Quotes by 20th-century Women

My desk, most loyal friend
thank you. You've been with me on
every road I've taken.
My scar and my protection.

Marina Tsvetaeva

A man in love is incomplete until he has married. Then he's finished.

Come on girls! Do you believe in love? Cause I got something to say about it.

It's not the most intellectual job in the world, but I do have to know the letters.

In tomorrow's world we must all work together as hard as ever, if we're truly to be United Nations

Expecting to be able to get rid of the competitive drive, first of all, flies in the face of human nature — and little girls certainly have this drive, as much as little boys do, or at least the little girls I have observed in my immediate family have it.

Our religion doesn't give women any human dignity. Women are considered slaves... I write against the religion because if women want to live like human beings, they will have to live outside the religion and Islamic law.

Housework is a breeze. Cooking is a pleasant diversion. Putting up a retaining wall is a lark. But teaching is like climbing a mountain.

You can't accomplish anything worthwhile if you inhibit yourself

When you least expect it, someone may actually listen to what you have to say.

As far as I can make out, women's friendships with each other are based on a gush of lies and pretty speeches that mean nothing. You'd think they were all wolves trying to seduce each other the way they flatter and flirt when they're together.

My studies gave me only a very superficial knowledge of philosophy but sharpened my interest in it. I benefited greatly from being a teacher—that is, from being able to spend a great deal of time reading, writing and educating myself.

Simone de Beauvoir

I have repeatedly said, when asked, that if the stories about me helped inspired our troops and rally a nation, then perhaps there was some good. However, I am still confused as to why they chose to lie and try to make me a legend, when the real heroics — of my fellow soldiers that day — were legendary.

Contention is inseparable from creating knowledge. It is not contention we should try to avoid, but discourses that attempt to suppress contention.

You can only perceive real beauty in a person as they get older.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is stoned to death.

If the whiteness they pursue is cool and haughty and blank,
history is uncool, reaches out gawkily for affinities, asserts itself boldly,
threatens to mark, to break through and stain the primed white canvas
that is their life.
For, having primed it, they do not know where to start,
how to make a mark. They are alone in the world, a small new
island of whiteness. Or so they think; they do not know, or perhaps
they do not want to know, that the neighbourhood is full of people
like them. Thus they are steeped in its silence.

Why would scientists dedicated to uncovering the truth about the natural world deliberately misrepresent the work of their own colleagues? Why would they spread accusations with no basis? Why would they refuse to correct their arguments once they had been shown to be incorrect? And why did the press continue to quote them, year after year, even as their claims were shown, one after another, to be false?

a question i have for whoever runs these sites—where do you get all these pictures from? i can't even tell where i was when i took most of these!

People who refer to themselves as intellectuals are automatically commiting a social crime and, also, an error.

Everything that I have told you is, of course, a fairy tale. Life is magical, after all. Nothing is safe and everything changes.

Trina Schart Hyman

Wait," I say. "I think you're mistaken. Saying there is no dream is the same as saying everything is a dream. Isn't it? Everyone's a dreamer? Extraordinary things happen all the time even when we're awake. What I meant to suggest to you, if indeed that was me in your dream doing the suggesting, is that there is only one world. This one. The dream is real. The ordinary is the wonderful. The wonderful is the ordinary.

About his plans to run the London Marathon:

I've set myself a target. I'm going for less than eleven-and-a-half days.

Oh, I don't read. I skulk about in search of quotations that might make me appear educated.

Tasha Alexander

I learned the hard way that just as I no longer have to save anyone, neither do I have to be saved.