A Quote by Jane Austen

I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman's fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men.
I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman's fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men." "Perhaps I shall. Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.
I always think it is kind of funny when it comes to wisdom, and I say God has a sense of humor, because my middle name is Solomon, and I love the Book of Proverbs which is written by Solomon, and I have read from the Book of Proverbs to start and end every day since I was 14.
In my opinion, the most important thing as a woman leader-and I learned this early through a whole bunch of great women who were in my life (and men, I have to say)-is that if you have a position of leadership and power and you don't use it in a different way, then you're wasting it. So when people used to say to me when I was the first woman president of PBS, "Well, you know, does that mean that as a woman you're going to be a different kind of president?" And I would say, "Well, I hope so!"
Long before I became a feminist in any explicit way, I had turned from writing love stories about women in which women were losers, and adventure stories about men in which the men were winners, to writing adventure stories about a woman in which the woman won. It was one of the hardest things I ever did in my life.
Proverbs, like the sacred books of each nation, are the sanctuary of the intuitions. That which the droning world, chained to appearances, will not allow the realist to say in his own words, it will suffer him to say in proverbs without contradiction.
I always think that today is the best day that there's ever been. The song that I'm working on is always the best song I've ever written. The woman I'm looking at is the most incomprehensibly beautiful woman I've ever seen. These dogs that I have now are, by far, the best dogs I've ever had - although, so were the last pair of dogs I had.
The woman who became the Duchesse d'Angoulême did indeed have painful memories, but she was not only very brave but I would say she had "nerves of steel." As I wrote in the book, one woman, defeated, one woman, defiant.
I think every woman in our culture is a feminist. They may refuse to articulate it, but if you were to take any woman back 40 years and say, 'Is this a world you want to live in?' They would say, 'No.'
Stupid as a man, say the women: cowardly as a woman, say the men. Stupidity in a woman is unwomanly.
Talk—half-talk, phrases that had no need to be finished, abstractions, Chinese bells played on with cotton-tipped sticks, mock orange blossoms painted on porcelain. The muffled, close, half-talk of soft-fleshed women. The men she had embraced, and the women, all washing against the resonance of my memory. Sound within sound, scene within scene, woman within woman—like acid revealing an invisible script. One woman within another eternally, in a far-reaching procession, shattering my mind into fragments, into quarter tones which no orchestral baton can ever make whole again.
For a woman to say she has had a dalliance with another woman is quite trendy these days. I do not like trendiness. Life isn't about dalliances - it's about individuals. You come across people in your life that you find very interesting. It's not about something flighty.
I want to quit. Not performing, but being a woman altogether. I want to throw my hands in the air, after reading a mean Twitter comment, and say, 'All right! You got it. You figured me out. I'm not pretty. I'm not thin. I do not deserve to use my voice. I'll start wearing a burqa and start waiting tables at a pancake house. All my self-worth is based on what you can see.' But then I think, F*** that ... I am a woman with thoughts and questions and s*** to say. I say if I'm beautiful. I say if I'm strong. You will not determine my story - I will.
The popular songs that were written in the 1920s and '30s, '40s and early '50s were written by veterans - mostly men who'd had experience in life. How can you write a lyric if you haven't really lived life?
A woman cannot do the thing she ought, which means whatever perfect thing she can, in life, in art, in science, but she fears to let the perfect action take her part and rest there: she must prove what she can do before she does it, -- prate of woman's rights, of woman's mission, woman's function, till the men (who are prating, too, on their side) cry, A woman's function plainly is... to talk. Poor souls, they are very reasonably vexed!
We are born of woman, we are conceived in the womb of woman, we are engaged and married to woman. We make friendship with woman and the lineage continued because of woman. When one woman dies, we take another one, we are bound with the world through woman. Why should we talk ill of her, who gives birth to kings? The woman is born from woman; there is none without her. Only the One True Lord is without woman
I think that's what, to me, also talks about the silences in my work - as a woman, a woman writer, when you say, "no" or you have to say, "no" so often to the writing occasion, those occasions don't really come back.
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