That One Female Friend Quotes

'This girl is fucking crazy. I like her,' Andre chuckles.
'I hate to break it to ya, dude, but I hear you're queer,' Max whispers with apparent regret. 'But I'd totally blow you in the bathroom if you're into it. Got a thing for black dudes. Huge penises.'
'Max!' Brayden gasps, then starts laughing his ass off. 'Holy shit!'
Andre laughs with him and Jenner smiles. Wrapping an arm around Max companionably, Andre draws her to his side.
'See?' Max says to them. 'Works every time. Honesty. God bless it.' ~ Lynn Kelling

If any of us had heard the word "feminist" we would have thought it meant a girl who wore too much makeup, but we were, without knowing it, feminists ourselves, bound together by the freemasonry that exists among intelligent women who know they are intelligent. It is the only kind of female bonding that works, which is why most men do not like intelligent women. They don't mind one female brain if they can enjoy it privately; it's the idea of two or more on the loose that upsets them. The girls in the college-bound group might not have been friends in every case
Sharon Cohen and I gave each other willies
but our instincts told us that we had the same enemies. ~ Florence King

From the Old Testament, containing the Atlantean Mystery teaching, we learn that mankind was created male-female, bi-sexual, and that each one was capable of propagating his species without the co-operation of another, as is the case with some plants today. ~ Max Heindel

Finally we touch that Great Fact, which Goethe incorporated into his final words: the 'ever-womanly.' It is a sin against Goethe to say that here he means the female sex. He refers to that profundity signifying the human soul as related to the mystery of the world; that which deeply yearns as the eternal in man, the ever-womanly which draws the soul to the eternally immortal, the eternal wisdom, and which gives itself to the 'eternal masculine.' The ever-womanly draws us towards the ever-masculine. It has nothing to do with something feminine in the ordinary sense. Therefore can we truly seek this ever-womanly in man and woman: the ever-womanly which aspires to the union with the ever-manly in the cosmos, to become one with the Divine-Spiritual that inter-penetrates and permeates the world towards which Faust strives. This mystery of man of all ages pursued by Faust from the beginning, this secret to which Spiritual Science is to lead us in a modern sense, is expressed by Goethe paradigmatically and monumentally in those five words at the conclusion of the second part of Faust represented as a mystic Spirit Choir; that everything physical surrounding us in the sense world is Maya, illusion; a symbol only of the spiritual. But this spiritual we can perceive if we penetrate that which covers it like a veil. And in it we see attained what on earth was impossible of attainment. We see that, which for ordinary intellect is indescribable, transformed into action as soon as the huma ~ Rudolf Steiner

One of the best things that ever happened to me was Rocky Horror being a total flop in New York as a play. I mean, it was a disaster, and it was the night of the long knives as far as the critics were concerned. ~ Tim Curry

We can readily see the function of nature, how it reconciles discordant things in such a fashion that it reduces all the differences to unity and combines them into one body and one substance: and also it combines them in plants and in seeds, and by the joining of male and female engenders beings according to the natural course.' - Fioretto della Bibbia ~ Carlo Ginzburg

If a man we don't know phones us up one day and talks a little, makes no suggestions, says nothing special, but nevertheless pays us the kind of attention we rarely receive, we're quite capable of going to bed with him that night, feeling relatively in love. That's what we women are like, and there's nothing wrong with that - it's the nature of the female to open herself to love easily. ~ Paulo Coelho

She [Bernice] didn't like anything that had an adult theme, with only one exception, her collection of erotic female memorabilia. They were all antiques, fragments of other women's sexuality that was somehow easier to deal with than her own. ~ K. Ford K.

I did not find that writing a diary with a lead male character differed in any essential way from writing one with a female character. They all had the same challenges in terms of attempting to establish an identity, coping with loneliness, friendships, relationships. ~ Kathryn Lasky

There had been no crises of incident, or marked movements of experience such as in Felipe's imaginations of love were essential to the fulness of its growth. This is a common mistake on the part of those who have never felt love's true bonds. Once in those chains, one perceives that they are not of the sort full forged in a day. They are made as the great iron cables are made, on which bridges are swung across the widest water-channels,
not of single huge rods, or bars, which would be stronger, perhaps, to look at; but myriads of the finest wires, each one by itself so fine, so frail, it would barely hold a child's kite in the wind: by hundreds, hundreds of thousands of such, twisted, re-twisted together, are made the mighty cables, which do not any more swerve from their place in the air, under the weight and jar of the ceaseless traffic and tread of two cities, than the solid earth swerves under the same ceaseless weight and jar. Such cables do not break. ~ Helen Hunt Jackson

Feminist "theory," as it is grandiloquently called, is simply whatever the women in the movement come up with in post facto justification of their attitudes and emotions. A heavy focus on feminist doctrine seems to me symptomatic of the rationalist fallacy: the assumption that people are motivated primarily by beliefs. If they were, the best way to combat an armed doctrine would indeed be to demonstrate that its beliefs are false. (…) A feminist in the strict and proper sense may be defined as a woman who envies the male role.

By the male role I mean, in the first place, providing, protecting, and guiding rather than nurturing and assisting. This in turn envolves relative independence, action, and competition in the larger impersonal society outside the family, the use of language for communication and analysis (rather than expressiveness or emotional manipulation), and deliberate behavior aiming at objective achievement (rather than the attainment of pleasant subjective states) and guided by practical reasoning (rather than emotional impulse).

Both feminist and nonfeminist women sense that these characteristically male attributes have a natural primacy over their own. I prefer to speak of"primacy" rather than superiority in this context since both sets of traits are necessary to propagate the race. One sign of male primacy is that envy of the female role by men is virtually nonexistent - even, so far as I know, among homosexuals. Normal women are att ~ F. Roger Devlin

It was not long after that Ganesh saw a big new notice in the shop, painted on cardboard.
'Is Leela self who write that,' Ramlogan said. 'I didn't ask she to write it, mind you. She just sit down quiet quiet one morning after tea and write it off.'
It read:

NOTICE
NOTICE, IS. HEREBY; PROVIDED: THAT, SEATS!
ARE, PROVIDED. FOR; FEMALE: SHOP, ASSISTANTS!

Ganesh said, 'Leela know a lot of punctuation marks.'
That is it, sahib. All day the girl just sitting down and talking about these puncturation marks. She is like that, sahib. ~ V.S. Naipaul

If one starts with the anatomical difference, which even a patriarchal Viennese novelist was able to see was destiny, then one begins to understand why men and women don't get on very well within marriage, or indeed in any exclusive sort of long-range sexual relationship. He is designed to make as many babies as possible with as many different women as he can get his hands on, while she is designed to take time off from her busy schedule as astronaut or role model to lay an egg and bring up the result. Male and female are on different sexual tracks, and that cannot be changed by the Book or any book. Since all our natural instincts are carefully perverted from birth, it is no wonder that we tend to be, if not all of us serial killers, killers of our own true nature. ~ Gore Vidal

Woman's fear of the female Self, of the experience of the numinous archetypal Feminine, becomes comprehensible when we get a glimpse - or even only a hint – of the profound otherness of female selfhood as contrasted to male selfhood. Precisely that element which, in his fear of the Feminine, the male experiences as the hole, abyss, void, and nothingness turns into something positive for the woman without, however, losing these same characteristics. Here the archetypal Feminine is experienced not as illusion and as maya but rather as unfathomable reality and as life in which above and below, spiritual and physical, are not pitted against each other; reality as eternity is creative and, at the same time, is grounded in primeval nothingness. Hence as daughter the woman experiences herself as belonging to the female spiritual figure Sophia, the highest wisdom, while at the same time she is actualizing her connection with the musty, sultry, bloody depths of swamp-mother Earth. However, in this sort of Self-discovery woman necessarily comes to see herself as different from what presents itself to men -as, for example, spirit and father, but often also as the patriarchal godhead and his ethics. The basic phenomenon - that the human being is born of woman and reared by her during the crucial developmental phases - is expressed in woman as a sense of connectedness with all living things, a sense not yet sufficiently realized, and one that men, and especially the patriarchal male, abso ~ Erich Neumann

But I can cite ten other reasons for not being a father."
"First of all, I don't like motherhood," said Jakub, and he broke off pensively. "Our century has already unmasked all myths. Childhood has long ceased to be an age of innocence. Freud discovered infant sexuality and told us all about Oedipus. Only Jocasta remains untouchable; no one dares tear off her veil. Motherhood is the last and greatest taboo, the one that harbors the most grievous curse. There is no stronger bond than the one that shackles mother to child. This bond cripples the child's soul forever and prepares for the mother, when her son has grown up, the most cruel of all the griefs of love. I say that motherhood is a curse, and I refuse to contribute to it."
"Another reason I don't want to add to the number of mothers," said Jakub with some embarrassment, "is that I love the female body, and I am disgusted by the thought of my beloved's breast becoming a milk-bag."
"The doctor here will certainly confirm that physicians and nurses treat women hospitalized after an aborted pregnancy more harshly than those who have given birth, and show some contempt toward them even though they themselves will, at least once in their lives, need a similar operation. But for them it's a reflex stronger than any kind of thought, because the cult of procreation is an imperative of nature. That's why it's useless to look for the slightest rational argument in natalist propaganda. Do you perhaps think it's the vo ~ Milan Kundera

And what about ageing? Do men force the fear of ageing upon us
or are we ourselves terrified because we only know one kind of power
the power of youthful beauty?
Isn't it possible that if we became comfortable with other forms of female power, men might too? In her wonderful futurist novel, He, She, and It, Marge Piercy imagines a cyborg who is taught to love the bodies of older women. A delicious proposal
because it tells that whatever we may imagine can come true. Women often hate their own bodies. Sometimes I think that the most important things about having at least one relationship with someone of your own gender
especially if you are a woman
is to confront the female self-hatred and turn it into self-love. ~ Erica Jong

...While many who have debated the image of female sexuality have put "explicit" and "self-objectifying" on one side and "respectable" and "covered-up" on the other, I find this a flawed means of categorization. [...] There is a creative possibility for liberatory explicitness because it may expand the confines of what women are allowed to say and do. We just need to refer to the history of blues music - one full of raunchy, irreverent, and transgressive women artists - for examples. Yet the overwhelming prevalence of the Madonna/whore dichotomy in American culture means that any woman who uses explicit language or images in her creative expression is in danger of being symbolically cast into the role of whore regardless of what liberatory intentions she may have. ~ Imani Perry

The first day after the merger, Brad got a call from a worried female employee, who whispered, "There is a guy in here with suspenders walking around with a baseball bat in his hands, taking swings." That turned out to be Carlin's CEO, Jeremy Frommer, who, whatever else he was, was not RBC nice. One of Frommer's signature poses was feet up on his desk, baseball bat swinging wildly over his head while some poor shoeshine guy tried to polish his shoes. ~ Michael Lewis

Each woman was valued at 150 pounds of tobacco, which was the same price exacted from Jane Dickenson when she eventually purchased her freedom. Not surprisingly, then, with their value calculated in tobacco, women in Virginia were treated as fertile commodities. They came with testimonials to their moral character, impressing on "industrious Planters" that they were not being sold a bad bill of goods. One particular planter wrote that an earlier shipment of females was "corrupt," and he expected a new crop that was guaranteed healthy and favorably disposed for breeding. Accompanying the female cargo were some two hundred head of cattle, a reminder that the Virginia husbandman needed both species of breeding stock to recover his English roots.37 Despite ~ Nancy Isenberg

When the two become the one
And the inside outside, the outside in
So that the male be not male nor the female female
Then will you see me. ~ Wesley Stace

How can so many (white, male) writers narratively justify restricting the agency of their female characters on the grounds of sexism = authenticity while simultaneously writing male characters with conveniently modern values?

The habit of authors writing Sexism Without Sexists in genre novels is seemingly pathological. Women are stuffed in the fridge under cover of "authenticity" by secondary characters and villains because too many authors flinch from the "authenticity" of sexist male protagonists. Which means the yardstick for "authenticity" in such novels almost always ends up being "how much do the women suffer", instead of - as might also be the case - "how sexist are the heroes".

And this bugs me; because if authors can stretch their imaginations far enough to envisage the presence of modern-minded men in the fake Middle Ages, then why can't they stretch them that little bit further to put in modern-minded women, or modern-minded social values? It strikes me as being extremely convenient that the one universally permitted exception to this species of "authenticity" is one that makes the male heroes look noble while still mandating that the women be downtrodden and in need of rescuing.

-Comment at Staffer's Book Review 4/18/2012 to "Michael J. Sullivan on Character Agency ~ Foz Meadows

Look,Freddy Krueger, if I thought there was a chance in a gazillion that Alex would even feature you in a nightmare, I might not be saying this so nicely. But I feel sorry for you, so I'm going to give you a tip." The p was sharp,harsh. She leaned in,close enough that I could see the pale,shimmery lipstick caked in the corners of her mouth. "This thing you have for him just makes you look like the world's most pitiful loser. Did you really think you had even the smallest chance with him? Did you?"
I didn't answer.Maybe a no would have satisfied her. Maybe not.
"You are a skank and a freak," she snapped, the hard sounds making me flinch. "You don't belong here. Go back to your greaseball 'hood. The sight of you makes me sick!"
Any girl who has ever been face-to-face with another angry girl, especially one with infinitely more spite and social standing knows to run.It's innate, from bunnies to baboons. Don't mess with the alpha female. She'll tear your throat out. So I ran,but not before I got a glimpse of Anna's face.
In the second before she turned away, she looked like someone had slapped her. Funny, seeing that didn't make me feel any better. ~ Melissa Jensen

In eighteenth-century Britain, many female friends enjoyed intense relationships, which they celebrated in romantic terms. Some probably compensated for stiff and formal relations with parents by forging close bonds with same-sex friends. In one case, Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby ran away from their families in Ireland to set up home together in Wales, where they would live in mutual harmony for more than fifty years. Known as the Ladies of Llangollen, they attracted visitors from far and wide who venerated their romantic story with never a hint that the friendship might be anything other than platonic ~ Wendy Moore

I deny that this happened. First, it is impossible for one animal to make love to another if the female does not have a vagina that matches the male's genitals. It is not possible for a dog and a monkey or a wolf and a hyena to mate with each other. Even an antelope cannot mate with a deer, for they are of different species. Even if they did mate with each other, it is not possible for them to produce young. I do not think a bull had intercourse with a wooden cow in the first place, for all four-legged animals smell the genitals of the animal before mating with it and only then mount it. And the woman could not have endured a bull mounting her. A woman could also not carry a fetus with horns. ~ Stephen M. Trzaskoma

One doesn't have to be fond of a person to make use of them." "That explains what the patron gets out of it, but not what the ingenii gets for betraying their own kind." Isabel taps her outsized, ragged-glass thumbnail against the table. "Ladies write editorials declaring they don't wish for the vote," she says, with something hovering between exaggerated patience and quite the reverse. "Mill-hands testify in courts of law that if they are forced to work in conditions of greater safety their children will starve. People do things that run counter to their own interests all the time. Why would ingenii be any different?" "Isabel, I'm sorry, but I cannot think about female suffrage or the rights of mill-hands just this instant," I say, and rest my forehead on my palm. ~ Ankaret Wells

I'm sorry, I don't understand. Could you tell me more about this 'profanity'?"
Mrs. Miller nodded at my dictionary. "I'll assume you don't need a definition. Perhaps you'd prefer an example?"
"That would be so helpful, thank you very much."
Without missing a beat, Mrs. Miller rattled off a stream of obscenities so fully and completely unexpected that I fell off my chair. Mothers were defiled, their male and female children, as well as any and all offspring who just happened to be born out of wedlock. AS for the sacred union that produced these innocent babes, the pertinent bodily appendages were catalogued by a list of names so profoundly scurrilous that a grizzled marine, conceived in a brothel and dying of a disease he contracted in one, would've wished he'd been born as smooth as a Ken doll. The act itself was invoked with such a verity of incestuous, scatological, bestial, and just plain bizarre variations that that same marine would've given up on the Ken doll fantasy, and wished instead that all life had been confined to a single-cell stage, forever free of taint of mitosis, let alone procreation.
Somewhere during the course of all this I noticed I'd snapped my pencil in half, and now I used the two ends to gouge out my brain.
"Guhhhhhh guhhhhh guhhhhhh guhhhhh guhhhhh," I said, by which I meant: "You have shattered whatever tattered remnants of pedagogical propriety I still possessed, and my tender young mind has broken beneath the strain." N ~ Dale Peck

[...] we must recognize that in our own experience of emptiness, that even though one feels "empty", one must have a self in order to feel this emptiness; a loss cannot be felt unless what is missed is really a lost part of the self. Unwholeness is a feeling which belongs only to a being born whole and somehow denied access to this whole self. A being born "unwhole" would be whole in that partiality, happy with that cavernous state, and feel no emptiness, miss nothing, feel at home in a vacuum of identity. It is precisely because we have selves that we mourn. ~ Susan Griffin

The deeply irrational attitude of each sex toward women may be seen in novels, particularly in bad novels. In bad novels by men, there is the woman with whom the author is in love, who usually possesses every charm, but is somewhat helpless, and requires male protection; sometimes, however, like Shakespeare's Cleopatra, she is an object of exasperated hatred, and is thought to be deeply and desperately wicked. In portraying the heroine, the male author does not write from observation, but merely objectifies his own emotions. In regard to his other female characters, he is more objective, and may even depend upon his notebook; but when he is in love, his passion makes a mist between him and the object of his devotion. Women novelists, also, have two kinds of women in their books. One is themselves, glamorous and kind, and object of lust to the wicked and of love to the good, sensitive, highsouled, and constantly misjudged. The other kind is represented by all other women, and is usually portrayed as petty, spiteful, cruel, and deceitful. It would seem that to judge women without bias is not easy either for men or for women. ~ Bertrand Russell

[Speaking to a group of female students] Have you any notion how many books are written [by men] about women in the course of one year? (...) Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe? (...)
Professors, schoolmasters, sociologists, clergymen, novelists, essayists, journalists, men who had no qualification save that they were not women (...) were very angry (...) as they wrote (...) about the mental, moral, and physical inferiority of women. (...) Why were they angry? (...)
Possibly when the professor [imagined by V. Woolf as a prototype of patriarchal writer] insisted a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of women, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his own superiority. (...) Hence the enormous importance to a patriarch (...) of feeling that great number of people, half the human race indeed [=women], are by nature inferior to himself.
Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. (…) That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men. And it serves to explain how restless they are under her criticism. For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished (…)

A Room of One´s Own, chapter 2 ~ Virginia Woolf

Tonight I am ugly. I have lost all faith in my ability to attract males, and in the female animal that is a rather pathetic malady ... I don't care about anyone, and the feeling is quite obviously mutual. What is it that makes one attract others? ~ Sylvia Plath

- Why should we be feminists? Why not egalitarians?

- "Because that would be dishonest. Feminism is, of course, part of human rights in general- but to choose to use the vague expression human rights (or egalitarians) is to deny the specific and particular problem of gender.

It would be a way of pretending that it was not women who have, for centuries, been excluded. It would be a way of denying that the problem of gender targets women. That the problem was not about being human, but specifically about being a female human.

For centuries, the world divided human beings into two groups and then proceeded to exclude and oppress one group. It is only fair that the solution acknowledge that. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Advancing the notion that there can be many "feminisms" has served the conservative and liberal political interests of women seeking status and privileged class power who were among the first group to use the term "power feminists." They also were the group that began to suggest that one could be feminist and anti-abortion. This another misguided notion. Granting women the civil right to have control over our bodies is a basic feminist principle. Whether an individual female should have an abortion is purely a matter of choice. It is not anti-feminist for us to choose not to have abortions. But it is a feminist principle that women should have the right to choose. ~ Bell Hooks

She passed through a world of snowcapped mountains under shining stars. Passed over one of those mountains, where a winged male stood beside a heavily pregnant female, gazing out at those very stars. Fae.

They were Fae, but this was not her world.

She flung out a hand, as if she might signal them, as if they might somehow help her when she was nothing but an invisible speck of power -

The winged male, beautiful beyond reason, snapped his head toward her as she arced across his starry sky.

He lifted a hand, as in greeting.

A blast of dark power, like a gentle summer night, slammed into her.

Not to attack - but to slow her down.

A wall, a shield, that she tore and plunged through.

But it slowed her. That winged male's power slowed her, just enough.

Aelin vanished from his world without a whisper. ~ Sarah J. Maas

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. ~ Anne Bronte

I read the script for 'Guncrazy' in 1985 and loved it because it was one of the few scripts I'd come across that revolved around a strong female character. ~ Tamra Davis

I can't help thinking," she confided when he finished answering her questions about women in India who covered their faces and hair in public, "that it is grossly unfair that I was born a female and so must never know such adventures, or see but a few of those places. Even if I were to journey there, I'd only be allowed to go where everything was as civilized as-as London!"
"There does seem to be a case of extreme disparity between the privileges accorded the sexes," Ian agreed.
"Still, we each have our duty to perform," she informed him with sham solemnity. "And there's said to be great satisfaction in that."
"How do you view your-er-duty?" he countered, responding to her teasing tone with a lazy white smile.
"That's easy. It is a female's duty to be a wife who is an asset to her husband in every way. It is a male's duty to do whatever he wishes, whenever he wishes, so long as he is prepared to defend his country should the occasion demand it in his lifetime-which it very likely won't. Men," she informed him, "gain honor by sacrificing themselves on the field of battle while we sacrifice ourselves on the altar of matrimony."
He laughed aloud then, and Elizabeth smiled back at him, enjoying herself hugely. "Which, when one considers it, only proves that our sacrifice is by far the greater and more noble."
"How is that?" he asked, still chuckling.
"It's perfectly obvious-battles last mere days or weeks, months at the very most. While matrimon ~ Judith McNaught

The clearest explanation for the failure of any marriage is that the two people are incompatible; that is, that one is male and the other female. ~ Anna Quindlen

We need to become more open minded to the idea that many of us exist on a spectrum - a continuum - of gender. That for some of us the choice isn't just one or the other - completely male or completely female - but often a combination of both. In fact, it seems there are three different lines on the sexuality spectrum: how you self identify, who you're attracted to, and what you look like. And it seems the dial can be at any place on any of those three lines. ~ Eddie Izzard

In the problem of women was the germ of a solution, not only for their oppression, but for everybody's. The control of women in society was ingeniously effective. It was not done directly by the state. Instead the family was used- men to control women, women to control children, all to be preoccupied with one another , to turn to one another for help, to blame one another for trouble, to do violence to one another when things weren't going right. Why could this not be turned around? Could women liberating themselves, children freeing themselves, men and women beginning to understand one another, find the source of their common oppression outside rather than in one another? Perhaps then they could create nuggets of strength in their own relationships, millions of pockets of insurrection. They could revolutionize thought and behavior in exactly that seclusion of family privacy which the system had counted on to do its work of control and indoctrination. And together, instead of at odds- male, female, parents, children- they could undertake the changing of society itself. ~ Howard Zinn

We may regard the cell quite apart from its familiar morphological aspects, and contemplate its constitution from the purely chemical standpoint. We are obliged to adopt the view, that the protoplasm is equipped with certain atomic groups, whose function especially consists in fixing to themselves food-stuffs, of importance to the cell-life. Adopting the nomenclature of organic chemistry, these groups may be designated side-chains. We may assume that the protoplasm consists of a special executive centre (Leistungs-centrum) in connection with which are nutritive side-chains... The relationship of the corresponding groups, i.e., those of the food-stuff, and those of the cell, must be specific. They must be adapted to one another, as, e.g., male and female screw (Pasteur), or as lock and key (E. Fischer). ~ Paul R. Ehrlich

You're as pretty as she is."
"Don't be saying such things loud enough for herself to hear you, or she'll skin us both."
Touched and amused, she kissed his cheek. And Shawn came through the door.
It would have been comical, she decided, and was a pity that no one noticed but herself noticed the way he stopped dead in his tracks, stared, then jolted when the door swung back and slapped him in the ass.
I liked how she was trying to make him jealous with Jack.
Jack sighed into his beer when Brenna strode out. "She smells like sawdust," he said more to himself than otherwise. "It's very pleasant."
"What are you doing sniffing at her?" Shawn demanded.
Jack just blinked at him. "What?"
"I'll be back in a minute." He shoved up the pass-through on the bar, let it fall with a bang that had Aidan cursing him, then rushed through the door after Brenna.
"Wait a minute. Mary Brennan? Just a damn minute."
She paused by the door of her truck, and for one of the first times in her life felt the warm glow of pure female satisfaction stream through her. A fine feeling, she decided. A fine feeling altogether.
Schooling her face to show mild interest, she turned. "Is there a problem, then?"
"Yes, there's a problem. What are you doing flirting with Jack Brennan that way?"
She let her eyebrows rise up under the bill of her cap. "And what business might that be of yours, I'd like to know?"
"A matter of days ago you're asking me to ~ Nora Roberts

Over a quarter of the scenario writers were women and many of them were already friends, including June Mathis, Agnes Christine Johnston, Dorothy Farnum, Gladys Unger, and Winifred Eaton Reeve. Most had entered the business at a time when a one-page synopsis of action could be turned into a two-reeler, but they had grown with the industry and were now well paid and highly valued for their abilities. The women were as likely to write jungle films or swashbucklers as tales of female angst and Thalberg maintained that his preference for women writers was a commercial one. ~ Cari Beauchamp

Among us, for instance, in Western Europe, freedom is officially approved. But such freedom makes me think of the poor female cousin in certain middle-class families. She has become a widow; she has lost her natural protector. So she has been taken in, given a room on the top floor, and is welcome in the kitchen. She is occasionally paraded publicly on Sunday, to prove that one is virtuous and not a dirty dog. But for everything else, and especially on state occasions, she is requested to keep her mouth shut. And even if some policeman idly takes liberties with her in dark corners, one doesn't make a fuss about it, for she has seen such things before, especially with the master of the house, and, after all, it's not worth getting in bad with the legal authorities. ~ Albert Camus

Incidentally, one has to be very careful with that 'Bridegroom' imagery. It is so very apt to land one in Male and Female Principles, Eleusis, and the womb of the Great Mother. And that sort of thing doesn't make much appeal to well-balanced women, who look on it as just another example of men's hopeless romanticism about sex, and who are apt either to burst out laughing or sniff a faint smell of drains. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

The problem with the word "vagina" is that vaginas seem to be just straight-out bad luck. Only a masochist would want one, because only awful things happen to them. Vaginas get torn. Vaginas get "examined.".. No. Let's clear this up right now - I don't actually have a vagina. I never have. I, personally, have a cunt. Cunt is a proper, old, historic, strong word, and it doubles up as the most potent swear word in the English language. Yeah. That's how powerful it is, guys. If I tell you what I've got down there, old ladies and clerics might faint. I like how shocked people are when you say "cunt." Compared to this, the most powerful swear word men have got out of their privates is "dick," which is frankly vanilla. In a culture where nearly everything female is still seen as squeam-inducing and/or weak - menstruation, menopause, just the sheer, simple act of calling someone "a girl" - I love that "cunt" stands on its own, as the supreme, unvanquishable word. ~ Caitlin Moran

Sometimes I think I am a strange, strange creature -- something not of earth, nor yet of heaven, nor of hell. I think at times I am a little thing fallen on the earth by mistake: a thing thrown among foreign, unfitting elements, where every little door is closed -- every Why unanswered, and itself knows not where to lay its head. I feel a deadly certainty in some moments that the wild world contains not one moment of rest for me, that there will never be any rest, that my woman's-soul will go on asking long, long centuries after my woman's-body is laid in its grave. ~ Mary MacLane