Gender Relations Quotes

“Men who are afraid to feel must keep women around to do their feeling for them while dismissing us for the same supposedly "inferior" capacity to feel deeply. But in this way also, men deny themselves their own essential humanity, becoming trapped in dependency and fear.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“Lovers are not snails; they don't have to protrude from their shells and meet each other halfway. Meet me within your own self.”
― Jerzy Kosiński, Steps

“It was fun to see him becoming sententious again, glorying in a science he had invented, and as positive as a village soothsayer.

'So one should neither give nor receive?' I laughed. 'And if the lover is poor, his mistress indigent, then both she and he must tactfully let themselves and each other die?'

'Let them die,' he repeated.

I had accompanied him as far as the revolving glass door of the lobby.

'Let them die,' he said again. 'It's less dangerous. I can swear on my word of honor that I never gave a present or made a loan or an exchange of anything except . . . this . . .'

He waved both hands in a complicated gesture which fleetingly indicated his chest, his mouth, his genitals, his thighs. Thanks no doubt to my fatigue, I was reminded of an animal standing on its hind legs and unwinding the invisible. Then he resumed his strictly human significance, opened the door, and easily mingled with the night outside, where the sea was already a little paler than the sky.”
― Colette, The Pure and the Impure

“I tell yeh, Bright-eyes. Men and women? A bloody mess. Every time.”
― David Kudler, Risuko: A Kunoichi Tale

“Bless the ladies and their charming inconsistency! They demand to be treated like men, but they react like women.”
― Elizabeth Peters, The Deeds of the Disturber

“For what is a girl but a vessel made to hold the desires of men.”
― Lauren Groff, The Vaster Wilds

“Mother says there are locked rooms inside all women.
Sometimes, the men--they come with keys,
and sometimes, the men--they come with hammers.”
― Warsan Shire, Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head

“All he think about since us married is how to make me mind. He don't want a wife, he want a dog. (Walker 2000: 58)”
― Alice Walker, The Color Purple

“1. Men are easy to please but are not pleased for long before some new novelty must delight them.

2. Men are easy to make passionate but are unable to sustain it.

3. Men are always seeking soft women but find their lives in ruins without strong women.

4. Men must be occupied at all times otherwise they make mischief.

5. Men deem themselves weighty and women light. Therefore it is simple to tie a stone round their necks and drown them should they become too troublesome.

6. Men are best left in groups by themselves where they will entirely wear themselves out in drunkenness and competition. While this is taking place a woman may carry on with her own life unhindered.

7. Men are never never to be trusted with what is closest to your heart, and if it is they who are closest to your heart, do not tell them.

8. If a man asks you for money, do not give it to him.

9. If you ask a man for money and he does not give it to you, sell his richest possession and leave at once.

10. Your greatest strength is that every man believes he knows the sum and possibility of every woman.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry

“This friendship among women is something Samuel often talks about. Because the women share a husband but the husband does not share their friendships, it makes Samuel uneasy. It is confusing, I suppose. And it is Samuel's duty as a Christian minister to preach the bible's directive of one husband and one wife. Samuel is confused because ti him, since the women are friends and will do anything for one another - not always, but more often than anyone from America would expect - and since they giggle and gossip and nurse each other's children, then they must be happy with things as they are. (Walker 2000: 141)”
― Alice Walker, The Color Purple

“One was less in love with the boy afterwards, and a little inclined to hate him, as if he had trespassed on one’s privacy and inner freedom.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

“The beautiful pure freedom of a woman was infinitely more wonderful than any sexual love. The only unfortunate thing was that men lagged so far behind women in the matter. They insisted on the sex thing like dogs...And a woman had to yield. A man was like a child with his appetites. A woman had to yield him what he wanted, or like a child he would probably turn nasty and flounce away and spoil what was a very pleasant connection.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

“But that is how men are! Ungrateful and never satisfied. When you don’t have them they hate you because you won’t; and when you do have them they hate you again, for some other reason.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

“I never much understood the point of the world of men. How they fed off each other. How they motivated themselves. I mean, I got the purpose, but I navigated that world the way an astronaut would an alien landscape. Trying not to breathe the same air. Which was impossible, of course.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Hummingbird Salamander

“Was I terribly rude?' It was almost as if she might care a jot.

'Yes! You were frightful!' Cassy tugged at her locks playfully.

'As rude as I was to Mr Blackall?'

'No,' Cassy conceded, laughing. 'Nobody has ever, in the history of social intercourse between the two sexes, been as rude as you were to Mr Blackall. You set impossibly high standards with him, for all womankind.”
― Gill Hornby, Miss Austen

“In her every small movement she was the woman of the future, a type that would swagger and curse, fall headlong, flaming into the hell of war, be as brave and tough as men, take the overflowing diarrhea of nervous frontline troops without grimacing, speak loudly and devastatingly, kick brain matter off their shoes and go unhurriedly on. When he looked at Bern, Viktor saw the future, and it was lovely and clean and as equal as things between men and women, between prole and patrician, could be.”
― Lauren Groff, Delicate Edible Birds and Other Stories

“I do hate to have a man--any man--tell me anything in that faintly patronizing voice men use sometimes that begins: "The trouble with women...”
― Shirley Jackson, Just an Ordinary Day: The Uncollected Stories

“The Australian jewel beetle has sex with beer bottles.
The beetles are a light chocolate color with dimples all down their back and dark black legs and heads that peek out from underneath their carapeces. Their bodies are big and long instead of round, and they resemble cicadas more than they do ladybugs.
The male Australian jewel beetle is hardwired to like certain aspects about the female jewel beetle. They like females to be big, brown, and shiny. The bottles they make love to are bigger, browner, and shinier than any female could ever hope to be. In Australia, a certain type of bottle called stubbies overstimulates male jewel beetles. In a trash heap filled with bottles, you will often see every single stubby covered in male jewel beetles trying to get it on. The stubbies are what evolutionary psychologists call supernormal releasers. They are superstimuli, better than the real thing. The beetles will mate with these bottles even while being devoured by ants.”
― David Raney

“You tries tuh be so much-knowin'. You got tuh learn how tuh speak when you spokin to, come when youse called."

"Ah ain't got tuh do but two things--stay black and die," Sister Berry snapped.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Jonah's Gourd Vine

“The Director eyed her nervously, as though she were some unstable substance. Zoe, observing this, whispered to Frances, "I'm the sort of woman who scares the pants off that sort of man. They wait to be set upon.”
― Penelope Lively, Perfect Happiness

“There's a whole lot of things you don't know about niggers. And God forbid you should! There's a whole lot of things you don't know about white girls . . about yourself, Virginia. And God forbid you should! That's what we men are here for.”
― Waldo Frank, Holiday

“Like many women, she would always find it easier to feel for a male (except, of course, her husband, against whom she bore innumerable, lifelong, deadly grudges) than for any female.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables

“Rose, who teaches college, said, I had a student who wrote in a paper that she'd have a different attitude toward mortality if she'd been born male, because then, quote, I would've always gotten what I wanted in life. When I pointed out that this wasn't true, that it was not just hyperbolic but completely false, she doubled down. But men have all the power, she kept saying.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables

“What does it mean, said Rose, our stubborn Rose, to say that the world would be better off without men? Women are less violent, but what about all the other wicked traits, like racism and greed and malignant narcissism? There'd still be plenty of that.

Oh, I don't know, said Camellia. Just to have less violence--less warmongering, less bloodshed, less crime--wouldn't that be grand?”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables

“The crowd waited with bated breath
as the first neurologically-enhanced lobster
elected President of the United States
clambered toward the podium.
The lobster hovered over the microphone,
clamped its claws and rubbed its antennae.
A storm of neurons fired inside its
ganglia, and its mandibles burbled out
a rousing acceptance speech.
The men whooped and hollered
at the significance of the moment,
while the women, relegated to years of
waiting for their turn, clapped tepidly.”
― Pedro Íñiguez, Mexicans on the Moon: Speculative Poetry from a Possible Future

“The woman who contorts herself
into a pretzel. The woman who shape-shifts
in an effort to please. The mental marvel.
The woman who stands on a jutting rock
and does not throw herself
into the sea.”
― Ama Codjoe

“Men are shit. She has known this since Percy, who took her virginity on the sand dunes at Santa Cruz but never called her back for a third date. Since Jean-Claude, who let her fly from the country she loved and back to the one she hated, without ever thinking to follow. Since Lenny Lynden, who accepted Terra as her replacement as easily as pancakes instead of French toast. For as long as she has been a woman, Evelyn has understood the fundamental indifference of men.”
― Laura Elizabeth Woollett, Beautiful Revolutionary