“How delicious an instrument is woman, when artfully played upon; how capable is she of producing the most exquisite harmonies, or executing the most divine erotic pleasures.”

The Anaga Ranga

“You don't love a woman because she is beautiful, but she is beautiful because you love her.”

Anonymous

“The prince said, 'Who is she Molly? What kind of woman is it who believes-who knows, for I saw her face-that she can cure wounds with a touch, and who weeps without tears?' Molly went on about her work, still humming to herself. 'Any woman can weep without tears,' she answered over her shoulder, 'and most can heal with her hands. It depends on the wound. She is a woman, Your Highness, and that's riddle enough.'”

The Last Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle

“On my way to work I see this woman wearing a short shirt that shows her belly button. She has a rounded stomach, and the skin curving in makes her belly button look like a very deep hole. I'm walking with my Walkman on down Steiner, music loud in my ears for a Friday morning, and I feel a wave of desire to stick my dick in that deep dark belly button hole, to fuck the woman with the short shirt, to lay her down on the sidewalk and take her. She walks by and I walk by and I continue on my way to work. Of course nothing happens. But I can imagine so clearly what it's like to enter a woman, I feel like I've done it. My body is on hers, drunk off the conquest, sliding in slow: my hips, the push, the glaze. I think about that belly button girl and I melt because girls are so goddamn elusive, you can't tell what the fuck they're thinking, except I am a girl, and I know just what a lot of girls are thinking, I know what I'm thinking, and right now it's exactly this.”

The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and Other Stories, Aimee Bender

“Women: I liked the colors of their clothing; the way they walked; the cruelty in some faces; now and then the almost pure beauty in another face, totally and enchantingly female. They had it over us: they planned much better and were better organized. While men were watching professional football or drinking beer or bowling, they, the women, were thinking about us, concentrating, studying, deciding--whether to accept us, discard us, exchange us, kill us or whether simply to leave us. In the end it hardly mattered; no matter what they did, we ended up lonely and insane.”

Woman, Charles Bukowski

“A woman watches her body uneasily, as though it were an unreliable ally in the battle for love.”

The Favorite Game, Leonard Cohen

“One sees that dead, vacant look steal sometimes over the rarest, finest of women's faces, - in the very midst, it may be, of their warmest summer's day; and then one can guess at the secret of intolerable solitude that lies hid beneath the delicate laces and brilliant smile.”

Life in the Iron Mills, Rebecca Harding Davis

“When a man gets up to speak, people listen, then look. When a woman gets up people look, then if they like what they see, they listen.”

Pauline Frederick

“bruises on her knees from praying to forget
she's heard stories of vietnam vets
who can still feel the tingling of their amputated limbs
she's wondering how many women are walking around this world
feeling the tingling of their amputated wings
remembering what it was to fly to sing”

Blue Blanket, Andrea Gibson

“She came, that day, alone and dreamingly up the hill toward me. She had not seen me and the sight of her approaching filled me with apprehension and suspense. I saw her hair, tied in two thick plaits, with loose strands on either side, her cheeks blown by the wind. I saw for the first time in my life how beautiful she was, and how beautiful and dreamlike the play of the wind in her delicate hair, how beautiful and provocative the fall of her thin blue dress over her young limbs; and just as the bitter spice of the chewed bud coursed through me with the whole dread pleasure and pain of spring, so the sight of the girl filled me with the whole deadly foreboding of love, the foreboding of woman.”

Harry's Loves, Herman Hesse

“Think of all the women you know who will not allow themselves to be seen without makeup. I often wonder how they feel about themselves at night when they are climbing into bed with intimate partners. Are they overwhelmed with secret shame that someone sees them as they really are? Or do they sleep with rage that who they really are can be celebrated or cared for only in secret?”

Communion, bell hooks

“In this dirty-minded world, you are either somebody's wife or somebody's whore- or fast on your way to becoming one or the other.”

The World According to Garp, John Irving

“Sometimes you have to be a high-riding bitch to survive. Sometimes being a bitch is all a woman has to hold onto.”

Dolores Claiborne, Stephen King

“I'm sorry to say this but those who are most worthy of love are never made happy by it. Do you still think men love the way we do? No... men enjoy the happiness they feel. We can only enjoy the happiness we give. They are not capable of devoting themselves exclusively to one person. So to hope to be made happy by love is a certain cause of grief.”

Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

“Well I had no choice, did I? I'm a woman. Women are obliged to be far more skillful than men. You can ruin our reputation and our life with a few well-chosen words. So of course I had to invent not only myself but ways of escape no one has every thought of before. And I've succeeded because I've always known I was born to dominate your sex and avenge my own.”

Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

“When one woman strikes at the heart of another she seldom misses, and the wound is invariably fatal.”

Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

“Girls can wear jeans and cut their hair short and wear shirts and boots because it's okay to be a boy; for girls it's like promotion. But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading, according to you, because secretly you believe that being a girl is degrading.”

The Cement Garden, Ian McEwan

“Maybe years later the slut has the look of a woman who has lived somewhere before. She now knows the words for certain things, is familiar with three-day winds, the roads of Morocco, the strongholds of the British, the uses of kohl, the laying and folding styles of napkins for all sorts of tables, has heard music from instruments deep-bellied and two-stringed, cries that were songs, waves washing on rock, coral, and sand. She has pens filled with ink and some that are plumed. Slippers sewn with gold thread and pointed toes. Gum smelling of leaves. Oil in wax-sealed jars. Says 'no' as a question after her sentences. Pedals backward to brake on a bike that only brakes by hand. Eats steak with a knife like it was a fork. Looks skyward for the grace of God. Digs in a garden with shards of broken bowl. Calls dogs with the clap of her hands. Trims her nail with a blade. Twists her hair and burns the broken, frayed ends. Rubs her teeth with hollow grass blades in the morning and night. Wears skirts that are scarves knotted at the hip. Writes in a leather-bound book. Totes a cat on her shoulder... Joins children at games on the street, throwing off her shoes and hiking up her dress, letting the girls try her perfume kept in a vial, applied with a stick to the small beating veins at their necks. She gives them names they have never heard before and tells them they are the words for tree, sky and lake in a country where the girls never bathe but are licked clean by cows.”

Here They Come, Yannick Murphy

“But long before Kate and Ultra Slimfast came along, hanging over the lives of every little girl born in the second half of the 20th century was the impossibly curvy shadow (40-18-32 in life-size terms) of Barbie. That preposterous physique, we learn as kids, is what a woman looks like with her clothes off.”

Anna Quindlen

“Most women have not even been able to touch this anger, except to drive it inward like a rusted nail.”

Adrienne Rich

“I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.”

Her Kind, Anne Sexton

“Boys are just boys after all, but sometimes girls really seem to be the turn of a pale wrist, or the sudden jut of a hip, or a clutch of very dark hair falling across a freckled forehead. I'm not saying that's what they really are. I'm just saying sometimes it seems that way, and that those details (a thigh mole, a full face flush, a scar the precise shape and size of a cashew nut) are so many hooks waiting to land you.”

The Girl With Bangs, Zadie Smith

“Fade in, start the scene
Enter beautiful girl
But things are not what they seem
As we stand at the edge of the world

"Excuse me, sir,
But I have plans to die tonight
Oh, and you are directly in my way
And I bet you're gonna say it's not right"
My reply:
"Excuse me, miss
But do you have the slightest clue
Of exactly what you just said to me
And exactly who you're talking to?"

She said, "I don't care, you don't even know me"
I said, "I know but I'd like to change that soon, hopefully"
Yeah, we all flirt with the tiniest notion
Of self conclusion in one simplified motion
You see the trick is that you're never supposed to act on it
No matter how unbearable this misery gets

"You make it sound so easy to be alive
But tell me, how am I supposed to seize this day
When everything inside me has died?"
My reply:
"Trust me, girl
I know your legs are pleading to leap
But I offer you this easy choice-
Instead of dying, living with me"

She said, "Are you crazy? You don't even know me."
I said, "I know, but I'd like to change that soon hopefully"
Yeah, we all flirt with the tiniest notion
Of self conclusion in one simplified motion
You see the trick is that you're never supposed to act on it
No matter how unbearable this misery gets

I would be lying if I said that things would never get rough
And all this cliche motivation, it could never be enough
I could stand here all night trying to convince you
But what good would that do?
My offer stands, and you must choose

"All right, you win, but I only give you one night
To prove yourself to be better than my attempt at flight
I swear to god if you hurt me I will leap
I will toss myself from these very cliffs
And you'll never see it coming"
"Settle, precious, I know what you're going through
Just ten minutes before you got here I was gonna jump too"

Yeah we all flirt with the tiniest notion
Of self conclusion in one simplified motion
You see the trick is that you're never supposed act on it
No matter how unbearable this misery gets”

Self-Conclusion, The Spill Canvas Recommended by Ray.

“People call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.”

Rebecca West

“ It steadies me now but it won't forever. I've done my homework, read books, websites, and message boards, lurked on lists, and even questioned a social worker too exhausted to guard her words, and I know how bad the odds are for girls like me.

We wait to be rescued, but for whatever reason, no one comes. We figure that if no one protects us then we must not be worth protecting so we become prey and are easily picked off. Our wounded, kicked-puppy gazes attract sly predators and we sell ourselves for clearance sale prices, mistaking screwing for caring.

We binge, purge, sleep around. We drink too much and get too high, anything to blot out the past. We accept and endure beatings and humiliations because our fathers, our uncles, and our mothers' twisted boyfriends said they loved us, too, right before they broke our bones and tore our tissue, right before they made us recieve them.

I tighten the first screw. Oh yes, I have done my homework.

We have babies because we want them to love us, to make us important, but they only make us tired and fat and stinking of spit up because they're babies, not saviors. Their fathers leave us, sick of crap and sour milk, sweatpants and tears.

But the babies still need all of us, only there isn't anything left to give because we based our worth on the lowlifes who knocked us up and around.

So our babies end up screwed up and screwed with because now we're single again, too, so we're bringing home guys who secretly like pink satin baby skin more than our silvery stretch marks. We don't see what we should see because having anyone is still supposedly better than being alone.”

Such A Pretty Girl, Laura Wiess