Lesbianism Quotes

“Tell them there are no holes for your fingers in the masks of men. Tell them how could you ever even hope to love what you can't grab onto.”
― David Foster Wallace, Girl With Curious Hair

“Feminism is the theory. Lesbianism is the practice.”
― Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

“I had never thought I had much in common with anybody. I had no mother, no father, no roots, no biological similarities called sisters and brothers. And for a future I didn't want a split-level home with a station wagon, pastel refrigerator, and a houseful of blonde children evenly spaced through the years. I didn't want to walk into the pages of McCall's magazine and become the model housewife. I didn't even want a husband or any man for that matter. I wanted to go my own way. That's all I think I ever wanted, to go my own way and maybe find some love here and there. Love, but not the now and forever kind with chains around your vagina and a short circuit in your brain. I'd rather be alone.”
― Rita Mae Brown, Rubyfruit Jungle

“The woman who refuses to see her sexual organs as mere wood chips, designed to make the man's life more comfortable, is in danger of becoming a lesbian--an active, phallic woman, an intellectual virago with a fire of her own .... The lesbian body is a particularly pernicious and depraved version of the female body in general; it is susceptible to auto-eroticism, clitoral pleasure and self-actualization.”
― Sigmund Freud

“Lesbian is important to me," Phoebe says. "The world likes to act like it's a porn category, not an identity. It took me a while to realize it wasn't. I want other girls like me to know it's a beautiful word.”
― Meryl Wilsner, Cleat Cute

“I sit down wanting to write the great lesbian love story, but wacko bitches just keep coming out.”
― Anna Dorn, Perfume and Pain

“Caroline, beside herself, dragged me down to her, her breast was against mine, and by a circular movement seemed to caress it. The pretty strawberries which crowned her breasts, jealous at meeting others as fair, endeavoured to engage them in combat.”
― Félicité Choiseul-Meuse

“I've never slept with a girl. I couldn't. I wouldn't want to. That's abnormal and I'm not, although you can't be normal unless you do what you want and you can't be normal unless you love men. To do what I wanted would be normal, unless what I wanted was abnormal, in which case it would be abnormal to please myself and normal to do what I didn't want to do, which isn't normal.”
― Joanna Russ, The Female Man

“Dressing femme to the nines and then hanging on the arm of another woman all night—a fuck-you to straight men—can feel electrifying. And butch confidence, the grit to invert every traditional way a woman is supposed to look is wholly contagious.”
― Grace Perry, The 2000s Made Me Gay: Essays on Pop Culture

“I write from the Land of Violets, and from the Land of Spring...”
― Emily Dickinson, Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson

“...though she herself was a woman, it was still a woman she loved; and if the consciousness of being of the same sex had any effect at all, it was to quicken and deepen those feelings which she had had as a man.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“ταὶς κάλαισ᾿ ὔμιν <τὸ> νόημμα τὦμον
οὐ διάμειπτον”
― Sappho, Poems and Fragments

“The pain was there from the start--big and solid. I swallowed tides of it. Opened to more of it, to its weird safety.”
― Heather Lewis

“Her voice is liquid, streaming, sultry and cool like shade spooling over the edge of her mouth on a hot day.”
― Lancali ., I Fell in Love With Hope

“In that moment, just before expertly wiping my browser history, I felt less alone.”
― Ella Braidwood

“Take off they pants, I say, and men look like frogs to me. No matter how you kiss 'em, as far as I'm concern frogs is what they stay.”
― Alice Walker, The Color Purple

“I’ve always wanted to be a lesbian." Henry is looking dreamy and heavy-lidded; not fair when I am wound up and ready to jump on him. He yawns. "Oh, well, not in this lifetime. Too much surgery.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“All of this to say that when my mother was finally convinced I hadn't been raped into lesbianism, she said Oh well you just haven't found the right man”
― JOAN TIERNEY, September: A Map

“The chief reason why inverted sexuality in woman is still covered with the veil of mystery is that the homosexual act so far as woman is concerned, does not fall under the law.”
― Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis: A Medico-Legal Study

“She said she had always been indifferent towards men. In fact, she avoided balls.”
― Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis: A Medico-Legal Study

“Well, Misty Hoyt,” Sergei grinned. “Why don’t you go up there on the stage and strut your stuff? I’d like to see you pole dance.”
“What?”
“Pole dance.”
“Oh, pole dance,” I mumbled, slurping back saliva. I figured I would hardly be able to stand up, let alone pole dance. I had never pole danced in my whole life though Misty Hoyt had pole danced and had admitted as much at the bar to Andrei, but I hadn’t had time to catch up with all of Misty’s skills. This was definitely a hole in the planning of my backstory – giving me experience, as a pole dancer, I would not be able to fake. I would look utterly grotesque too, tattooed as I was; the vanity of self-consciousness never dies – I shuddered at the thought of me tattooed and pierced among those buff, golden, perfectly beautiful girls.
Whatever! I had to do it.
“Okay,” I said, “You are the boss, Mister Sergei.” I managed somehow to stand up, wobble, and then make my way, through tables and guests, and get over to the runway, and climb up onto it. It seemed very high. I weaved, tottered this way and that, and then somehow, I pulled myself together.
I pole danced with one of the pole dancers – me weaving around one pole, and she around the other. She was the petite, fine-featured golden Vietnamese girl I had noticed before. I’d seen movies of pole dancing, so I managed to fake it; and then I was the tattooed pierced clown, a freakish waif, I didn’t really have to be very good.
Then – I’m foggy about actually when – the golden Vietnamese girl and I were ordered to make love on the runway in the bright lights. The strobe lights had stopped. The other pole dancers had disappeared into the crowd. And now, except for the spotlights on the two of us, the whole place was subdued in dull amber light, a sort of nightclub twilight. The music went down, and it was quiet. I thought maybe I was hallucinating the silence. But no, it was real.”
― Gwendoline Clermont, Gwendoline Goes Underground

“But instead, my father sat us down for an explanation of lesbianism....

...I was mortified, and looked over at my girlfriend to see if this was all registering with her, but she was too busy daydreaming to notice the runaway train that was thundering thought the motel room. She hadn't spoken a single word to any of the adults so far on the trip, and even when she occasionally spoke to me, it was in such a eerily quiet tone that only a nine-year-old- girl or a dog could hear it. I'm pretty sure that Bob and Donna thought she was a deaf-mute, albeit one who could miraculously sense the vacuum seal breaking on a can of Pringles from a mile away.

I was eager to let the whole thing go, when my friend asked casually, 'But what's munching the carpet got to do with anything?”
― Samantha Bee, I Know I Am, But What Are You?

“But recently words like sapphic and queer feel a bit corporate and Tik-Tok-y. I don't use TikTok because it makes me feel like I'm having a seizure, but suddenly I can't open Instagram without being bombarded by some "sapphic booksta-grammer" or "queer radical sex therapist." And, I don't know, maybe I miss when homosexuality was a little less corny? I prefer the word lesbian because it conjures a less cringe, more libidinous past.”
― Anna Dorn

“Celine smiles sweetly. "Why would I be interested in boys," she asks the table innocently, "when there are girls?”
― Jennifer Lynn Barnes, Twelve

“I affirmed that fucking men years before did not make me less of a lesbian now, but she always remained a fraction dubious.”
― Valentine Glass, Jarring Sex

“she put her face against glinda's and kissed her. "hold out if you can," she murmured, and kissed her again. "hold out, my sweet.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“It is heavy work to live without women's society & I would for rather while away an hour with this girl, who has nothing in the world to boast but good humor, than not flirt at all.”
― Anne Lister, I Know My Own Heart: The Diaries, 1791-1840

“She is my wife in honor & in love & why not acknowledge her such openly & at once? I am satisfied to have her mind, & my on, at ease. The chain is golden & shared with M---. I love it better than any liberty.”
― Anne Lister, I Know My Own Heart: The Diaries, 1791-1840

“The Sex Wars are over, I've been told, and it always makes me want to ask who won. But my sense of humor may be a little obscure to women who have never felt threatened by the way most lesbians use and mean the words "pervert" and "queer." I use the word queer to mean more than lesbian. Since I first used it in 1980 I have always meant it to imply that I am not only a lesbian but a transgressive lesbian -- femme, masochistic, as sexually aggressive as the women I seek out, and as pornographic in my imagination and sexual activities as the heterosexual hegemony has ever believed.”
― Dorothy Allison, Skin: Talking About Sex, Class & Literature. SIGNED.

“Harriet didn't fit well into the world that whisked past. She didn't want a life common to most women or to live as a man. She desired something in between: to do the same as men could--free of question or scrutiny--but unabashedly as a woman. And when returning home each night, she wanted to share her excitement and successes and her disappointments and challenges with a woman like Barbara Wozniak.”
― Rob Osler, The Case of the Missing Maid