Quotable Women

Quotable Women – An Archive of
Memorable Quotes by Women

Bella Abzug:: The test for whether or not you can hold a job should not be the arrangement of your chromosomes.
Bella Abzug:: Our struggle today is not to have a female Einstein get appointed as an assistant professor. It is for a woman schlemiel to get as quickly promoted as a male schlemiel.
Abigail Adams:: Great necessities call out great virtues.
Abigail Adams:: Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could.
Abigail Adams:: If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.
Dawn Adams:: Show me the books he loves and I shall know the man far better than through mortal friends.
Elizabeth Adamson:: Baby: An alimentary canal with a loud voice at one end and no responsibility at the other.
Jane Addams:: Old-fashioned ways which no longer apply to changed conditions are a snare in which the feet of women have always become readily entangled.
Jane Addams:: Civilization is a method of living and an attitude of equal respect for all people.
Louisa May Alcott:: "Stay" is a charming word in a friend's vocabulary.
Louisa May Alcott:: I'm not afraid of storms, for I'm learning to sail my ship.
Gracie Allen:: When I was born I was so surprised I didn't talk for a year and a half.
Kirstie Alley:: You are not in business to be popular.
Marian Anderson:: As long as you keep a person down, some part of you has to be down there to hold him down, so it means you cannot soar as you otherwise might.
Julie Andrews:: Perseverance is failing nineteen times and succeeding the twentieth.
Julie Andrews:: All love shifts and changes. I don't know if you can be wholeheartedly in love all the time.
Maya Angelou:: A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.
Maya Angelou:: Self-pity in its early stages is as snug as a feather mattress. Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable.
Maya Angelou:: If you have only one smile in you, give it to the people you love. Don't be surly at home, then go out in the street and start grinning "Good morning" at total strangers.
Susan B. Anthony:: Men, their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less.
Corazon Aquino:: I would rather die a meaningful death than to live a meaningless life.
Hannah Arendt:: The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
Hannah Arendt:: War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.
Hannah Arendt:: There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.
Hannah Arendt:: Man's chief moral deficiency appears to be not his indiscretions but his reticence.
Hannah Arendt:: The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be either good or evil.
Leah Arendt:: Do not do what you would undo if caught.
Mary Kay Ash:: Aerodynamically the bumblebee shouldn't be able to fly, but the bumblebee doesn't know that so it goes on flying anyway.
Margot Asquith:: She tells enough white lies to ice a wedding cake.
Nancy Astor:: The main dangers in this life are the people who want to change everything... or nothing.
Nancy Astor:: The penalty of success is to be bored by people who used to snub you.
Jane Austen:: I do not want people to be agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them.

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N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Eve Babitz:: By the time I'd grown up, I naturally supposed that I'd grown up.
Lauren Bacall:: In Hollywood, an equitable divorce settlement means each party getting fifty percent of the publicity.
Lauren Bacall:: (on being told that a store was not open to the public) I'm not the public.
Joan Baez:: You don't get to choose how you're going to die, or when. You can only decide how you're going to live now.
Joan Baez:: It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them. The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page.
Joan Baez:: The easiest kind of relationship for me is with ten thousand people. The hardest is with one.
Joan Baez:: If it's natural to kill, why do men have to go into training to learn how?
Pearl Bailey:: There is a way to look at the past. Don't hide from it. It will not catch you if you don't repeat it.
Faith Baldwin:: Time is a dressmaker specializing in alterations.
Faith Baldwin:: Character builds slowly, but it can be torn down with incredible swiftness.
Lucille Ball:: You see much more of your children once they leave home.
Tallulah Bankhead:: Only good girls keep diaries. Bad girls don't have time.
Tallulah Bankhead:: (on seeing a former lover for the first time in years) I thought I told you to wait in the car.
Tallulah Bankhead:: It's one of the tragic ironies of the theatre that only one man in it can count on steady work: the night watchman.
Brigitte Bardot:: It is better to be unfaithful than to be faithful without wanting to be.
Colleen C. Barrett:: When it comes to getting things done, we need fewer architects and more bricklayers.
Colleen C. Barrett:: Work is either fun or drudgery. It depends on your attitude. I like fun.
Ethel Barrymore:: You grow up the day you have your first real laugh at yourself.
Ethel Barrymore:: You must learn day by day, year by year, to broaden your horizon. The more things you love, the more you are interested in, the more you enjoy, the more you are indignant about, the more you have left when anything happens.
Clara Barton:: I may be compelled to face danger, but never fear it, and while our soldiers can stand and fight, I can stand and feed and nurse them.
Mary Catherine Bateson:: We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn.
Mary Catherine Bateson:: Caring can be learned by all human beings, can be worked into the design of every life, meeting an individual need as well as a pervasive need in society.
Mary Catherine Bateson:: Of any stopping place in life, it is good to ask whether it will be a good place from which to go on as well as a good place to remain.
Mary Catherine Bateson:: Sharing is sometimes more demanding than giving.
Mary Catherine Bateson:: In many ways, constancy is an illusion.
Mary Catherine Bateson:: Fear is not a good teacher. The lessons of fear are quickly forgotten.
Simone de Beauvoir:: One is not born a woman, one becomes one.
Hada Bejar:: The fragrance always stays in the hand that gives the rose.
Lillian Bell:: It is really asking too much of a woman to expect her to bring up her husband and her children too.
Ruth Benedict:: Our faith in the present dies out long before our faith in the future.
Candice Bergen:: Hollywood is like Picasso's bathroom.
Sally Berger:: The secret of getting ahead is getting started.
Ingrid Bergman:: A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous.
Ingrid Bergman:: Happiness is good health and a bad memory.
Ingrid Bergman:: I have no regrets. I wouldn't have lived my life the way I did if I was going to worry about what people were going to say.
Ingrid Bergman:: It is not whether you really cry. It's whether the audience thinks you are crying.
Annie Besant:: ... those who can serve best, those who help most, those who sacrifice most, those are the people who will be loved in life and honoured in death, when all questions of colour are swept away and when in a free country free citizens shall meet on equal grounds.
Mary McLeod Bethune:: If our people are to fight their way up out of bondage we must arm them with the sword and the shield and the buckler of pride.
Mary McLeod Bethune:: I never stop to plan. I take things step by step.
Mary McLeod Bethune:: The true worth of a race must be measured by the character of its womanhood.
Mary McLeod Bethune:: Invest in the human soul. Who knows, it might be a diamond in the rough.
Shirley Temple Black:: I stopped believing in Santa Claus at age six when my mother took me to see him in a store and he asked for my autograph.
Alice Stone Blackwell:: Justice is better than chivalry if we cannot have both.
Alice Stone Blackwell:: The brain is not, and cannot be, the sole or complete organ of thought and feeling.
Antoinette Brown Blackwell:: Work, alternated with needful rest, is the salvation of man or woman.
Elizabeth Blackwell:: If society will not admit of woman's free development, then society must be remodeled.
Linda Blandford:: Justice is a concept. Muscle is the reality.
Mary Bly:: A stale mind is the devil's breadbox.
Mary Bly:: Dogs come when they're called. Cats take a message and get back to you.
Boadaceia:: If you weigh well the strengths of our armies you will see that in this battle we must conquer or die. This is a woman's resolve. As for the men, they may live or be slaves.
Sarah Knowles Bolton:: Forget the past and live the present hour.
Erma Bombeck:: People shop for a bathing suit with more care than they do a husband or wife. The rules are the same. Look for something you'll feel comfortable wearing. Allow for room to grow.
Erma Bombeck:: I come from a family where gravy is considered a beverage.
Erma Bombeck:: Spend at least one Mother's Day with your respective mothers before you decide on marriage. If a man gives his mother a gift certificate for a flu shot, dump him.
Erma Bombeck:: Guilt is the gift that keeps on giving.
Erma Bombeck:: Housework is a treadmill from futility to oblivion with stop offs at tedium and counter productivity.
Erma Bombeck:: If a man watches three football games in a row, he should be declared legally dead.
Erma Bombeck:: We've got a generation now who were born with semi-equality. They don't know how it was before, so they think, this isn't too bad. We're working. We have our attache cases and our three-piece suits. I get very disgusted with the younger generation of women. We had a torch to pass, and they are just sitting there. They don't realize it can be taken away. Things are going to have to get worse before they join in fighting the battle.
Erma Bombeck:: When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, "I used everything you gave me."
Erma Bombeck:: Never lend your car to anyone to whom you have given birth.
Lesley Boone:: I tried to commit suicide by sticking my head in the oven, but there was a cake in it.

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N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Elayne Boosler:: Ever notice that Soup for One is eight aisles away from Party Mix?
Elayne Boosler:: I've never been married, but I tell people I'm divorced so they won't think something's wrong with me.
Elayne Boosler:: When the sun comes up, I have morals again.
Elayne Boosler:: When women are depressed, they eat or go shopping. Man invade another country. It's a whole different way of thinking.
Phyllis Bottome:: There are two ways of meeting difficulties. You alter the difficulties or you alter yourself to meet them.
Louise Bourgeois:: An artist can show things that other people are terrified of expressing.
Catherine Drinker Bowen:: Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes, and always count their change when it is handed to them.
Elizabeth Bowen:: Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.
Elizabeth Bowen:: Nobody speaks the truth when there is something they must have.
Peg Bracken:: Why does a slight tax increase cost you two hundred dollars and a substantial tax cut save you thirty cents?
Anne Bradstreet:: If what I do prove well, it won't advance. / They'll say it's stolen, or else it was by chance.
Anne Bradstreet:: If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant; if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome.
Anne Bradstreet:: Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge, fitter to bruise than polish.
Harriet Braiker:: Striving for excellence motivates you; striving for perfection is demoralizing.
Mary Gardiner Brainard:: I would rather walk with God in the dark than go alone in the light.
Charlotte Brontë:: Look twice before you leap.
Charlotte Brontë:: If we would build on a sure foundation in friendship we must love friends for their sake rather than our own.
Charlotte Brontë:: Life appears to me to be too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrong.
Charlotte Brontë:: Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilized by education; they grow there, firm as weeds among rocks.
Emily Brontë:: I cannot live without my life!
Emily Brontë:: Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.
Joyce Brothers:: A strong, positive self-image is the best possible preparation for success.
Joyce Brothers:: If Shakespeare had to go on an author tour to promote Romeo and Juliet, he never would have written Macbeth.
Joyce Brothers:: Listening, not imitation, may be the sincerest form of flattery.
Joyce Brothers:: Marriage is not just spiritual communion, it is also remembering to take out the trash.
Joyce Brothers:: No matter how love-sick a woman is, she shouldn't take the first pill that comes along.
Helen Gurley Brown:: Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere.
Rita Mae Brown:: If the world were a logical place, men would ride side-saddle.
Rita Mae Brown:: Language exerts hidden power, like the moon on the tides.
Rita Mae Brown:: Lead me not into temptation; I can find the way myself.
Rita Mae Brown:: I still miss those I loved who are no longer with me but I find I am grateful for having loved them. The gratitude has finally conquered the loss.
Rita Mae Brown:: I believe the true function of age is memory. I'm recording as fast as I can.
Rita Mae Brown:: I believe you are your work. Don't trade the stuff of your life, time, for nothing more than dollars. That's a rotten bargain.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning:: Colors seen by candle-light will not look the same by day.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning:: The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning:: Who so loves, believes the impossible.
Gro Harlem Brundtland:: Women power is a formidable force.
Pearl S. Buck:: Truth is always exciting. Speak it, then; life is dull without it.
Pearl S. Buck:: I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in human beings.
Pearl S. Buck:: The basic discovery about any people is the discovery of the relationship between its men and its women.
Billie Burke:: Age is something that doesn't matter, unless you are a cheese.
Delta Burke:: If you want to say it with flowers, a single rose says: "I'm cheap!"
Carol Burnett:: Celebrity was a long time in coming; it will go away. Everything goes away.
Carol Burnett:: Giving birth is like taking your lower lip and forcing it over your head.
Carol Burnett:: I don't have false teeth. Do you think I'd buy teeth like these?
Fanny Burney:: I am ashamed of confessing that I have nothing to confess.
Fanny Burney:: Traveling is the ruin of all happiness! There's no looking at a building after seeing Italy.
Barbara Bush:: I married the first man I ever kissed. When I tell my children that they just about throw up.
Barbara Bush:: (commencement address to Wellesley College) And who knows? Somewhere out there in this audience may even be someone who will one day follow in my footsteps, and preside over the White House as the president's spouse. I wish him well.
Barbara Bush:: If human beings are perceived as potentials rather than problems, as possessing strengths instead of weaknesses, as unlimited rather that dull and unresponsive, then they thrive and grow to their capabilities.
Barbara Bush:: Giving frees us from the familiar territory of our own needs by opening our mind to the unexplained worlds occupied by the needs of others.
Barbara Bush:: You just don't luck into things as much as you'd like to think you do. You build step by step, whether it's friendships or opportunities.
Berta Buxton:: The eleventh commandment – thou shalt not be found out – is the only one that is virtually impossible to keep these days.

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N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Mrs. Patrick Campbell:: (to George Bernard Shaw) When you were quite a little boy, somebody ought to have said "hush" just once.
Mrs. Patrick Campbell:: It doesn't make any difference what you do in the bedroom as long as you don't do it in the street and frighten the horses.
Jan Carew:: Those whom the gods would destroy they first call "promising."
Liz Carpenter:: If we can't turn the world around we can at least bolster the victims.
Liz Carpenter:: What a lot we lost when we stopped writing letters. You can't reread a phone call.
Rachel Carson:: In every out-thrust headland, in every curving beach, in every grain of sand, there is the story of the earth.
Lillian Carter:: (at age 85) Sure, I'm for helping the elderly. I'm going to be old myself someday.
Judy Castrina:: A committee takes hours to put into minutes what can be done in seconds.
Willa Cather:: Where there is great love there are always miracles.
Catherine the Great:: I shall be an autocrat, that's my trade; and the good Lord will forgive me, that's his.
Coco Chanel:: Elegance is refusal.
Cher:: The trouble with some women is they get all excited about nothing – and then they marry him.
Julia Child:: Noncooks think it's silly to invest two hours' work in two minutes' enjoyment; but if cooking is evanescent, so is the ballet.
Kate Chopin:: There are some people who leave impressions not so lasting as the imprint of an oar upon the water.
Agatha Christie:: Never do anything yourself that others can do for you.
Agatha Christie:: The best time to plan a book is while you're doing the dishes.
Agatha Christie:: Where large sums of money are concerned, it is advisable to trust nobody.
Agatha Christie:: An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can have. The older she gets the more interested he is in her.
Agatha Christie:: I don't think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness – to save oneself trouble.
Agatha Christie:: I've always believed in writing without a collaborator, because where two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worry and only half the royalties.

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N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Jennie Jerome Churchill:: We owe something to extravagance, for thrift and adventure seldom go hand in hand.
Isabel Colegate:: It's not a bad idea to get in the habit of writing down one's thoughts. It saves one having to bother anyone with them.
Christiane Collage:: Common sense is perhaps the most equally divided, but surely the most underemployed, talent in the world.
Christiane Collage:: When you belong to a minority, you have to be better in order to have the right to be equal.
Colette:: If I can't have too many truffles, I'll do without truffles.
Colette:: What a wonderful life I've had! I only wish I'd realized it sooner.
Colette:: Writing only leads to more writing.
Joan Collins:: Loneliness is the universal problem of rich people.
Joan Collins:: The secret of having a personal life is not answering too many questions about it.
Laurie Colwin:: Friendship is not possible between two women, one of whom is very well dressed.
Ivy Compton Burnett:: Pushing forty? She's hanging on for dear life.
Eliza Cook:: There's a magical tie to the land of our home, which the heart cannot break, though the footsteps may roam.
Alice Roosevelt Longworth:: (on Calvin Coolidge) He looks as though he's been weaned on a pickle.
Joan Ganz Cooney:: There is a young and impressionable mind out there that is hungry for information. It has latched on to an electronic tube as its main source of nourishment.
Alicia Coro:: When we escaped from Cuba, all we could carry was our education.
Marcelene Cox:: A sparkling house is a fine thing if the children aren't robbed of their luster in keeping it that way.
Marcelene Cox:: A vacation frequently means that the family goes away for a rest, accompanied by a mother who sees that the others get it.
Marcelene Cox:: Eating without conversation is only stoking.
Marcelene Cox:: The quickest way to know a woman is to go shopping with her.
Marcelene Cox:: Weather means more when you have a garden. There's nothing like listening to a shower and thinking how it is soaking in around your green beans.
Joan Crawford:: I never go out unless I look like Joan Crawford the movie star. If you want to see the girl next door, go next door.
Judith Crist:: All you'll get from strangers is surface pleasantry or indifference. Only someone who loves you will criticize you.
Amanda Cross:: Romance is the glamour which turns the dust of everyday life into a golden haze.
Marie Curie:: I never see what has been done; I only see what remains to be done.
Marie Curie:: Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.

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N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Bette Davis:: I'd marry again if I found a man who had fifteen million dollars, would sign over half to me, and guarantee that he'd be dead within a year.
Bette Davis:: (about a starlet) She's the original good time that was had by all.
Bette Davis:: (on being told that her death was rumored) With the newspaper strike on, I wouldn't consider dying.
Bette Davis:: Old age is no place for sissies.
Doris Day:: The really frightening thing about middle age is the knowledge that you'll grow out of it.
Lillian Day:: A lady is one who never shows her underwear unintentionally.
Agnes De Mille:: The truest expression of a people is in its dances and its music. Bodies never lie.
Diane de Poitiers:: To have a good enemy, choose a friend; he knows where to strike.
Diane de Poitiers:: The years that a woman subtracts from her age are not lost. They are added to other women's.
Madame de Sevigne:: I fear nothing so much as a man who is witty all day long.
Madame de Stael:: Love is the emblem of eternity; it confounds all notions of time; effaces all memory of beginning, all fear of an end.
Emily Dickinson:: Hope is a thing with feathers / That perches in the soul, / And sings the tune without words / And never stops at all.
Emily Dickinson:: They say that God is everywhere, and yet we always think of Him as somewhat of a recluse.
Marlene Dietrich:: I was raised almost entirely on turnips and potatoes, but I think that the turnips had more to do with the effect than the potatoes.
Marlene Dietrich:: In America, sex is an obsession; in other parts of the world it's a fact.
Marlene Dietrich:: Most women set out to try to change a man, and once they have changed him they don't like him.
Marlene Dietrich:: Once a woman has forgiven a man, she must not reheat his sins for breakfast.
Marlene Dietrich:: The average man is more interested in a woman who is interested in him than he is in a woman – any woman – with beautiful legs.
Phyllis Diller:: Always be nice to your children because they are the ones who will choose your rest home.
Phyllis Diller:: If it weren't for baseball, many kids wouldn't know what a millionaire looked like.
Phyllis Diller:: Housework can't kill you, but why take a chance?
Missy Dizick:: Some people say that cats are sneaky, evil, and cruel. True, and they have many other fine qualities as well.
Mary Mapes Dodge:: Life is a mystery as deep as ever death can be.
Elizabeth Drew:: Travel, instead of broadening the mind, often merely lengthens the conversation.
Isadora Duncan:: It has taken me years of struggle, hard work and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence.
Isadora Duncan:: People don't live nowadays: they get about ten percent out of life.
Ariel Durant:: A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.

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N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Amelia Earhart:: Adventure is worthwhile in itself.
Amelia Earhart:: Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace. The soul that knows it not, knows no release from little things; knows not the livid loneliness of fear.
Elsa Einstein:: No, I don't understand my husband's theory of relativity, but I know my husband, and I know he can be trusted.
Britt Ekland:: I don't sleep with happily married men.
George Eliot:: Animals are such agreeable friends, they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms.
George Eliot:: Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us worthy evidence of the fact.
George Eliot:: Excessive literary production is a social offense.
George Eliot:: Different taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.
George Eliot:: It is a common enough case, that of a man being suddenly captivated by a woman nearly the opposite of his ideal.
George Eliot:: Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.
George Eliot:: He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow.
Linda Ellerbee:: If men can run the world, why can't they stop wearing neckties? How intelligent is it to start the day by tying a little noose around your neck?
Nora Ephron:: If pregnancy were a book they would cut the last two chapters.
Nora Ephron:: What my mother believed about cooking is that if you worked hard and prospered, someone else would do it for you.
Nora Ephron:: Whenever I get married I start buying Gourmet magazine.
Susan Ertz:: Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do on a rainy afternoon.
Edith Evans:: When a woman behaves like a man, why doesn't she behave like a nice man?

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N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Farrah Fawcett:: God gave women intuition and femininity. Used properly, the combination easily jumbles the brain of any man I've ever met.
Dianne Feinstein:: Winning may not be everything, but losing has little to recommend it.
Edna Ferber:: A woman can look both moral and exciting... if she also looks as if it was quite a struggle.
Edna Ferber:: Being an old maid is like death by drowning, a really delightful sensation after you cease to struggle.
Edna Ferber:: Writers should be read but not seen. Rarely are they a winsome sight.
Edna Ferber:: Big doesn't necessarily mean better. Sunflowers aren't better than violets.
Miriam "Ma" Ferguson (Governor of Texas, 1924):: English was good enough for Jesus Christ and it's good enough for the children of Texas.
Geraldine Ferraro:: It was not so very long ago that people thought that semiconductors were part-time orchestra leaders and microchips were very small snack foods.
Geraldine Ferraro:: You don't have to have fought in a war to love peace.
Carrie Fisher:: I don't want life to imitate art. I want life to be art.
M.F.K. Fisher:: Family dinners are more often than not an ordeal of nervous indigestion, preceded by hidden resentment and ennui and accompanied by psychosomatic jitters.
Ella Fitzgerald:: Just don't give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don't think you can go wrong.
Zelda Fitzgerald:: Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.
Jane Fonda:: My husband said he wanted to have a relationship with a redhead, so I dyed my hair.
Jane Fonda:: Telling lies and showing off to get attention are mistakes I made that I don't want my kids to make.
Jane Fonda:: Women are not forgiven for aging. Robert Redford's lines of distinction are my old-age wrinkles.
Margot Fonteyn:: Take your work seriously, but never yourself.
Kelly Fordyce:: Language is a wonderful thing. It can be used to express thoughts, to conceal thoughts, but more often, to replace thinking.
Anne Frank:: Who would ever think that so much went on in the soul of a young girl?
Anne Frank:: Laziness may appear attractive, but work gives satisfaction.
Betty Friedan:: It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself.
Betty Friedan:: Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women's denigration of themselves.
Dorothy Fuldheim:: This is a youth-oriented society, and the joke is on them because youth is a disease from which we all recover.
Margaret Fuller:: If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it.

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N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Zsa Zsa Gabor:: How many husbands have I had? You mean apart from my own?
Zsa Zsa Gabor:: I don't remember anybody's name. How do you think the "dahling" thing got started?
Zsa Zsa Gabor:: The women's movement hasn't changed my sex life. It wouldn't dare.
Zsa Zsa Gabor:: I am a marvelous housekeeper. Every time I leave a man I keep his house.
Indira Gandhi:: There exists no politician in India daring enough to attempt to explain to the masses that cows can be eaten.
Indira Gandhi:: My grandfather once told me that there were two kinds of people: those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was much less competition.
Indira Gandhi:: You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist.
Judy Garland:: I was born at the age of twelve on an MGM lot.
Elizabeth Gaskell:: I'll not listen to reason. Reason always means what someone else has got to say.
Martha Gellman:: The only aspect of our travels that is interesting to others is disaster.
Phyllis George:: The most popular labor saving device is still money.
Estelle Getty:: If love means never having to say you're sorry, then marriage means always having to say everything twice.
Helen Giangregorio:: He who laughs last didn't get it.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman:: In New York City, everyone is an exile, none more so than the Americans.
Gail Godwin:: Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theatre.
Ruth Gordon:: The very best impromptu speeches are the ones written well in advance.
Princess Grace of Monaco:: The freedom of the press works in such a way that there is not much freedom from it.
Sue Grafton:: If high heels were so wonderful, men would be wearing them.
Sheila Graham:: The youthful sparkle in Ronald Reagan's eyes is caused by his contact lenses, which he keeps highly polished.
Grandma Moses:: If I hadn't started painting, I would have raised chickens.
Grandma Moses:: Life is what we make it, always has been, always will be.
Lee Grant:: I've been married to one Marxist and one Fascist, and neither one would take the garbage out.
Carolyn Green:: I don't believe in divorce. I believe in widowhood.
Celia Green:: The way to do research is to attack the facts at the point of greatest astonishment.
Edith Starett Green:: I've always argued that it is just as desirable, just as possible, to have philosopher plumbers as philosopher kings.
Germaine Greer:: Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
Germaine Greer:: There is no such thing as security. There never has been.
Cathy Guisewhite:: Mothers, food, love, and career: the four major guilt groups.
Adrienne Gusoff:: If the shoe fits, it's too expensive.
Adrienne Gusoff:: Living in a vacuum sucks.
Adrienne Gusoff:: Opportunity knocked. My doorman threw him out.
Adrienne Gusoff:: Shopping is better than sex. If you're not satisfied after shopping you can make an exchange for something you really like.

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N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Melissa Hahn:: It's nice to be important, but it's important to be nice.
Melissa Hahn:: You are what you eat (minus what you excrete).
Grace Hansen:: Don't be afraid your life will end; be afraid that it will never begin.
Mata Hari:: The dance is a poem of which each movement is a word.
Nikki Harris:: Van Gogh became a painter because he had no ear for music.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison:: I refuse to believe that trading recipes is silly. Tunafish casserole is at least as real as corporate stock.
Tori Harrison:: Rules are for people who don't know how to get around them.
Grace Hartigan:: I don't mind being miserable as long as I'm painting well.
Katharine Butler Hathaway:: If you realize too acutely how valuable time is, you are too paralyzed to do anything.
Helen Hayes:: Only the poet can look beyond the detail and see the whole picture.
Amy Heckerling:: Babies don't need fathers, but mothers do. Someone who is taking care of a baby needs to be taken care of.
Lillian Hellman:: Cynicism is an unpleasant way of telling the truth.
Lillian Hellman:: I like people who refuse to speak until they are ready to speak.
Lillian Hellman:: It is not good to see people who have been pretending strength all their lives lose it even for a minute.
Lillian Hellman:: My father was often angry when I was most like him.
Lillian Hellman:: I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions.
Lillian Hellman:: It is a mark of many famous people that they cannot part with their finest hour.
Lillian Hellman:: People change and forget to tell each other.
Madeline Hemmings:: With increased opportunity comes increased stress. The stress comes from multiple conflicting demands and very little in the way of role models.
Katharine Hepburn:: I never realized until lately that women were supposed to be the inferior sex.
Katharine Hepburn:: Acting is the most minor of gifts. After all, Shirley Temple could do it when she was four.
Katharine Hepburn:: I don't care what is written about me so long as it isn't true.
Katharine Hepburn:: I think most of the people involved in any art always secretly wonder whether they are really there because they're good – or because they're lucky.
Katharine Hepburn:: Plain women know more about men than beautiful women do.
Katharine Hepburn:: Someone asked someone who was about my age: "How are you?" The answer was, "Fine. If you don't ask for details."
Katharine Hepburn:: Life is hard. After all, it kills you.
Katharine Hepburn:: Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door, and just visit now and then.
Katherine Tynan Hinkson:: To be a saint does not exclude fine dresses nor a beautiful house.
Ellen Sturgis Hooper:: I slept, and dreamed that life was Beauty; I woke, and found that life was Duty.
Karen Horney:: Fortunately, psychoanalysis is not the only way to resolve inner conflicts. Life itself remains a very effective therapist.
Shirley Hufstedler:: Security is not the meaning of my life. Great opportunities are worth the risk.
Rhetta Hughes:: There are two kinds of directors in the theater. Those who think they are God and those who are certain of it.
Lucretia P. Hunter:: Not only have women been successful in entering fields in which men are supposed to have a more natural aptitude, but they have created entirely new businesses.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M

N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Delores Ibarruri:: It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.
Helen (Fiske) Hunt Jackson:: All lost things are in the angels' keeping.
Elizabeth Janeway:: Power is the ability not to have to please.
Elizabeth Jenkins:: The woman whose behavior indicates that she will make a scene if she is told the truth asks to be deceived.
Sarah Orne Jewett:: Tact is after all a kind of mind reading.
Joyce Jillson:: There are times not to flirt. When you're sick. When you're with children. When you're on the witness stand.
Lady Bird Johnson:: The First Lady is an unpaid public servant elected by one person – her husband.
Alice Jones:: One has a greater sense of degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience.
Effie Jones:: Failing to plan is planning to fail.
Erica Jong:: Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow talent to the dark place where it leads.
Erica Jong:: Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't.
Erica Jong:: You take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.
Erica Jong:: You see a lot of smart guys with dumb women, but you hardly ever see a smart woman with a dumb guy.
Barbara Jordan:: Do not call for black power or green power. Call for brain power.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M

N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Pauline Kael:: Her only flair is in her nostrils.
Irene Kassorla:: Don't wait for your ship to come in, and feel angry and cheated when it doesn't. Get going with something small.
Helen Keller:: Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold.
Helen Keller:: Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all. Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature.
Helen Keller:: Science may have found a cure for most evils, but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all: the apathy of human beings.
Helen Keller:: The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.
Helen Keller:: When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.
Frances Anne Kemble:: Maids must be wives and mothers to fulfill the entire and holiest end of woman's being.
Florynce Kennedy:: Don't agonize. Organize.
Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy:: I've had an exciting time. I married for love and got a little money along with it.
Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy:: Life isn't a matter of milestones but of moments.
Sister Elizabeth Kenny:: It's better to be a lion for a day than a sheep all your life.
Sister Corita Kent:: Love the moment, and the energy of that moment will spread beyond all boundaries.
Jean Kerr:: Man is the only animal that learns by being hypocritical. He pretends to be polite and then, eventually, he becomes polite.
Jean Kerr:: One of the most difficult things to contend with in a hospital is that assumption on the part of the staff that because you have lost your gall bladder you have also lost your mind.
Jean Kerr:: Marrying a man is like buying something you've been admiring for a long time in a shop window. You may love it when you get it home, but it doesn't always go with everything else in the house.
Jean Kerr:: The real menace in dealing with a five-year-old is that in no time at all you begin to sound like a five-year-old.
Jean Kerr:: When the grandmothers of today hear the word "Chippendales," they don't necessary think of chairs.
Billie Jean King:: Be bold. If you're going to make an error, make a doozey, and don't be afraid to hit the ball.
Coretta Scott King:: Segregation was wrong when it was forced by white people, and I believe it is still wrong when it is requested by black people.
Rose King:: You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time. And that's sufficient.
Lisa Kirk:: A gossip is someone who talks to you about others, a bore is someone who talks to you about himself, and a brilliant conversationalist is one who talks to you about yourself.
Joan Kiser:: The sins of the fathers are often visited upon the sons-in-law.
Denise Klahn:: Fashion is something that goes in one year and out the other.
Joan Klempner:: To achieve the impossible dream, try going to sleep.
Hildegard Knef:: Success and failure are greatly overrated. But failure gives you a whole lot more to talk about.
Judith M. Knowlton:: I discovered I always have choices and sometimes it's only a choice of attitude.
Joan Konner:: Procrastination gives you something to look forward to.
Maggie Kuhn:: The ultimate indignity is to be given a bedpan by a stranger who calls you by your first name.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M

N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Anne Lamott:: A hundred years from now? All new people.
Hedy Lamarr:: Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.
Elsa Lancaster:: She looked as though butter wouldn't melt in her mouth... or anywhere else.
Ann Landers:: Television has proved that people will look at anything rather than each other.
Adair Lara:: Having something to say is overrated.
Adair Lara:: Women who buy perfume and flowers for themselves because their men won't do it are called "self basting."
Lucy Larcom:: I don't own an inch of land, but all I see is mine.
Fran Lebowitz:: My favorite animal is steak.
Fran Lebowitz:: The telephone is a good way to talk to people without having to offer them a drink.
Fran Lebowitz:: Remember that as a teenager you are in the last stage of your life when you will be happy to hear the phone is for you.
Fran Lebowitz:: The opposite of talking isn't listening. The opposite of talking is waiting.
Ursula K. LeGuin:: Love doesn't just sit there like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.
Ursula K. LeGuin:: The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
Mary Jean LeTendre:: Let us not confuse stability with stagnation.
Gypsy Rose Lee:: God is love, but get it in writing.
Harper Lee:: The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.
Doris Lessing:: In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.
Caron Warner Lieber:: A person who talks fast often says things she hasn't thought of yet.
Barbara Melser Lieberman:: Anyone with more than 365 pair of shoes is a pig.
Wendy Liebman:: I found out why cats drink out of the toilet. My mother told me it's because the water is cold in there. And I'm like, how did my mother know that?
Wendy Liebman:: I've been on so many blind dates, I should get a free dog.
Beatrice Lillie:: I was born because my mother needed a fourth for meals.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh:: My passport photo is one of the most remarkable photographs I have ever seen – no retouching, no shadows, no flattery – just stark me.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh:: Good communication is just as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.
Mary Wilson Little:: Politeness is half good manners and half good lying.
Mary Wilson Little:: There is no pleasure in having nothing to do; the fun is in having lots to do and not doing it.
Anita Loos:: I'm furious about the Women's Liberationists. They keep getting up on soapboxes and proclaiming that women are brighter than men. That's true, but it should be kept quiet or it ruins the whole racket.
Anita Loos:: On a plane you can pick up more and better people than on any other public conveyance since the stagecoach.
Shirley Lord:: What really matters is what you do with what you have.
Sophia Loren:: Mistakes are part of the dues one pays for a full life.
Sophia Loren:: There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of the people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will truly have defeated age.
Susie Loucks:: I was on a date recently, and the guy took me horseback riding. That was kind of fun, until we ran out of quarters.
Clare Booth Luce:: Politicians talk themselves red, white, and blue in the face.
Clare Booth Luce:: They say that women talk too much. If you have worked in Congress you know that the filibuster was invented by men.
Clare Booth Luce:: No good deed goes unpunished.
Alison Lurie:: We can lie in the language of dress or try to tell the truth; but unless we are naked and bald, it is impossible to be silent.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M

N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Shirley MacLaine:: It's useless to hold a person to anything he says while he's in love, drunk, or running for office.
Dolley Madison:: I would rather fight with my hands than my tongue.
Madonna:: I'm tough, ambitious and I know exactly what I want.
May Maloo:: There's one thing to be said for inviting trouble: it generally accepts.
Marya Mannes:: All really great lovers are articulate, and verbal seduction is the surest road to actual seduction.
Katherine Mansfield:: I am treating you as my friend asking you share my present minuses in the hope I can ask you to share my future pluses.
Elizabeth Marbury:: The richer your friends, the more they will cost you.
Margareth II, Queen of Denmark:: I have always had a dread of becoming a passenger in life.
Mary, Queen of Scots:: No more tears now; I will think about revenge.
Florida Scott Maxwell:: No matter how old a mother is she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement.
Mary McCarthy:: If someone tells you he is going to make "a realistic decision", you immediately understand that he is going to do something bad.
Mary McCarthy:: People with bad consciences always fear the judgment of children.
Colleen McCullough:: The lovely thing about being forty is that you can appreciate twenty-five-year-old men more.
Phyllis McGinley:: Getting along with men isn't what's truly important. The vital knowledge is how to get along with one man.
Mignon McLaughlin:: Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.
Mignon McLaughlin:: Many are saved from sin by being so inept at it.
Mignon McLaughlin:: Most of us become parents long before we have stopped being children.
Golda Meir:: I must govern the clock, not be governed by it.
Golda Meir:: Moses dragged us through the desert for 40 years to bring us to the one place in the Middle East where there was no oil.
Golda Meir:: Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you're aboard, there's nothing you can do.
Golda Meir:: Those who don't know how to weep with their whole heart don't know how to laugh either.
Golda Meir:: Whether women are better than men I cannot say – but I can say they are certainly no worse.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M

N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Bette Midler:: I married a German. Every night I dress up as Poland and he invades me.
Bette Midler:: I wouldn't say I invented tacky, but I definitely brought it to its present high popularity.
Bette Midler:: The worst part of success is to try to find someone who is happy for you.
Margaret Miller:: Most conversations are simply monologues delivered in the presence of a witness.
Mistinguette:: A kiss can be a comma, a question mark, or an exclamation point. That's the basic spelling that every woman ought to know.
Margaret Mitchell:: Until you lose your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was or what freedom really is.
Margaret Mitchell:: Life's under no obligation to give us what we expect.
Maria Mitchell:: Study as if you were going to live forever; live as if you were going to die tomorrow.
Nancy Mitford:: I love children: especially when they cry, for then someone takes them away.
Nancy Mitford:: To fall in love you have to be in the state of mind for it to take, like a disease.
Marilyn Monroe:: I have too many fantasies to be a housewife. I guess I am a fantasy.
Marilyn Monroe:: I've been on a calendar, but never on time.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu:: I prefer liberty to chains of diamonds.
Mary Tyler Moore:: You can't be brave if you've only had wonderful things happen to you.
Hannah More:: Going to the opera, like getting drunk, is a sin that carries its own punishment with it.
Mother Teresa:: Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person.
Mother Teresa:: Loneliness is the most terrible poverty.
Mother Teresa:: Love is a fruit in season at all times, and within reach of every hand.
Ethel Watts Mumford:: Knowledge is power, if you know it about the right person.
Iris Murdoch:: Falling out of love is very enlightening. For a short while you see the world with new eyes.
Iris Murdoch:: Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
Iris Murdoch:: We can only learn to love by loving.
Joyce A. Myers:: Teachers can change lives with just the right mix of chalk and challenges.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M

N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Carry Nation:: (on smoking) I want all hellions to quit puffing that hell fume in God's clean air.
Martina Navratilova:: Just go out there and do what you have to do.
Patricia Neal:: I may be a dumb blonde, but I'm not that blonde.
Cynthia Nelms:: Nobody really cares if you're miserable, so you might as well be happy.
Dorothy Nevill:: The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing in the right place but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.
Anais Nin:: I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.
Anais Nin:: It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.
Anais Nin:: Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.
Anais Nin:: The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.
Anais Nin:: We don't see things as they are. We see them as we are.
Kathleen Norris:: When you are unhappy, is there anything more maddening than to be told that you should be contented with your lot?

A B C D E F G H I J K L M

N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Edna O'Brien:: The vote means nothing to women. We should be armed.
Caroline Elizabeth Sarah (Sheridan) Norton:: We have been friends together in sunshine and in shade.
Marie O'Conner:: It's not so much how busy you are, but why you are busy. The bee is praised; the mosquito is swatted.
Flannery O'Connor:: Everywhere I go I'm asked if the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
Catherine O'Hara:: Night time is really the best time to work. All the ideas are there to be yours because everyone else is asleep.
Georgia O'Keeffe:: Nobody sees a flower really, it is so small. We haven't time, and to see takes time – like to have a friend takes time.
Georgia O'Keeffe:: To create one's own world in any of the arts takes courage.
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis:: Sex is a bad thing because it rumples the clothes.
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis:: What is sad for women of my generation is that they weren't supposed to work if they had families. What were they going to do when the children are grown? Watch the raindrops coming down the windowpane?

A B C D E F G H I J K L M

N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Dorothy Parker:: Brevity is the soul of lingerie.
Dorothy Parker:: Every year, back comes Spring, with nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off and the ground all mucked up with plants.
Dorothy Parker:: His voice was as intimate as the rustle of sheets.
Dorothy Parker:: I'm never going to be famous. I don't do anything, not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don't even do that any more.
Dorothy Parker:: One more drink and I'll be under the host.
Dorothy Parker:: The best way to keep children at home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant – and let the air out of their tires.
Dorothy Parker:: The two most beautiful words in the English language are "check enclosed."
Dorothy Parker:: (book review) This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
Dorothy Parker:: (suggested for her tombstone)This is on me.
Dorothy Parker:: (telegram to friend who had given birth) Dear Mary: We all knew you had it in you.
Dorothy Parker:: Four be the things I am wiser to know: Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe.
Dorothy Parker:: Misfortune, and recited misfortune especially, may be prolonged to the point where it ceases to excite pity and arouses only irritation.
Dorothy Parker:: There's a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.
Dolly Parton:: The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.
Mildred Webster Pepper:: The mistake a lot of politicians make is in forgetting they've been appointed and thinking they've been anointed.
Marilyn Peterson:: You don't die of a broken heart, you only wish you did.
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps:: Happiness must be cultivated. It is like character. It is not a thing to be safely let alone for a moment, or it will run to weeds.
Heanne Philips:: All the world's a cage.
Monica Piper:: A man on a date wonders if he'll get lucky. The woman already knows.
Gloria Pitzer:: In parts of the world, people still pray in the streets. In this country they're called pedestrians.
Susanna Pomeory:: If at first you don't succeed, why go on and make a fool of yourself?
Sally Poplin:: Some couples go over their budgets very carefully every month, others just go over them.
Beatrix Potter:: Thank goodness I was never sent to school: it would have rubbed off some of the originality.
Ivy Baker Priest:: The world is round, and the place which may seem like the end may also be the beginning.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M

N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Gilda Radner:: I base my fashion taste on what doesn't itch.
Gilda Radner:: I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it without knowing what's going to happen next.
Ayn Rand:: He had a big head and a face so ugly it became almost fascinating.
Helen Reddy:: If I have to, I can do anything. I am strong, I am invincible, I am Woman.
Myrtle Reed:: Lots of people think they're charitable if they give away their old clothes and things they don't want.
Agnes Repplier:: Humor distorts nothing, and only false gods are laughed off their pedestals.
Agnes Repplier:: The tourist may complain of other tourists, but he would be lost without them.
Wynetka Ann Reynolds:: Anyone who says you can't see a thought simply doesn't know art.
Adrienne Rich:: Lying is done with words and also with silence.
Ann Richards:: Teaching was the hardest work I had ever done, and it remains the hardest work I have done to date.
Joan Rivers:: I have flabby thighs, but fortunately my stomach covers them.
Joan Rivers:: I succeeded by saying what everyone else is thinking.
Joan Rivers:: I told my mother-in-law that my house was her house, and she said, "Get the hell off my property."
Joan Rivers:: If God wanted us to bend over he'd put diamonds on the floor.
Joan Rivers:: There is not one female comic who was beautiful as a little girl.
Kelly Robinson:: Things are always darkest just before they go pitch black.
Eleanor Roosevelt:: Friendship with one's self is all important, because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world.
Eleanor Roosevelt:: I could not, at any age, be content to take my place by the fireside and simply look on. Life was meant to be lived. Curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.
Eleanor Roosevelt:: You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M

N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Jacqueline Roque (wife of Pablo Picasso):: If my husband ever met a woman on the street who looked like one of his paintings he would faint.
Christina Georgina Rossetti:: Love is like a rose, the joy of all the earth.
Christina Georgina Rossetti:: My heart is like a singing bird.
Christina Georgina Rossetti:: Better by far you should forget and smile than that you should remember and be sad.
Roseanne:: My husband and I didn't sign a pre-nuptial agreement. We signed a mutual suicide pact.
Roseanne:: Experts say you should never hit your children in anger. When is a good time? When you're feeling festive?
Roseanne:: In Tulsa, restaurants have signs that say, "Sorry, we're open."
Helen Rowland:: A husband is what's left of the lover after the nerve has been extracted.
Helen Rowland:: Before marriage, a man will lay down his life for you; after marriage he won't even lay down his newspaper.
Helen Rowland:: Every man wants a woman to appeal to his better side, his nobler instincts, and his higher nature – and another woman to help him forget them.
Helen Rowland:: Never trust a husband too far or a bachelor too near.
Helen Rowland:: The follies which a man regrets the most in his life are those which he didn't commit when he had the opportunity.
Helen Rowland:: Before marriage, a man will lie awake all night thinking about something you've said. After marriage, he'll fall asleep before you finish saying it.
Rita Rudner:: Before I met my husband I'd never fallen in love, though I'd stepped in it a few times.
Rita Rudner:: My mother buried three husbands – and two of them were only napping.
Rita Rudner:: My mother is such a lousy cook that Thanksgiving at her house is a time of sorrow.
Rita Rudner:: To attract men, I wear a perfume called "New Car Interior."
Rita Rudner:: Whenever I date a guy, I think, is this the man I want my children to spend their weekends with?
Rita Rudner:: I want to have children, but my friends scare me. One of my friends told me she was in labor for 36 hours. I don't even want to do anything that feels good for 36 hours.
Rita Rudner:: My husband and I are either going to buy a dog or have a child. We can't decide whether to ruin our carpet or ruin our lives.
Roseanne:: I figure that if the children are alive when I get home, I've done my job.
Dora Russell:: We want far better reasons for having children than not knowing how to prevent them.
Rosalind Russell:: Success is a public affair. Failure is a private funeral.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M

N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Patsy H. Sampson:: Human successes, like human failures, are composed of one action at a time and achieved by one person at a time.
George Sand:: There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved.
May Sarton:: Women are at last becoming persons first and wives second, and that is as it should be.
Dorothy Sayers:: As I grow older and older, / And totter toward the tomb, / I find that I care less and less / Who goes to bed with whom.
Zenna Schaffer:: Give a man a fish and he has food for a day. Teach him how to fish and you can get rid of him of the entire weekend.
Anne Sexton:: It doesn't matter who my father was. It matters who I remember he was.
Anne Wilson Schaef:: Getting to the top isn't bad, and it's probably best done as an afterthought.
Margaret Sherwood:: In great moments life seems neither right nor wrong, but something greater: it seems inevitable.
Beverly Sills:: You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don't try.
Cornelia Otis Skinner:: Women's virtue is man's greatest invention.
Grace Slick:: No matter how big or soft or warm your bed is, you still have to get out of it.
Liz Smith:: You can't build a reputation on what you intend to do.
Margaret Smith:: I don't visit my parents often because Delta Airlines won't wait in the yard while I run in.
Susan Sontag:: Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.
Susan Sontag:: Sanity is a cozy lie.
Janet Sorensen:: I love my kids, but I wouldn't want them for friends.
Muriel Spark:: One should only see a psychiatrist out of boredom.
Gertrude Stein:: When they are alone they want to be with others, and when they are with others they want to be alone. After all, human beings are like that.
Gloria Steinem:: Most women's magazines simply try to mold women into bigger and better consumers.
Gloria Steinem:: I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.
Gladys Browyn Stern:: Silent gratitude isn't much use to anyone.
Harriet Beecher Stowe:: The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.
Meryl Streep:: Instant gratification is not soon enough.
Muriel Strode:: Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
Annie Sullivan:: We all like stories that make us cry. It's so nice to feel sad when you've nothing in particular to feel sad about.
Annie Sullivan:: The truth is not wonderful enough to suit the newspapers, so they enlarge upon it, and invent ridiculous embellishments.
Baroness Edith Summerskill:: Nagging is the repetition of unpalatable truths.
Gloria Swanson:: All creative people should be required to leave California for three months every year.
Anne Sophie Swetchine:: To love deeply in one direction makes us more loving in all others.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M

N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Jane Taylor:: Who ran to help me when I fell, and would some pretty story tell, or kiss the place to make it well? My mother.
Sara Teasdale:: No one worth possessing can be quite possessed.
Josephine Tey:: Lack of education is an extraordinary handicap when one is being offensive.
Margaret Thatcher:: Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't.
Margaret Thatcher:: If you just set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time, and you would achieve nothing.
Margaret Thatcher:: No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he'd only had good intentions – he had money, too.
Margaret Thatcher:: Success is having a flair for the thing that you are doing, knowing that is not enough, that you have got to have hard work and a sense of purpose.
Margaret Thatcher:: You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it.
Lily Tomlin:: Why is it when we talk to God we're said to be praying, but when God talks to us we're schizophrenic?
Sophie Tucker:: I've been rich and I've been poor. Rich is better.
Judy Tenuta:: This guy says, "I'm perfect for you, 'cause I'm a cross between a macho man and a sensitive man." I said, "Oh, a gay trucker?"
Margaret Turnbull:: No man is responsible for his father. That was entirely his mother's affair.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M

N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Ernestine Ulmer:: Life is uncertain. Eat dessert first.
Linda Grace Updike:: If you talk enough, you don't feel you have to do anything.
Abigail Van Buren:: People who fight fire with fire usually end up with ashes.
Patricia H. Vance:: Do you want to trace your family tree? Run for public office.
Stephanie Vanderkellen:: If you don't show up at a party, people will assume you're fat.
Harriet Van Horne:: Cooking is like love. It should be entered into with abandon or not at all.
Harriet Van Horne:: There are days when any electrical appliance in the house, including the vacuum cleaner, offers more entertainment than the TV set.
Marie Egner von Eschenbach:: We are so vain that we even care for the opinions of those we don't care for.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M

N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Jane Wagner:: Our ability to delude ourselves may be an important survival tool.
Jane Wagner:: A sobering thought: what if, at this very moment, I am living up to my full potential?
Jane Wagner:: I personally think we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain.
Alice Walker:: Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for?
Alice Walker:: No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.
Barbara Walters:: Success can make you go one of two ways. It can make you a prima donna, or it can smooth the edges, take away the insecurities, let the nice things come out.
Mrs. Humphry (Augusta Arnold) Ward:: Truth has never been, can never be, contained in any one creed or system.
Christi Mary Warner:: A friend is one who knows all about you and likes you anyway.
Martha Washington:: The greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and not our circumstances.
Cathy Warner Weatherford:: What you teach your own children is what you really believe in.
Mary Webb:: If you stop to be kind, you must swerve often from your path.
Simone Weil:: All sins are attempts to fill voids.
Anita Weiss:: I moved to New York City for my health. I'm paranoid and New York was the only place where my fears were justified.
Eudora Welty:: Never think you've seen the last of anything.
Jessamyn West:: It is very easy to forgive others their mistakes. It takes more grit and gumption to forgive them for having witnessed your own.
Jessamyn West:: Memory is a magnet. It will pull to it and hold only material nature has designed it to attract.
Jessamyn West:: We want the facts to fit the preconceptions. When they don't, it is easier to ignore the facts than to change the preconceptions.
Mae West:: I believe in censorship. I made a fortune out of it.
Mae West:: I feel like a million tonight – but one at a time.
Mae West:: I wrote the story myself. It's about a girl who lost her reputation and never missed it.
Mae West:: It is better to be looked over than overlooked.
Mae West:: It's hard to be funny when you have to be clean.
Mae West:: It's not the men in my life that count, it's the life in my men.
Mae West:: Keep a diary, and someday it'll keep you.
Mae West:: Loves conquers all things except poverty and toothache.
Mae West:: Say what you want about long dresses, but they cover a multitude of shins.
Mae West:: To err is human, but it feels divine.
Mae West:: Virtue has its own reward, but no box office.
Mae West:: When women go wrong, men go right after them.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M

N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Rebecca West:: People call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.
Edith Wharton:: If only we'd stop trying to be happy we'd have a pretty good time.
Edith Wharton:: Life is the only real counselor. Wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.
Katharine Whitehorn:: Why do born-again people so often make you wish they'd never been born the first time?
Faith Whittlesey:: Remember, Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but she did it backwards and in high heels.
Colleen Wilcox:: Teaching is the greatest act of optimism.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox:: Laugh and the world laughs with you, weep, and you weep alone.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox:: No question is ever settled until it is settled right.
Liz Winston:: I rely on my personality for birth control.
Liz Winston:: When mom found my diaphragm, I told her it was a bathing cap for my cat.
Shelley Winters:: All marriages are happy. It's trying to live together afterwards that causes all the problems.
Harriet Woods:: You can stand tall without standing on someone. You can be a victor without having victims.
Virginia Woolf:: Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.
Virginia Woolf:: The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.
Virginia Woolf:: Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title.
Virginia Woolf:: If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.
Claudia Young:: If age imparted wisdom, there wouldn't be any old fools.

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