#omen

There were certain moments upon which the whole of the future course of one's life might turn. And almost inevitably they popped out at one without any warning at all, leaving one with no time to consider or engage in a reasoned debate with oneself. One had to make a split second decision, and much depended upon it. Perhaps everything. ↗

— Mary Balogh

#future #moments #life

If I were king, I would redress an abuse which cuts back, as it were, one half of human kind. I would have women participate in all human rights, especially those of the mind. ↗

— Émilie Du Châtelet

#engineering #math #passonate-minds #rights #science

Learn her skills, honor her sword, and keep her secrets. ↗

— Ally Carter

#awesome

What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through little speakers, which could be in the pouches of our overalls? When you skateboarded down the street at night you could hear everyone's heartbeat, and they could hear yours, sort of like sonar. One weird thing is, I wonder if everyone's hearts would start to beat at the same time, like how women who live together have their menstrual periods at the same time, which I know about, but don't really want to know about. That would be so weird, except that the place in the hospital where babies are born would sound like a crystal chandelier in a houseboat, because the babies wouldn't have had time to match up their heartbeats yet. And at the finish line at the end of the New York City Marathon it would sound like war. ↗

— Jonathan Safran Foer

#women

She can't help it,' he said. 'She's got the soul of a poet and the emotional makeup of a junkyard dog. ↗

— Stephen King

#soul #stubborn #women #emotion

There are plenty of images of women in science fiction. There are hardly any women. ↗

— Joanna Russ

#male-gaze #science-fiction #women #science

The light teaches you to convert life into a festive promenade. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#dejan-stojanovic #festive #light #literature #literature-quotes

It is extraordinarily entertaining to watch the historians of the past ... entangling themselves in what they were pleased to call the "problem" of Queen Elizabeth. They invented the most complicated and astonishing reasons both for her success as a sovereign and for her tortuous matrimonial policy. She was the tool of Burleigh, she was the tool of Leicester, she was the fool of Essex; she was diseased, she was deformed, she was a man in disguise. She was a mystery, and must have some extraordinary solution. Only recently has it occrurred to a few enlightened people that the solution might be quite simple after all. She might be one of the rare people were born into the right job and put that job first. ↗

— Dorothy L. Sayers

#achievements #career #clichés #double-standards #feminism

He'd always liked women who'd talk back to him just a little bit. "Girls with balls" were good. Women with an actual mind of their own who could prove him wrong in something were, of course, castrating bitches who should be drowned in bottomless wells. ↗

— Warren Ellis

#hypocrisy #sexism #women #hypocrisy

This is eminently true of many happy moments in life. Freed from the demands of decision and intention, adrift on some inner sea, we observe our various movements as if they belonged to someone else, and yet we admire their involuntary excellence. ↗

— Muriel Barbery

#life