Woman Quotes

“Women never bought Freud's idea of penis envy: who would want a shotgun when you can have an automatic?”
― Natalie Angier, Woman: An Intimate Geography

“The clitoris not only applauds when a women flaunts her mastery; it will give a standing ovation. In the multiple orgasm, we see the finest evidence that our lady Klitoris helps those who help themselves. It may take many minutes to reach the first summit, but once there the lusty mountaineer finds wings awaiting her. She does noy need to scramble back to the ground before scaling the next peak, but can glide like a raptor on currents of joy.”
― Natalie Angier, Woman: An Intimate Geography

“Perhaps eggs are like neurons, which also are not replenished in adulthood: they know too much. Eggs must plan the party. Sperm need only to show up- wearing top hat and tails, of course. ”
― Natalie Angier, Woman: An Intimate Geography

“We are all yeses. We are worthy enough, we passed inspection, we survived the great fetal oocyte extinctions. In that sense, at least -- call it a mechanospiritual sense -- we are meant to be. We are good eggs, every one of us.”
― Natalie Angier, Woman: An Intimate Geography

“Touch is... one of the most ancient transactions, a defiance of the plasma membrane and the loneliness it brought.”
― Natalie Angier, Woman: An Intimate Geography

“We may love men and we may live with men, but some of them have said stupendously inaccurate things about us, our bodies, and our psyches.”
― Natalie Angier, Woman: An Intimate Geography

“What is wrong with looking muscular? Muscles are beautiful. Strength is beautiful. Muscle tissue is beautiful. It is metabolically, medically, and philosophically beautiful. Muscles retreat when they're not used, but they will always come back if you give them good reason. No matter how old you get, your muscles never lose hope. Few cells of the body are as capable as muscle cells are of change and reformation, of achievement and transcendence.”
― Natalie Angier, Woman: An Intimate Geography

“Giving a girl the impression that girlhood is an extended bounce on Barney's knee is like prepping a young gazelle for life on the Serengeti by dipping it in cream.”
― Natalie Angier, Woman: An Intimate Geography

“Our minds hurtled outward in all directions. We became absurdly creative, Homo artifactus, intolerant of bare cave walls and naked clay pots.”
― Natalie Angier, Woman: An Intimate Geography

“Eternal love is a myth, but we make our myths, and we love them to death.”
― Natalie Angier, Woman: An Intimate Geography

“The brain is an organ of aggression, and there are many roads to this Rome of imagined conquests — so many that mental disorders, regardless of their particulars, often result in a derangement of our aggressive drive. Schizophrenics stand on the streetcorner screaming obscenely at passersby; depressives lie in their beds screaming mutely at themselves. Our gentle aggressions, the drive to be, prods us out of bed in the morning and draws us toward each other. And in each other we find what our aggressive brain desires: love. As we are wired for aggression, so we are wired to love. We are a lavishly loving species, aggressively sentimental. We are tirelessly in pursuit of fresh targets for our love. We love our children so long that they come to despise us for it. We love friends, books... We love answers. We love yesterday and next year. We love gods, for a god is there when all else fails, and God can keep all conduits of love alive — erotic, maternal, paternal, euphoric, infantile.”
― Natalie Angier, Woman: An Intimate Geography

“If your doctor has no experience with hysteroscopic myomectomies, find one who does; the procedure is the best first-line attack against symptomatic fibroids.”
― Natalie Angier, Woman: An Intimate Geography

“They talk about myths: the myth that links testosterone to libido, for example, in both men and women. If the myth were true, then these women should have no sex drive; they can’t, after all, respond to the testosterone their bodies produce. Some sex researchers have said as much about AIS patients—that they’re frigid, uninterested, dead in bed. The women themselves come close to spitting in rage at that sort of talk. Whether or not they manage to inflate their vaginas sufficiently to have intercourse, their erotic nature remains intact. They fantasize about sex. They are orgasmic. They lust when there is somebody worth lusting after.”
― Natalie Angier, Woman: An Intimate Geography

“I have great, wild hopes of finding my daughter as she will be in adulthood, when she nominally stops needing me, when she is past the seizures and denunciations that I expect will come at adolescence because they came so brutally for me. I hope that I am right in my interpretation of the organic grandmother, that mother hunger is a primal trait of womanness, and that my daughter's need for me may prove larger, more enduring, more passionate than the child's needs for meals, clothes, shelter and applause. I hope that she needs me enough to show me who she is, to give regular dispatches, her intellectual progeny, and to trust me with their safekeeping. I hope that she likes to barter- Youth and Experience haggling over Notoriety. May she spit fire and leave me gladly but sense in her very hemoglobin that she can find me and rest with me and breathe, safely breathe, if only for the intermission between cycles of anger and disappointment. For as long as they last, my bones, brains, and strength are her birthright, and they may not be much, but they are tenacious by decree, and they’ll comply happily with the customs of dynasty. When Youth comes calling, Experience gets her shovel and digs.”
― Natalie Angier, Woman: An Intimate Geography

“The authors present many things that are new, and many things that are true; unfortunately, the things that are true are not new; and the things that are new are not true.”
― Natalie Angier, Woman: An Intimate Geography

“sexual access to the woman is formalized through a public ceremony”
― Natalie Angier, Woman: An Intimate Geography

“A meditative state can be attained through measured, rhythmic breathing.”
― Natalie Angier, Woman: An Intimate Geography

“A ewe usually is a good mother, but she will turn bad if for some reason she is separated from her lamb shortly after birth. Then she is likely to reject the lamb, refusing to nurse it. Sheep farmers have a way of persuading her otherwise. They stimulate her vagina with a kind of sheep dildo. The tickling releases a stream of oxytocin in her brain, and she then takes the lamb to udder. An oxytocin pump in her spinal cord will have the same maternogenic impact.”
― Natalie Angier, Woman: An Intimate Geography

“Pitocin, the drug given to pregnant women to jump-start recalcitrant labor, is a synthetic version of oxytocin.”
― Natalie Angier, Woman: An Intimate Geography

“it’s better to be sullen and strong than sullen and weak.”
― Natalie Angier, Woman: An Intimate Geography

“It is hard to exaggerate the utility of muscle. We have more than six hundred muscles in our body, some of them under voluntary control—our skeletal muscles—and some of them smooth muscles, the autonomic staff. Muscles allow us to move, of course. They stand between us and dissipation, apathy. But muscle tissue helps us even when we are immobilized by illness. In sickness, the body loses its power to tap the caloric reserves of fat. If you’re fasting, intentionally or otherwise, but you are healthy, your insulin levels fall and your body begins to call on its fat reserves for energy. But when you’re sick, with either an acute infection or a chronic illness, your insulin levels rise. Because insulin levels also rise when you eat, your body grows confused. It thinks it is fed, so it won’t tap its stored fat for calories. Your body still needs energy, though, and if you’re too sick to eat, it will begin breaking down its muscle for fuel. Muscle has fewer calories to offer: the average woman stores only about 20,000 calories in her muscle tissue, compared to the 180,000 or so in her fat. An acutely ill person who cannot eat will starve to death in ten days rather than forty. (Cachexia, the wasting of lean mass seen in people with cancer or AIDS, occurs more gradually than that, but it too is caused by a disruption of the body’s ability to burn fat and its fallback tendency to cannibalize its muscle.) The more muscle you have, then, the better your chances are of withstanding illness. Young people survive an acute disease more readily than the old do in part because they have more muscle in escrow.”
― Natalie Angier, Woman: An Intimate Geography

“Aggression and depression sound like two different, even polarized phenomena, but they’re not. Depression is aggression turned inward, directed against the self, or the imagined, threatening self. A seriously depressed person may look anesthetized to an observer, but the depressed person is never anesthetized to herself. She may wish to be, and she may seek to be with chemical aid, but she cannot truly placate her sneering, jabbering, nested aggressor.”
― Natalie Angier, Woman: An Intimate Geography

“The brain is never fixed. It is a moving target. Your hormones don’t make you do anything. Habit and circumstance can have a more profound effect on behavior than anything hormonal. A person who is accustomed to deference will be obeyed into old age, whatever her or his estrogen or testosterone or androstenedione levels may be doing or failing to do. A tomcat that sprayed your house with territorial and reproductive resolve before being neutered may well continue spraying when his testicles are gone. He has learned how to do it, and though the impetus to start spraying may have come with a pubertal surge in testosterone, he no longer needs the hormone to know (as cats know, for they are infinitely wise) that a tomcat must leave a spackle of pong wherever he goes.”
― Natalie Angier, Woman: An Intimate Geography

“And now I must reiterate the almighty fact that a hormone does not cause a behavior. We don’t know what hormones do to the brain or the self, but we do know what they don’t do, and they don’t cause a behavior, the way turning a steering wheel will cause a car to veer left or right. Nor does the ability to behave in an aggressive or dominant fashion require a hormonal substrate. If hormones do anything, any little thing at all, they merely raise the likelihood that, other things being equal, a given behavior will occur. An estrogen peak at midcycle may make one’s eros a shade brighter or tauter, nothing more. At the same time, it helps to remember the concept of biofeedback: behaviors and emotions can change the hormonal milieu and the connections between neurons. The brain is pliant. Synapses linking one brain cell to another arise and die and arise again.”
― Natalie Angier, Woman: An Intimate Geography

“I don’t want to make too much of androstenedione, though. Testosterone isn’t the only hormone that’s overrated. All hormones are ultimately overrated, as well as poorly understood. But even though we know this mantra, we still get shackled by testosterone and need a new perspective to shake ourselves free.”
― Natalie Angier, Woman: An Intimate Geography

“If you are or have ever been a girl, you know that girls are aggressive. This is news the way the Code of Hammurabi is news. Yet the girls in station break Candyland are never aggressive; in fact, they are getting gooier by the year. Nor are the girls who prance through the meadows of biological theory ever aggressive. No, they’re prosocial. They’re verbal, interactive, attentive, amiable. They’re the friends you wish you could buy along with the Belchee Baby you saw on TV.”
― Natalie Angier, Woman: An Intimate Geography

“I hope that I’m right in my interpretation of the organic grandmother, that mother hunger is a primal trait of womanness, and that my daughter’s need for me may prove larger, more enduring, and more passionate than the child’s need for meals, clothes, shelter, and applause.”
― Natalie Angier, Woman: An Intimate Geography

“A group of same-aged people is inherently unstable. Peers will compete just as siblings compete. The ancestral sorority was transgenerational, and if we want whatever strength and balm may come from sisterhood, it wouldn’t hurt to recapitulate in some measure the timeworn model and brace our listing library of cohorts with bookends of the young and the seasoned.”
― Natalie Angier, Woman: An Intimate Geography

“the body evolved to gather vegetables, not to become them, and who resists being absorbed entirely by the creamy perilife that is the desk-computer dyad, may decide, Feh, I’ll forgo the pills, I’ll take a walk, I’ll lift a weight, I’ll visit my daughter and offer to babysit her kids right now.”
― Natalie Angier, Woman: An Intimate Geography

“The body of the average woman is 27 percent fat, that of the average man 15 percent fat. The leanest elite female athletes may get their body fat down to 11 or 12 percent, but that is nearly double the percentage of body fat found on the elite male athlete,”
― Natalie Angier, Woman: An Intimate Geography