; they want to separate again. Women want to talk, to continue the merging, melting fusion into one. Postcoital conversations keep the woman's power alive. Through unconscious severance, by falling asleep, the man regains his self.

When is enough enough? In envy's eyes, enough never is. Somebody else always has something we want.

All my writing has been an effort to sort out the paradoxes of my life.

Do women dress for men or women? I've always wondered why that eternally provocative question is put in terms of approval - as if the heart of the matter, the answer, were indeed a question of approval by either sex. But the question is never satisfactorily answered because it is incorrectly posed. It's disapproval, the fear of it, that motivates most women, and with disapproval it doesn't matter where it comes from.

Women's behavior in handling beauty, even before feminism, was to deny they had any. Don't hate me because I'm beautiful.

If women really want equality, we have to wipe the slate clean. It no longer matters in the largest sense what men did to us for the last 200 or 300 years.

Inside every adult male is a denied little boy.

Because society would rather we always wore a pretty face, women have been trained to cut off anger.

Fantasy isn't something you run out of.

No man can be really free in bed with a woman who is not.