When a diplomat says yes, he means perhaps. When he says perhaps, he means no. When he says no, he is not a diplomat. When a lady says no, she means perhaps. When she says perhaps, she means yes. But when she says yes, she is no lady. –Lord Denning
Mothers find themselves in a film noir every other day. My byline for the film is ‘It’s a mess. She’s a mother. She cleans it up. Next.’ --the actress who played the mother in The Deep End
Three failed marriages have taught me this: You can disagree with what a woman says, but never argue with how she feels. –Doug Sanders
As long as there are human beings—particularly boys and overgrown boys—around to fart, and make fart jokes, there will be cartoons. Of that you can be sure. This is not a criticism of boys or what they turn into; it just happens to be a fact, and a diamond-hard one, that boys aren’t subject to the depredations of the Four Horseman of Appropriate-ness—Received Notions About Femininity, Fear of Not Being Perceived as Nice, No Boy Will Ever Want You If You Act/Look/Talk Like That, and Caring Too Much What Other People Think of You. These soul killers, having been loosed on the world by all the manufacturers of pink toys and spaghetti-strap toddlerwear, and sometimes by well-meaning, anxious mothers, come after girls before they even start elementary school and turn them into polite (if sometimes mean) little beings. –Nancy Franklin
Her eyes were blue, her mouth red, her teeth white and she had a nose. Without getting steamed up over the details, she was nice. –Dashiell Hammett
Women will always outwork you at the margins. –Walter J. Karabian
The photography in her various publications seems to reduce all of female longing to its essential elements. A basket of flowers, a child’s lawn pinafore draped across a painted rocking chair, an exceptionally white towel folded in thirds and perched in glamorous isolation on a clean and barren shelf; most of the pictures feature a lot of sunlight, and many show rooms that are either empty of people or occupied solely by Martha, evoking the profound and enduring female desires for solitude and silence. No heterosexual man can understand this stuff, and no woman with a beating heart and an ounce of femininity can resist it. I can unpack a paragraph of Martha Stewart’s prose with the best of them, but I also fall mute and wondering at the pages of Martha Stewart Living. –Caitlin Flanagan
She walked toward me, her hips waving a happy hello. –Mickey Spillane
Are women “the equal” of men? This is an embarrassing subject. Women are certainly physically inferior to men and if this were not the case the whole history of the world would be different. … Any woman who has ever had her wrist twisted by a man recognizes a fact of nature as humbling as a cyclone to a frail tree branch. How can anything be more important than this? --Elizabeth Hardwick
She thinks she’s a feminist but she’s just bad-tempered.
A woman’s body works as if it knew something she didn’t and does not have her best interests at heart. –Fay Weldon
A woman’s like a dresser, some man is always ramblin’ through its drawers. –Robert Johnson
Hot girls want you to call them smart. Smart girls want you to call them hot. –Paget Brewster
The proper study of mankind is woman. –Henry Adams
