" Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model's size
But when I start to tell them,
They think I'm telling lies.
I say,
It's in the reach of my arms
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,
The curl of my lips.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me."
— Maya Angelou

"One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that would tell one anything."
— Oscar Wilde

"Like a compass needle that points north, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. Always."
— Khaled Hosseini

"A man can sleep around, no questions asked, but if a woman makes nineteen or twenty mistakes she's a tramp.
"
— Joan Rivers

"Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain: But a woman who fears the Lord,
She shall be praised."
— Proverbs 31:30

"Woman is not made to be the admiration of all, but the happiness of one."
— Edmund Burke

"If you aren't the woman I think you are, then this isn't the world I thought it was."
— Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)

"A woman's destiny, they say, is not fulfilled until she holds in her arms her own little book."
— Caroline Mytinger (Headhunting in the Solomon Islands: Around the Coral Sea)

"She will not be simple and sweet.
She will not be what people tell her she should be."
— E. Lockhart (The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks)

"The way black women say "girl" can be magical. Frankly, I have no solid beliefs about the survival of consciousness after physical death. But if it's going to happen I know what I want to see after my trek toward the light. I want to see a black woman who will smile and say, "Girl....""
— Abigail Padgett (Blue)

"Who can find a virtuous woman?
For her price is far above rubies."
— Proverbs 31.10

"The culture of women in the church today is crippled by some very pervasive lies. "To be spiritual is to be busy. To be spiritual is to be disciplined. To be spiritual is to be dutiful." No, to be spiritual is to be in Romance with God. The desire to be romanced lies deep in the heart of every women. It is for such that you were made. Are you ARE romanced, and ever will be."
— John & Staci Elderedge

"Today I married myself and I became my own wife."
— Johnette Napolitano, Concrete Blonde

"From the poem " What is Charm ? "

Charm is the measure of attraction's power to chain the fleeting fancy
Of an hour and rival all the spell
Of beauty's dower.

A subtle grace of heart and mind
That flows with tactful sympathy;
The sweetest rose, If not the fairest ,
That garden knows.

A quick responsivness in word and deed,
A dignity and statliness at need,
The will to follow or the art to lead.

She to whom this most gracious gift is
Know has life's great potent factor for her own, and rules alike the Cottage and the throne."
— Louisa Caroll Thomas

""Listen to me, Amin," I said slowly. "Listen to me very carefully. Nothing is the same. Nothing will ever be the same again. There lives on this earth a woman who can be my friend and my lover. Do you understand that? Do you understand what a marvelous thing that is?"

"A friend is a friend," Uthman interrupted, "and a woman is a woman. You can't have them in one person. The whole world knows that."

"If that's what the whole world knows, ...then the whole world is wrong. I believed the whole world, and I lost her.""
— Barbara Cohen (Seven Daughters and Seven Sons)

"As Unto the bow the the cord is ,
So unto the man is woman;
Though she bends him, she obeys him,
Though she draws him , yet she follows:
Useless each without the other."
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"There is no weapon in the feminine armory to which men are so vulnerable as they are to a smile."
— Dorothy Dix

"A strong woman who recklessly throws away her strength, she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away."
— Thomas Hardy (Tess of the D'Urbervilles: Classic Collection)

"Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation..."
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

"It's hard to love a woman and do anything."
— Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

"My love, do you recall the object which we saw,
That fair, sweet, summer morn!
At a turn in the path a foul carcass
On a gravel strewn bed,

Its legs raised in the air, like a lustful woman,
Burning and dripping with poisons,
Displayed in a shameless, nonchalant way
Its belly, swollen with gases."
— Charles Baudelaire (Les Fleurs Du Mal)

"I am a bundle of nerves dressed up to look like a man!"
— Wilkie Collins (The Woman in White)

"A man chases a woman until she catches him."
— American Proverb.

"Selfishly, perhaps, Catti-brie had determined that the assassin was her own business. He had unnerved her, had stripped away years of training and discipline and reduced her to the quivering semblance of a frightened child. But she was a young woman now, no more a girl. She had to personally respond to that emotional humiliation, or the scars from it would haunt her to her grave, forever paralyzing her along her path to discover her true potential in life."
— R.A. Salvatore (Streams of Silver)

""A woman should have a set of screwdrivers, a cordless drill, and a black lace bra..."
"
— Pamela Redmond Satran

"Her antiquity in preceding and surviving succeeding tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible."
— James Joyce (Ulysses)

"Every poem is an infant labored into birth and I am drenched with sweating effort, tired from the pain and hurt of being a man, in the poem I transform myself into a woman."
— Jimmy Santiago Baca

"'I love you' is what people say when they have run out of words and can't say anything else. It is like reaching out a hand in desperation. "
— Thomas Perry

"A clever girl may pass through the phase of foolish miss on the way to sensible woman."
— Mary Lascelles (Jane Austen and Her Art)

"I say that almost everywhere there is beauty enough to fill a person's life if one would only be sensitive to it. but Henry says No: that broken beauty is only a torment, that one must have a whole beauty with man living in relation to it to have a rich civilization and art. . . . Is it because I am a woman that I accept what crumbs I may have, accept the hot-dog stands and amusement parks if I must, if the blue is bright beyond them and the sunset flushes the breasts of sea birds?"
— Elizabeth Coatsworth (Personal Geography: Almost and Autobiography)

"Read "The Story of O." Convince yourself that it was in fact written by a woman or someone who thinks like a woman."
— Whitney Otto (How to Make an American Quilt)

"I see myself..in those pages as she goes back and forth, enjoying simply enjoying the beauties of the moments then chastising herself for having ‘no edge’ being simple and worse, harmless."
— Michael Cunningham

"For lunch, we drove into the hills and parked in the dappled shade of a big sycamore, its powdery white bark like a woman's body against the uncanny blue sky."
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander)

"What manner of mind considers this holy estate [pregnancy] which women are privileged by the Almighty to attain as a slur upon the social conscience?"
— Grantly Dick-Read