Top 31 Quotes & Sayings by Nancy Friday

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American author Nancy Friday.

Last updated on September 18, 2024.

Nancy Colbert Friday was an American author who wrote on the topics of female sexuality and liberation. Her writings argue that women have often been reared under an ideal of womanhood, which was outdated and restrictive, and largely unrepresentative of many women's true inner lives, and that openness about women's hidden lives could help free women to truly feel able to enjoy being themselves. She asserts that this is not due to deliberate malice, but due to social expectation, and that for women's and men's benefit alike it is healthier that both be able to be equally open, participatory and free to be accepted for who and what they are.

American - Author | August 27, 1933 - November 5, 2017

Source: Wikipedia

I like the company of men. I've never been welcome in those groups, but then I would no more go to a consciousness-raising group and talk about my intimate life with my husband than fly to the moon. I never understood all that.

Nancy Friday

The older I get the more of my mother I see in myself.

Nancy Friday

Because society would rather we always wore a pretty face, women have been trained to cut off anger.

Nancy Friday

Women's behavior in handling beauty, even before feminism, was to deny they had any. Don't hate me because I'm beautiful.

Nancy Friday

If women really want equality, we have to wipe the slate clean. It no longer matters in the largest sense what men did to us for the last 200 or 300 years.

Nancy Friday

I think biologically we are attracted to more than one person, but given society and our needs, monogamy works better.

Nancy Friday

To say something nice about yourself, this is the hardest thing in the world for people to do. They'd rather take their clothes off.

Nancy Friday

Dreams are the expression of the unconscious while we are asleep.

Nancy Friday

Fantasy isn't something you run out of.

Nancy Friday

The debt of gratitude we owe our mother and father goes forward, not backward. What we owe our parents is the bill presented to us by our children.

Nancy Friday

Inside every adult male is a denied little boy.

Nancy Friday

When I stopped seeing my mother through the eyes of a child, I saw the woman who helped me give birth to myself.

Nancy Friday

Blaming mother is just a negative way of clinging to her still.

Nancy Friday

I'm sure it's why I'm such an odd duck in my feminist generation, because I've always been equally fair to men.

Nancy Friday

I think the thing I miss most in our age is our manners. It sounds so old-fashioned in a way. But even bad people had good manners in the old days, and manners hold a community together, and manners hold a family together; in a way, they hold the world together.

Nancy Friday

For instance, in group therapy, I'll have people stand up, show off, give a speech about themselves as though they've just died and have to give a eulogy. Even with this explicit permission - even an order - to say something nice about themselves, this is the hardest thing in the world for people to do. They'd rather take their clothes off.

Nancy Friday

Spontaneous love admits errors, hesitations and human failings. It can be tested and repaired.

Nancy Friday

In a baby's first months, the earliest patterns of intimacy or distrust are forever grooved into his soul.

Nancy Friday

All my writing has been an effort to sort out the paradoxes of my life.

Nancy Friday

Sexuality is the great field of battle between biology and society.

Nancy Friday

Do women dress for men or women? I’ve always wondered why that eternally provocative question is put in terms of approval - as if the heart of the matter, the answer, were indeed a question of approval by either sex. But the question is never satisfactorily answered because it is incorrectly posed. It’s disapproval, the fear of it, that motivates most women, and with disapproval it doesn’t matter where it comes from.

Nancy Friday

Oh, I know all about my mother and me,' you may say. 'All that business with my mother was over years ago.' You don't and it wasn't.

Nancy Friday

To say something nice about themselves, this is the hardest thing in the world for people to do.

Nancy Friday

After sex, men fear too much intimacy; they want to separate again. Women want to talk, to continue the merging, melting fusion into one. Postcoital conversations keep the woman's power alive. Through unconscious severance, by falling asleep, the man regains his self.

Nancy Friday