Menstruation Quotes

“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

“Women complain about premenstrual syndrome, but I think of it as the only time of the month that I can be myself.”
― Roseanne Barr

“The great mother whom we call Innana gave a gift to woman that is not known among men, and this is the secret of blood. The flow at the dark of the moon, the healing blood of the moon’s birth - to men, this is flux and distemper, bother and pain. They imagine we suffer and consider themselves lucky. We do not disabuse them.

In the red tent, the truth is known. In the red tent, where days pass like a gentle stream, as the gift of Innana courses through us, cleansing the body of last month’s death, preparing the body to receive the new month’s life, women give thanks — for repose and restoration, for the knowledge that life comes from between our legs, and that life costs blood.”
― Anita Diamant, The Red Tent

“I bleed twelve weeks a year, so I know a thing or two about bloodstains.”
― Amanda Lovelace, The Witch Doesn't Burn in This One

“A woman must wait for her ovaries to die before she can get her rightful personality back. Post-menstrual is the same as pre-menstrual; I am once again what I was before the age of twelve: a female human being who knows that a month has thirty day, not twenty-five, and who can spend every one of them free of the shackles of that defect of body and mind known as femininity.”
― Florence King

“To be a woman is a horror I can little comprehend.”
― Kat Dunn, Hungerstone

“I have periods now, like normal girls; I too am among the knowing, I too can sit out volleyball games and go to the nurse's for aspirin and waddle along the halls with a pad like a flattened rabbit tail wadded between my legs, sopping with liver-colored blood.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye

“Gradually my whole concept of time changed until I thought of a month as having twenty-five days of humanness and five others when I might just as well have been an animal in a steel trap.”
― Florence King

“It was 1976.
It was one of the darkest days of my life when that nurse, Mrs. Shimmer, pulled out a maxi pad that measured the width and depth of a mattress and showed us how to use it. It had a belt with it that looked like a slingshot that possessed the jaw-dropping potential to pop a man's head like a gourd. As she stretched the belt between the fingers of her two hands, Mrs. Shimmer told us becoming a woman was a magical and beautiful experience.

I remember thinking to myself, You're damn right it had better be magic, because that's what it's going to take to get me to wear something like that, Tinkerbell! It looked like a saddle. Weighed as much as one, too. Some girls even cried.
I didn't.
I raised my hand.
"Mrs. Shimmer," I asked the cautiously, "so what kind of security napkins do boys wear when their flower pollinates? Does it have a belt, too?"
The room got quiet except for a bubbling round of giggles.
"You haven't been paying attention, have you?" Mrs. Shimmer accused sharply. "Boys have stamens, and stamens do not require sanitary napkins. They require self control, but you'll learn that soon enough."
I was certainly hoping my naughty bits (what Mrs. Shimmer explained to us was like the pistil of a flower) didn't get out of control, because I had no idea what to do if they did.”
― Laurie Notaro, The Idiot Girls' Action-Adventure Club: True Tales from a Magnificent and Clumsy Life

“Leaders bleed, period.”
― Silvia Young, My FemTruth: Scandalous Survival Stories

“Once we start to work with Feminine power we begin to see that it is not our minds that are in control of this power – it ebbs and flows with the movements of the planets, the procession of the seasons, the moons and tides, our own internal cycles of menstruality, anniversaries, the events around us. All these and more impact our experience and expressions of power. We learn to become aware of these various patterns and their impact on us and work more consciously with rather than against or in spite of them. We learn that they are all part of the same process. We open towards the energy, rather than shut down to it. We learn to trust the flow.”
― Lucy H. Pearce, Burning Woman

“There is a bench in the back of my garden shaded by Virginia creeper, climbing roses, and a white pine where I sit early in the morning and watch the action. Light blue bells of a dwarf campanula drift over the rock garden just before my eyes. Behind it, a three-foot stand of aconite is flowering now, each dark blue cowl-like corolla bowed for worship or intrigue: thus its common name, monkshood. Next to the aconite, black madonna lilies with their seductive Easter scent are just coming into bloom. At the back of the garden, a hollow log, used in its glory days for a base to split kindling, now spills white cascade petunias and lobelia.

I can't get enough of watching the bees and trying to imagine how they experience the abundance of, say, a blue campanula blosssom, the dizzy light pulsing, every fiber of being immersed in the flower. ...

Last night, after a day in the garden, I asked Robin to explain (again) photosynthesis to me. I can't take in this business of _eating light_ and turning it into stem and thorn and flower...

I would not call this meditation, sitting in the back garden. Maybe I would call it eating light. Mystical traditions recognize two kinds of practice: _apophatic mysticism_, which is the dark surrender of Zen, the Via Negativa of John of the Cross, and _kataphatic mysticism_, less well defined: an openhearted surrender to the beauty of creation. Maybe Francis of Assissi was, on the whole, a kataphatic mystic, as was Thérèse of Lisieux in her exuberant momemnts: but the fact is, kataphatic mysticism has low status in religious circles. Francis and Thérèse were made, really made, any mother superior will let you know, in the dark nights of their lives: no more of this throwing off your clothes and singing songs and babbling about the shelter of God's arms.

When I was twelve and had my first menstrual period, my grandmother took me aside and said, 'Now your childhood is over. You will never really be happy again.' That is pretty much how some spiritual directors treat the transition from kataphatic to apophatic mysticism.

But, I'm sorry, I'm going to sit here every day the sun shines and eat this light. Hung in the bell of desire.”
― Mary Rose O'Reilley, The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd

“Women's regular bleeding engenders phantoms.”
― Paracelsus

“Women are females and men are males. According to gynaecologists, women menstruate every month or so, while men, being male, do not menstruate or suffer during the monthly period. A women, being female, is naturally subject to monthly bleeding. When a women does not menstruate, she is pregnant. If she is pregnant, she becomes, due to pregnancy, less active for about a year.”
― Muammar Al-Qaddafi, The Green Book

“In terms of language, there were no separate words for female genitalia for thousands of years. That was mostly because women were considered pretty much the same as men, only of course flimsier, more poorly designed, and incapable of writing in the snow.”
― Elissa Stein and Susan Kim

“This is women’s way of feeling time pass, that sinister clockwork inching round the roundness of the body; the slow gathering of endometrial cells, a nesting, a fluffing of pillows ready to receive guests, the ripeness of the womb, fleshy and welcoming, all neat and tidy and, yes, ready to receive guests, even one, just a casual visitor, anything. And then realisation that the arrival time has been and gone, and no one is coming; the tearing of the wallpaper, great swathes of it, and tears of disappointment, of ageing, of loneliness. The womb revolts and shudders. The painters are in.”
― Emma van Straaten, Creep

“Menstruosity was the condition of being menstruous. And menstruous had once meant horribly filthy or polluted. Menstruous. Like monstrous. It came closest to explaining how I felt. Lizzie had called it “The Curse". She had never heard of menstruation and laughed when I said it.”
― Pip Williams, The Dictionary of Lost Words

“There were so many words to describe the bleeding. Menstrue was the same as catamenia. It meant unclean blood. But what blood was clean? It always left a stain.”
― Pip Williams, The Dictionary of Lost Words

“It was easy for me to understand this language of blood, pain, and creation that begins with physical substance itself when one is a woman.”
― Carmen Laforet, Nada

“Menstruation is just a way of your body letting go of something that is no longer needed.”
― Adriana Vandelinde, English for Her: Everything You Always Wanted to Know But Were Afraid to Ask

“she even contemplated having her womb taken out to eliminate periods altogether, which would surely be her greatest possible career move, a tactical hysterectomy for ambitious women with menstruation problems”
― Bernadine Evaristo

“Why should I be afraid of a little blood, I bleed a little every month and never die.”
― Ekta Kumar, Box of Lies: A Love Story, Without Love

“Menstruation is a small price you pay for being blessed with the grandest gift you can ever wish for, and that is, to have the privilege to give birth.”
― Tshetrim Tharchen, A Play of the Cosmos: Script of the Stars

“In another example, my wife, who has a PhD in mathematical physics, was quick to note that many cosmologists clutched to the idea that we may live in a steady-state universe, long after data from leading telescopes made it clear we do not. At the time, we learned that our expanding universe, birthed from a Big Bang, may one day recollapse and perhaps cycle endlessly. She wondered whether the steady-state cosmologists, most of whom have never menstruated, had a hard time thinking about and embracing cycles—something half the world's population lives with for most of their adult lives.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson

“Period? Ibuprofen, Netflix and recline!”
― Steven Magee

“[N]o one told me I was carrying the Beginning of the World.
The gibbous. The loom.”
― Sylvia Linsteadt, Our Lady of the Dark Country

“Making a poltergeist can be a simple recipe: allow a girl to have her first menstrual period, tell her she is a naughty girl for thinking dirty thoughts, punish her, bore her, disenfranchise her from her life, and wait. It is not a universal outcome. More than likely, you will summon nothing more than a moody teenager who slams her bedroom door and wishes aloud she had never been born. In exceptional cases, the dishes will fly off the shelves.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, The Curious Case of the Talking Mongoose

“We cannot imagine a God who bleeds like us.”
― Patricia Lynn Reilly, A God Who Looks Like Me

“None of my friends in high school showed any signs that their insides were on fire for a quarter of their lives. Were they just really good at pretending?”
― Tiffany Haddish

“Unfortunately, instead of a world where those who bear the physical burdens of reproduction—whether they reproduce or not—have equal footing, we have the opposite. The Ancient Greeks, the originators of Western medicine, labeled the female body as inferior, and the act of menstruation has been viewed as proof that women have troublesome physiology and are by nature dirty and toxic. Many religions and cultures have long carried that same torch based on the erroneous belief of impurity and the idea that menstrual blood is filthy and contains actual toxins that poison the body (and especially men, if they were to touch it). Women have been banned from places of worship, from preparing food, from having sex, and even from their own homes based on the supposed polluting powers of menstrual blood.”
― Jen Gunter, Blood: The Science, Medicine, and Mythology of Menstruation