Jennifer > Jennifer's Quotes

“We are a generation of young women who were told we could do anything and instead heard that we had to be everything.”
― Courtney E. Martin, Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body

“I wish I were a girl again, half-savage and hardy, and free.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“They talk about “body language,” as if we all speak it the same. But everyone has their own dialect. For me right now, for example, swiveling my body right away and staring rigidly at the corner means, “I like you.” Because I didn’t run away and shut myself in the bathroom. I just hope he realizes that.”
― Sophie Kinsella, Finding Audrey

“The more you engage with the outside world, the more you’ll be able to turn down the volume on those worries. You’ll see that they’re unfounded. You’ll see that the world is a very busy and varied place and most people have the attention span of a gnat. They’ve already forgotten what happened. They don’t think about it. There will have been five more sensations since your incident.”
― Sophie Kinsella, Finding Audrey

“You have no idea what Linus is thinking. It could be good, it could be bad. Most likely, it's nothing at all. He's a boy. You'd better get used to that.”
― Sophie Kinsella, Finding Audrey

“think my father came to believe long ago what Rhett Butler told Scarlett: reputation is something people with character can do without. Character and character”
― Sally Mann, Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs

“Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere.”
― Elie Wiesel, Night

“An adult life...is a slowly emerging design, with shifting components, occasional dramatic disruptions, and fresh creative arrangements.”
― Jill Ker Conway

“To identify a person as a Southerner suggests not only that her history is inescapable and formative but that it is also impossibly present. Southerners live uneasily at the nexus between myth and reality, watching the mishmash amalgam of sorrow, humility, honor, graciousness, and renegade defiance play out against a backdrop of profligate physical beauty.”
― Sally Mann, Deep South

“The writer Lee Smith, who once had a New York copy editor query in the margin of her manuscript “Double-wide what?” tells a perfectly marvelous, spot-on story about Eudora Welty when she came to Hollins College, where Smith was a student. Welty read a short story in which one female character presents another with a marble cake. In the back of the audience Smith noted a group of leather-elbowed, goatee-sporting PhD candidates, all of whom were getting pretty excited. One started waving his hand as soon as she stopped reading and said, “Miz Welty, how did you come up with that powerful symbol of the marble cake, with the feminine and masculine, the yin and the yang, the Freudian and the Jungian all mixed together like that?” Smith reported that Welty looked at him from the lectern without saying anything for a while. Finally she replied mildly, “Well, you see, it’s a recipe that’s been in my family for some time.”
― Sally Mann, Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs

“The postmortem readjustment is one that many of us have had to make when our parents die. The parental door against which we have spent a lifetime pushing finally gives way, and we lurch forward, unprepared and disbelieving, into the rest of our lives.”
― Sally Mann

“To love is simply to allow another to be, live, grow, expand, become. An appreciation that demands and expects nothing in return.”
― Kate Millett, Sita

“While she was in transit, being unattached was exhilarating, but the moment she stopped, so did the high.”
― Whitney Otto, Eight Girls Taking Pictures

“It was hard not to feel resentment that men weren't forced into these choices. Some days she felt that she would spend all her time trying to forget her life before children because she loved them too much to be reminded of the heat of Rome in the summer and a beautiful girl who turned heads as she walked down an Italian strada.”
― Whitney Otto, Eight Girls Taking Pictures

“But, of course, you might be asking yourself, 'Am I a feminist? I might not be. I don't know! I still don't know what it is! I'm too knackered and confused to work it out. That curtain pole really still isn't up! I don't have time to work out if I am a women's libber! There seems to be a lot to it. WHAT DOES IT MEAN?'
I understand.
So here is the quick way of working out if you're a feminist. Put your hand in your pants.

a) Do you have a vagina? and
b) Do you want to be in charge of it?

If you said 'yes' to both, then congratulations! You're a feminist.”
― Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman

“I hate men who are afraid of women's strength.”
― Anaïs Nin, Henry and June: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931-1932

“I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself”
― Simone de Beauvoir

“As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“No woman can call herself free who does not control her own body.”
― Margaret Sanger

“Women may be the one group that grows more radical with age.”
― Gloria Steinem

“I'm not going to limit myself just because people won't accept the fact that I can do something else.”
― Dolly Parton

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“She wasn't a person to whom things happen. She did all the happenings.”
― Muriel Spark, Aiding and Abetting

“My imagination functions much better when I don't have to speak to people.”
― Patricia Highsmith

“One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others.”
― Simone de Beauvoir

“Forever is composed of nows.”
― Emily Dickinson

“People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.”
― Saul Bellow

“Never be afraid to sit awhile and think.”
― Lorraine Hansberry

“One of the best guides to how to be self-loving is to give ourselves the love we are often dreaming about receiving from others. There was a time when I felt lousy about my over-forty body, saw myself as too fat, too this, or too that. Yet I fantasized about finding a lover who would give me the gift of being loved as I am. It is silly, isn't it, that I would dream of someone else offering to me the acceptance and affirmation I was withholding from myself. This was a moment when the maxim "You can never love anybody if you are unable to love yourself" made clear sense. And I add, "Do not expect to receive the love from someone else you do not give yourself.”
― Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Women lose their lives not knowing they can do something different...I claimed myself and remade my life. Only when I knew I belonged to myself completely did I become capable of giving myself to another, of finding joy in desire, pleasure in our love, power in this body no one else owns.”
― Dorothy Allison