Ilwaddy > Ilwaddy's Quotes

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“For me, being a lesbian means three things—

First, it means that I love, cherish, and respect women in my mind, in my heart, and in my soul. This love of women is the soil in which my life is rooted. It is the soil of our common life together. My life grows out of this soil. In any other soil, I would die. In whatever ways I am strong, I am strong because of the power and passion of this nurturant love.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics

“All women are supposed to vilify any peer who deviates from the accepted norm of femininity, and most do. What is remarkable is not that most do, but that some do not.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics

“It takes a great deal of courage and independence to decide to design your own image instead of the one that society rewards, but it gets easier as you go along.”
― Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch

“Security is the denial of life”
― Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch

“Reading was my first solitary vice (and led to all others). I read while I ate, I read in the loo, I read in the bath. When I was supposed to be sleeping, I was reading.”
― Germaine Greer

“Yet if a woman never lets herself go, how will she ever know how far she might have got? If she never takes off her high-heeled shoes, how will she ever know how far she could walk or how fast she could run?”
― Germaine Greer

“Many a housewife staring at the back of her husband's newspaper, or listening to his breathing in bed is lonelier than any spinster in a rented room.”
― Germaine Greer

“Is it too much to ask that women be spared the daily struggle for superhuman beauty in order to offer it to the caresses of a subhumanly ugly mate?”
― Germaine Greer

“It is often falsely assumed, even by feminists, that sexuality is the enemy of the female who really wants to develop these aspects of her personality, and this is perhaps the most misleading aspect of movements like the National Organization of Women. It was not the insistence upon her sex that weakened the American woman student's desire to make something of her education, but the insistence upon a passive sexual role”
― Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch

“In my own case, I had to train myself out of that phony smile, which is like a nervous tic on every teenage girl. And this meant that I smiled rarely, for in truth, when it came down to real smiling, I had less to smile about. My 'dream' action for the women's liberation movement: a smile boycott, at which declaration all women would instantly abandon their 'pleasing' smiles, henceforth smiling only when something pleased them.”
― Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution

“It would take a denial of all cultural tradition for women to produce even a true 'female' art. For a woman who participates in (male) culture must achieve and be rated by standards of a tradition she had no part in making - and certainly there is no room in that tradition for a female view, even if she could discover what it was.”
― Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution

“...childbirth is at best necessary and tolerable. It is not fun.
(Like shitting a pumpkin, a friend of mine told me when I inquired about the Great-Experience-You-Are-Missing.)”
― Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution

“When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values[...].”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Woman Destroyed

“What an odd thing a diary is: the things you omit are more important than those you put in.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Woman Destroyed

“One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, and compassion”
― Simone de Beauvoir

“Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“Change your life today. Don't gamble on the future, act now, without delay.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Book of Positive Quotations

“Fathers never have exactly the daughters they want because they invent a notion a them that the daughters have to conform to.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Woman Destroyed

“There is no discovery without risk and what you risk reveals what you value.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

“When she bleeds the smells I know change colour. There is iron in her soul on those days. She smells like a gun.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

“Life is very hard. The only people who really live are those who are harder than life itself.”
― Nawal El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero

“They said, “You are a savage and dangerous woman.”
I am speaking the truth. And the truth is savage and dangerous.”
― Nawal El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero