Nancy Friday Quotes & Sayings

Our feelings about menstruation are the image of what it is to be a woman in this culture. While menstruation and the fear of revealing evidence of loss of body control bear possibilities of humiliation for women of which men are not aware, it is humiliating too to be that sex whose voice and presence carry less significance. It is humiliating to speak the same words as a man and have his heard, and not yours. It is humiliating to feel invisible when God gave you a body as solid as his. It is humiliating that women are accorded little dignity unless they are married. We twist these humiliations around, of course, and say it is glorious to have a man fight our battles for us, put us on a pedestal, take care of us. It is, if you enjoy being dependent on someone else. — Nancy Friday

To say something nice about yourself, this is the hardest thing in the world for people to do. They'd rather take their clothes off. — Nancy Friday

The debt of gratitude we owe our mother and father goes forward, not backward. What we owe our parents is the bill presented to us by our children. — Nancy Friday

When I stopped seeing my mother through the eyes of a child, I saw the woman who helped me give birth to myself. — Nancy Friday

If women really want equality, we have to wipe the slate clean. It no longer matters in the largest sense what men did to us for the last 200 or 300 years. — Nancy Friday

Oh, I know all about my mother and me,' you may say. 'All that business with my mother was over years ago.' You don't and it wasn't. — Nancy Friday

All my writing has been an effort to sort out the paradoxes of my life. — Nancy Friday

When is enough enough? In envy's eyes, enough never is. Somebody else always has something we want. — Nancy Friday

No man can be really free in bed with a woman who is not. — Nancy Friday

Sexuality is the great field of battle between biology and society. — Nancy Friday

I think the thing I miss most in our age is our manners. It sounds so old-fashioned in a way. But even bad people had good manners in the old days, and manners hold a community together, and manners hold a family together; in a way, they hold the world together. — Nancy Friday

Do women dress for men or women? I've always wondered why that eternally provocative question is put in terms of approval - as if the heart of the matter, the answer, were indeed a question of approval by either sex. But the question is never satisfactorily answered because it is incorrectly posed. It's disapproval, the fear of it, that motivates most women, and with disapproval it doesn't matter where it comes from. — Nancy Friday

After sex, men fear too much intimacy; they want to separate again. Women want to talk, to continue the merging, melting fusion into one. Postcoital conversations keep the woman's power alive. Through unconscious severance, by falling asleep, the man regains his self. — Nancy Friday

Separation is not the end of love; it creates love. — Nancy Friday

Our culture raises us to seek success but we are not taught how to live with it. — Nancy Friday

Blaming mother is just a negative way of clinging to her still. — Nancy Friday

Women's behavior in handling beauty, even before feminism, was to deny they had any. Don't hate me because I'm beautiful. — Nancy Friday

I think biologically we are attracted to more than one person, but given society and our needs, monogamy works better. — Nancy Friday

The older I get the more of my mother I see in myself. — Nancy Friday

Dreams are the expression of the unconscious while we are asleep. — Nancy Friday

It's Friday; you ain't got no job ... you ain't got shit to do — Nancy Friday

Inside every adult male is a denied little boy. — Nancy Friday

Who said "ladies" don't use words like "fuck" and "cunt," or that one doesn't use them around "ladies"? Maybe not when you're having lunch with a lady, but when a lady's fucking, she's not having lunch. — Nancy Friday

I like the company of men. I've never been welcome in those groups, but then I would no more go to a consciousness-raising group and talk about my intimate life with my husband than fly to the moon. I never understood all that. — Nancy Friday

Because society would rather we always wore a pretty face, women have been trained to cut off anger. — Nancy Friday

I'm sure it's why I'm such an odd duck in my feminist generation, because I've always been equally fair to men. — Nancy Friday

If you believe in the maternal instinct and fail at mother love, you fail as a woman. It is a controlling idea that holds us in an iron grip. — Nancy Friday

Spontaneous love admits errors, hesitations and human failings. It can be tested and repaired. — Nancy Friday

Fantasy isn't something you run out of. — Nancy Friday

To say something nice about themselves, this is the hardest thing in the world for people to do. — Nancy Friday