English Woman Quotes & Sayings

Who are you, Martin Eden? he demanded of himself in the looking-
glass, that night when he got back to his room. He gazed at
himself long and curiously. Who are you? What are you? Where do
you belong? You belong by rights to girls like Lizzie Connolly.
You belong with the legions of toil, with all that is low, and
vulgar, and unbeautiful. You belong with the oxen and the drudges,
in dirty surroundings among smells and stenches. There are the
stale vegetables now. Those potatoes are rotting. Smell them,
damn you, smell them. And yet you dare to open the books, to
listen to beautiful music, to learn to love beautiful paintings, to
speak good English, to think thoughts that none of your own kind
thinks, to tear yourself away from the oxen and the Lizzie
Connollys and to love a pale spirit of a woman who is a million
miles beyond you and who lives in the stars! Who are you? and what
are you? damn you! And are you going to make good? — Jack London

The kind of kiss that even when it ends, your soul remembers, the kind of kiss that plays in your mind for all of eternity, the kind of kiss that a man gives a woman when his instincts to roam have been tamed. — C.J. English

Nowadays when a good-looking woman flirts with me, however idly, I guffaw like some ruddy English lord, haw haw, har har, harr harr. — Walker Percy

King Henry wants lands an'titles, like all the English."
"What do Scots want?" she asked, glancing over her shoulder. Darrow was far more sure footed than she was.
"A good woman, a warm bed, and food in their bellies." He grinned at her and she couldn't help but laugh. — Selena Kitt

I am illegitimate," she said distinctly, as if he were a foreigner trying to learn English. "You are a viscount. You can't marry a bastard."
"What about the Duke of Clarence? He had ten bastard children by that actress ... what was her name ... "
"Mrs. Jordan."
"Yes, that one, Their children were all illegitimate, but some of them married peers."
"You're not the Duke of Clarence."
"That's right. I'm not a blueblood any more than you are. I inherited the title purely by happenstance"
"That doesn't matter. If your married me, it would be scandalous and inappropriate, and doors would be closed to you."
"Good God, woman, I let two of my sisters marry Gypsies. Those doors have already been closed, bolted, and nailed shut. — Lisa Kleypas

The number of theatres that regularly played art films (defined as foreign language films and English language films produced abroad without American financing) increased from around one hundred in 1950 to close to 700 by the 1960s. Foreign film distribution in the United States was originally handled by dozens of small independent outfits, but when Brigitte Bardot's And God Created...Woman broke box-office records in 1956, Hollywood took over. In search of foreign pictures with commercial ingredients, the majors absorbed the most talented foreign film-makers with offers of total financing and promises of distribution in the lucrative US market. — Tino Balio

Living in the era of social media and dating apps, online dating is also a very popular dating method in England. It perfectly suits the English person's superpower: being the invisible man or woman. They also like to keep their distance, and the internet is perfect for that. Also complimenting someone is easier online than offline; you don't even have to say anything you just press a 'like' or a 'wink' button and that's it; perfectly suitable for romantically retarded people. — Angela Kiss

The alternative, should you, or any writer of English, choose to employ it (and who is to stop you?) is, by use of subordinate clause upon subordinate clause, which itself may be subordinated to those clauses that have gone before or after, to construct a sentence of such labyrinthine grammatical complexity that, like Theseus before you when he searched the dark Minoan mazes for that monstrous monster, half bull and half man, or rather half woman for it had been conceived from, or in, Pasiphae, herself within a Daedalian contraption of perverted invention, you must unravel a ball of grammatical yarn lest you wander for ever, amazed in the maze, searching through dark eternity for a full stop. — Mark Forsyth

'IT IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR YOU TO DO IT,' WAS THE TERRIBLE VERDICT. 'IN THE FIRST PLACE YOU ARE A WOMAN AND WOULD NEED A PROTECTOR, AND EVEN IF IT WERE POSSIBLE FOR YOU TO TRAVEL ALONE YOU WOULD NEED TO CARRY SO MUCH BAGGAGE THAT IT WOULD DETAIN YOU IN MAKING RAPID CHANGES. BESIDES YOU SPEAK NOTHING BUT ENGLISH, SO THERE IS NO USE TALKING ABOUT IT; NO ONE BUT A MAN CAN DO THIS.' — Nellie Bly

I have lived and slept in the same bed with English countesses and Prussian farm women ... no woman has excited passions among women more than I have. — Florence Nightingale

HOSTESS. Oh, nonsense! She speaks English perfectly.
NEPOMMUCK. Too perfectly. Can you shew me any English woman who speaks English as it should be spoken? Only foreigners who have been taught to speak it speak it well. — George Bernard Shaw

The English have this extraordianry respect for longevity. The best example of this was Queen Victoria, a most unpleasant woman who achieved a sort of public affection simply by living to be an enormous age. — Malcolm Muggeridge

Then the woman in the bed sat up and looked about her with wild eyes; and the oldest of the old men said: 'Lady, we have come to write down the names of the immortals,' and at his words a look of great joy came into her face. Presently she, began to speak slowly, and yet eagerly, as though she knew she had but a little while to live, and, in English, with the accent of their own country; and she told them the secret names of the immortals of many lands, and of the colours, and odours, and weapons, and instruments of music and instruments of handicraft they held dearest; but most about the immortals of Ireland and of their love for the cauldron, and the whetstone, and the sword, and the spear, and the hills of the Shee, and the horns of the moon, and the Grey Wind, and the Yellow Wind, and the Black Wind, and the Red Wind. ("The Adoration of the Magi") — W.B.Yeats

That which brought me into the capacity I now stand in, was the Petition and Advice given me by you, who, in reference to the ancient Constitution, did draw me here to accept the place of Protector. There is not a man living can say I sought it, no not a man, nor woman, treading upon English ground. — Oliver Cromwell

A woman who loses a husband is called a widow, a man who loses his wife is called a widower, and a child who loses his/her parents is called an orphan, but there is no word in the English language for a parent who loses a child (Jay Neugeboren). — David Asay

During the late Victorian period, one English woman in Hampshire who suffered from fits reportedly ate an entire New Testament in an attempt to cure her illness, putting each page in the middle of a sandwich. — Martyn Lyons

By the next afternoon, a shepherd boy had heard his shouts and he'd been hauled up the cliffs and confined to an empty pigeon house, the sole survivor of his doomed mission.
Gone cracked, though, from the ordeal. Ranting in perfect English about dragons and a young woman who could fly.
No one believed him. A few people swore the airships had suffered lightning strikes, although the night had seemed so clear. A few more vowed they'd spotted them off the bluffs and fired at them, and that had brought them down.
Whatever it had been, everyone seemed certain of two things. It had not been a dragon, and it had not been the poor, tormented Duke of Idylling. — Shana Abe

English was such a dense, tight language. So many hard letters, like miniature walls. Not open with vowels the way Spanish was. Our throats open, our mouths open, our hearts open. In English, the sounds were closed. They thudded to the floor. And yet, there was something magnificent about it. Profesora Shields explained that in English there was no usted, no tu. There was only one word - you. It applied to all people. No one more distant or more familiar. You. They. Me. I. Us. We. There were no words that changed from feminine to masculine and back again depending on the speaker. A person was from New York. Not a woman from New York, not a man from New York. Simply a person. — Cristina Henriquez

I set the vodka glasses on the table, and we become gently drunk in the foetal warmth. The Australian woman doesn't quite get the picture. We have a brief exchange in English. 'Do you have a car?' she asks. 'No,' I reply. 'A TV?' 'No.' 'What if you have a problem?' 'I walk.' 'Do you go to the village for food?' 'There is no village.' 'Do you wait for a car on the road?' 'There is no road.' 'Are those your books?' 'Yes.' 'Did you write all of them?' I prefer people whose character resembles a frozen lake to those who are more like marshes. — Sylvain Tesson

I remember one time I heard this English professor asking the class what the world's scariest noise is. Is it a man crying out in pain? A woman's scream of terror? A gunshot? A baby crying? And the professor shakes his head and says, 'No, the scariest noise is, you're all alone in your dark house, you know you're all alone, you know that there is no chance anyone else is home or within miles - and then, suddenly, from upstairs, you hear the toilet flush. — Harlan Coben

This character's entirely invented, and the woman that I interviewed wouldn't recognize herself, or really anything about herself, in this book, which she hasn't read, because she doesn't read English. — Arthur Golden

I know a few things to be true. I do not know where I am going, where I have come from is disappearing, I am unwelcome and my beauty is not beauty here. My body is burning with the shame of not belonging, my body is longing. I am the sin of memory and the absence of memory. I watch the news and my mouth becomes a sink full of blood. The lines, the forms, the people at the desks, the calling cards, the immigration officers, the looks on the street, the cold settling deep into my bones, the English classes at night, the distance I am from home. But Alhamdulilah all of this is better than the scent of a woman completely on fire, or a truckload of men, who look like my father pulling out my teeth and nails, or fourteen men between my legs, or a gun, or a promise, or a lie, or his name, or his manhood in my mouth. — Warsan Shire

The illuminated ones can take any form
a man, a woman, a child, an elder, or even a dog. It is not inconsequential that the English language allows for the dyslexia of the spelling of the word dog: God spelled backward. — Jean Houston

This matter of the "love" of pets is of immense import because many, many people are capable of "loving" only pets and incapable of genuinely loving other human beings. Large numbers of American soldiers had idyllic marriages to German, Italian or Japanese "war brides" with whom they could not verbally communicate. But when their brides learned English, the marriages began to fall apart. The servicemen could then no longer project upon their wives their own thoughts, feelings, desires and goals and feel the same sense of closeness one feels with a pet. Instead, as their wives learned English, the men began to realize that these women had ideas, opinions and aims different from their own. As this happened, love began to grow for some; for most, perhaps, it ceased. The liberated woman is right to beware of the man who affectionately calls her his "pet. — M. Scott Peck

Bourbon's the only drink. You can take all that champagne stuff and pour it down the English Channel. Well, why wait 80 years before you can drink the stuff? Great vineyards, huge barrels aging forever, poor little old monks running around testing it, just so some woman in Tulsa, Oklahoma can say it tickles her nose. — John Michael Hayes

The whole of life did not consist in going to bed with a woman, he thought, returning to Scott and Balzac, to the English novel and the French novel. — Virginia Woolf

Sylvia Plath"
A miniature mad talent? Sylvia Plath,
who'll wipe off the spit of your integrity,
rising in the saddle to slash at Auschwitz,
life tearing this or that, I am a woman?
Who'll lay the graduate girl in marriage,
queen bee, naked, unqueenly, shaming her shame?
Each English major saying, "I am Sylvia,
I hate marriage, I must hate babies."
Even men have a horror of giving birth,
mother-sized babies splitting us in half,
sixty thousand American infants a year,
U.I.D., Unexplained Infant Deaths,
born physically whole and hearty, refuse to live,
Sylvia ... the expanding torrent of your attack. — Robert Lowell

Damn, she's good."
"Of course she bloody is," Pearl murmured, her ace still stuffed against Jack's neck, even though she sounded like the prim English woman she was, her tone turning curt. "She's my mother. — Scarlett Dawn

Loretta folded her arms. She felt like a heroine in a movie, confronted by a jealous husband in a kitchen while outside the camera is aching to draw back and show a wonderland of adventures waiting for her - long, frantic rides on trains, landscapes of wounded soldiers, a lovely white desert across which a camel caravan draped voluptuously in veils moves slowly with a kind of mincing melancholy, the steamy jungles of India opening before British officers in white, young officers, the mysteries of English drawing-rooms cracking before the quick, humorless smirk of a wise young woman from America ... — Joyce Carol Oates

There was a jauntiness in the young woman's manner that appealed to Isabel. And then there was the accent, which was not Scottish, but from somewhere in Northern Ireland and not unlike Georgina Cameron's; the English that Shakespeare would have spoken, preserved by centuries of relative linguistic isolation. — Alexander McCall Smith

Never, and by this I mean never, criticise the English weather. Especially if you're an alien. For an English woman, it's as though you are scolding her first born child. For an Englishman, it's as if you are criticising the size of his penis. Or even worse: his football team. — Angela Kiss

I know all about you. You're the people waiting on the shoreline with the warm towels and the hot chocolate after the woman swims the English Channel. — Gwen Moore

Are you asking me out? For a date?" asked Marie. She wasn't surprised. It had happened to her before. She thought David was just another white guy who wanted to rebel against his white middle-class childhood by dating a brown woman. He wouldn't have been the first white guy to do such a thing. She had watched quite a few white guys pursue brown female students, especially Asian nationals, with a missionary passion. Co to college, find a cute minority woman, preferably one with limited English, and colonize her by sleeping with her. — Sherman Alexie

In photographs she is a boxy woman, girdled with steel, shod in coal-black stompers, her bosom so large it might have housed turbines. She was all but illiterate in Yiddish and English but obliged my grandfather, and later Uncle Ray, to read to her daily from the Yiddish press so that she could keep abreast of the latest calamities to beset Jewry. From — Michael Chabon

Most Muslim women know it is fear and curiosity that cause people to stare. They know it is ignorance and stereotypes that cause people to suppose that a piece of material covering the hair strips a woman of the ability to speak English, pursue a career, work a remote control. — Randa Abdel-Fattah

A woman who is praying and a woman who is having fun, they both say " Oh My God", the only difference is how they pronounce it. — M.F. Moonzajer

I can well imagine a lily-livered coward shying away from taking you on. But don't try to tell me that you haven't had your chances. I refuse to believe that every man in Hampshire is blind and stupid. Unless thin English blood is to blame." "You forget I've got thin English blood." He smiled. "There's nothing thin about your blood, lassie. Perhaps that's why it takes a proud Scot to see your true worth. I don't want a milk-and-water miss at my side. I want a woman of strength and fire. A woman like you." Shocked, she struggled to sit up. He'd started out with the familiar teasing, but purpose had resonated through that declaration. "Nobody's ever said anything like that to me before." "I want a wife to share my joys and troubles." His Scottish burr deepened with every word. "I want a wife who meets a challenge with a sparkle in her eyes. I want a wife who gives me a run for my money." Inside — Anna Campbell

He noted that she sipped the wine immediately, without the usual ritual of those accustomed to sampling fine vintages... no swirling of the glass to test the aroma, or the rivulets that the English called "legs" and the French more poetically referred to as "tears." As a member of the beau monde, Vivien should have been experienced at such a ritual. However, she did not look like a worldly courtesan accustomed to the finer things in life... she looked like a sheltered, naive young woman. — Lisa Kleypas

Soccer Mom
English is not my first language.
For years I thought a soccer mom was a woman beaten by her husband ~
just with children.
A nice woman explained to me I was thinking about a battered wife.
I said,
'You mean he dips her in flour before he slaps her?
Then she slapped me.

Oy, English. — Beryl Dov

God! The sexiest three words in the English language, 'you were right'. What woman doesn't love to hear that? — Kristan Higgins

So what? German or French, friend or enemy, he's first and foremost a man and I'm a woman. He's good to me, kind, attentive ... that's good enough for me. I'm not looking for anything else. Our lives are complicated enough with all these wars and bombings. Between a man and a woman, none of that's important. I couldn't care less if the man I fancy is English or black - I'd still offer myself to him if I got the opportunity. — Irene Nemirovsky

If we have come to think that the nursery and the kitchen are the natural sphere of a woman, we have done so exactly as English children come to think that a cage is the natural sphere of a parrot: because they have never seen one anywhere else. — George Bernard Shaw

Each woman was valued at 150 pounds of tobacco, which was the same price exacted from Jane Dickenson when she eventually purchased her freedom. Not surprisingly, then, with their value calculated in tobacco, women in Virginia were treated as fertile commodities. They came with testimonials to their moral character, impressing on "industrious Planters" that they were not being sold a bad bill of goods. One particular planter wrote that an earlier shipment of females was "corrupt," and he expected a new crop that was guaranteed healthy and favorably disposed for breeding. Accompanying the female cargo were some two hundred head of cattle, a reminder that the Virginia husbandman needed both species of breeding stock to recover his English roots.37 Despite — Nancy Isenberg

I am the granddaughter of an English woman. I love England and her people and, regardless of politics, consider you to be family ... and always will. — Nicola Sturgeon

We're never so outraged as when a cabbie drives past us or the woman in the elevator clutches her purse, not so much because we're bothered by the fact that such indignities are what less fortunate coloreds have to put up with every single day of their lives - although that's what we tell ourselves - but because we're wearing a Brooks Brothers suit and speak impeccable English and yet have somehow been mistaken for an ordinary nigger. — Barack Obama

Where's your sketch pad?" I asked.
... "I gave that up," Kay said. "I wasn't very good, so I changed my major."
"To what?"
"To pre-med, then psychology, then English lit, then history."
"I like a woman who knows what she wants."
Kay smiled. "So do I, but I don't know any. — James Ellroy

For example, most editions of the Old Testament, intended for a Christian readership (obtained from a Greek translation of the original Hebrew), will translate Isaiah 7:14 to state that "a virgin shall conceive . . ." The English translation of the original Hebrew, used in the corresponding passage in the Hebrew Bible, states that "a young woman shall conceive. . . . — Anonymous

Angela Carter ... refused to join in rejecting or denouncing fairy tales, but instead embraced the whole stigmatized genre, its stock characters and well-known plots, and with wonderful verve and invention, perverse grace and wicked fun, soaked them in a new fiery liquor that brought them leaping back to life. From her childhood, through her English degree at the University of Bristol where she specialised in Medieval Literature, and her experiences as a young woman on the folk-music circuit in the West Country, Angela Carter was steeped in English and Celtic faerie, in romances of chivalry and the grail, Chaucerian storytelling and Spenserian allegory, and she was to become fairy tale's rescuer, the form's own knight errant, who seized hold of it in its moribund state and plunged it into the fontaine de jouvence itself.
(from "Chamber of Secrets: The Sorcery of Angela Carter") — Marina Warner

At Camp Don Bosco, there were Bibles all over the place, mostly 1970s hippie versions like Good News for Modern Man. They had groovy titles like The Word or The Way, and translated the Bible into "contemporary English," which meant Saul yelling at Jonathan, "You son of a bitch!" (I Samuel 20:30). Awesome! The King James version gave this verse as "Thou son of the perverse rebellious woman," which was bogus in comparison. Maybe these translations went a bit far. I recall one of the Bibles translating the inscription over the cross, "INRI" (Iesus Nazaremus Rex Iudaeorum), as "SSDD" (Same Shit Different Day), and another describing the Last Supper - the night before Jesus' death, a death he freely accepted - where Jesus breaks the bread, gives it to his disciples, and says, "It's better to burn out than fade away," but these memories could be deceptive. — Rob Sheffield

The child with Down syndrome on the fifth row from the back in your church, he's not a "ministry project." He's a future king of the universe. The immigrant woman who scrubs toilets every day on hands and knees, and can barely speak enough English to sing along with your praise choruses, she's not a problem to be solved. She's a future queen of the cosmos, a joint-heir with Christ. — Russell D. Moore

I am not alone in this. I only let him do to me what men have ever done to women: march off to empty glory and hollow acclaim and leave us behind to pick up the pieces. The broken cities, the burned barns, the innocent injured beasts, the ruined bodies of the boys we bore and the men we lay with.
The waste of it. I sit here, and I look at him, and it is as if a hundred women sit beside me: the revolutionary farm wife, the English peasant woman, the Spartan mother-'Come back with your shield or on it,' she cried, because that was what she was expected to cry. And then she leaned across the broken body of her son and the words turned to dust in her throat. — Geraldine Brooks

As a woman, I'm expected to want everything to be nice and to be nice myself. A very English thing. I don't design nice buildings - I don't like them. I like architecture to have some raw, vital, earthy quality. — Zaha Hadid

Above all her voice moved him. He had not known that an accent seduced his emotions. But he'd always been drawn to those with an accent. Be it woman or man. It sounded nicer. A lavender husk. More proper, elegant. American English was clumsy, clipped, flat. No lilt, nothing guttural, boring, unpleasant. He had no exotic fetishes. His attuned ear seemed to be remembering voices from another life, another time. He could never escape the sense that he'd lost a life dear to him and that life was lived in another language. — Wheston Chancellor Grove

I went to the Alabama public schools at a time when my English teachers, all but one of whom was a woman, taught nothing but the classics. They revered the great British and American writers. — Thomas H. Cook

I'm worried I will leave grad school and no longer be able to speak English. I know this woman in grad school, a friend of a friend, and just listening to her talk is scary. The semiotic dialetics of intertextual modernity. Which makes no sense at all. Sometimes I feel that they live in a parallel universe of academia speaking acadamese instead of English and they don't really know what's happening in the real world. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

You haven't learned anything yet, have you? Don't you know My hand sustains you?" I began to shiver in the chilly wind, and wrapped my cloak tighter. Then - I just couldn't help it - I said, "You - have a hand?" "Only in a manner of speaking. I thought you'd understand it better that way." "Oh, I'm sorry." "You ought to be. You're very troublesome, for a woman." "For a woman - ? Are You a man, then, after all?" "I am what people expect Me to be. It's all they are capable of comprehending. After all, doesn't it surprise you that I'm speaking in English instead of Latin?" "But I don't know any Latin." "Exactly. — Judith Merkle Riley

Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having always to translate, while I still have to speak English or Spanish when I would rather speak Spanglish, and as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate. I will no longer be made to feel ashamed of existing. I will have my voice: Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my serpent's tongue - my woman's voice, my sexual voice, my poet's voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

In 1927 she became, and would forevermore remain, the "It Girl." "It" was first a two-part article and then a novel by a flame-haired English novelist named Elinor Glyn, who was known for writing juicy romances in which the main characters did a lot of undulating ("she undulated round and all over him, twined about him like a serpent") and for being the mistress for some years of Lord Curzon, former viceroy of India. "It," as Glyn explained, "is that quality possessed by some few persons which draws all others with its magnetic life force. With it you win all men if you are a woman - and all women if you are a man. — Bill Bryson

What silliness that we must consider the proper order of milk and tea when pouring a cup."
Callie swallowed back a laugh. "I suppose you do not place much stock in such ceremony in Venice?"
"No. It is liquid. It is warm. It is not coffee. Why worry?" Juliana's smile flashed, showing a dimple in her cheek.
"Why indeed?" Callie said, wondering, fleetingly, if Juliana's brothers had such an endearing trait.
"Do not be concerned," Juliana held up a hand dramatically. "I shall endeavor to remember tea first, milk second. I should hate to cause another war between Britain and the Continent."
Callie laughed, accepting a cup of perfectly poured tea from the younger woman. "I am certain that Parliament will thank you for your diplomacy. — Sarah MacLean

My name is Lev," said Lev.
"My name is Lydia," said the woman. And they shook hands, Lev's hand holding the scrunched-up kerchief and Lydia's hand rough with salt and smelling of egg, and then Lev asked, "What are you planning to do in En gland?" and Lydia said, "I have some interviews in London for jobs as a translator."
"That sounds promising."
"I hope so. I was a teacher of English at School 237 in Yarbl, so my language is very colloquial."
Lev looked at Lydia. It wasn't difficult to imagine her standing in front of a class and writing words on a blackboard. He said, "I wonder why you're leaving our country when you had a good job at School 237 in Yarbl?"
"Well," said Lydia, "I became very tired of the view from my window. Every day, summer and winter, I looked out at the schoolyard and the high fence and the apartment block beyond, and I began to imagine I would die seeing these things, and I didn't want this. I expect you understand what I mean? — Rose Tremain

Somebody once said that the Irish derived the greatest benefit from the English language. They court it like a beautiful woman. They make it bray with donkey laughter, they fling it at the sky like paint pots full of rainbow colors. — Malachy McCourt

She went to the public school that the three youngest girls attended and in halting English told the teacher that the children must be encouraged to speak only English; they were not to use a German word or phrase ever. In that way, she protected them against their father. She grieved when her children had to leave school after the sixth grade and go out working. She grieved when they married no-account men. She wept when they gave birth to daughters, knowing that to be born a woman meant a life of humble hardship. Each — Betty Smith

I had the impression from reading English literature that British women were great beauties, and I only had seen Julie Christie, and she was gorgeous and sexy. I don't know whether it was just my taste, but when I got to London, I went two years without seeing a truly attractive woman. A lot of near misses. — Walter Kirn

Now," she said when all was ready and lit the silver sconces on either side of the mirror. What woman would not have kindled to see what Orlando saw then burning in the snow
for all about the looking glass were snowy lawns, and she was like a fire, a burning bush, and the candle flames about her head were silver leaves; or again, the glass was green water, and she a mermaid, slung with pearls, a siren in a cave, singing so that oarsmen leant from their boats and fell down, down to embrace her; so dark, so bright, so hard, so soft, was she, so astonishingly seductive that it was a thousand pities that there was no one there to pt it in plain English, and say outright "Damn it Madam, you are loveliness incarnate," which was the truth. — Virginia Woolf

Nighthawks

I wanted to run away with you tonight
but you are a difficult woman
the rules of you -

Past and future circle round us
now we know more now less
in the institute of shadows.

On a street black as widows
with nothing to confess
our distances found us

the rules of you -
so difficult a woman
I wanted to run away with you tonight. — Anne Carson

California nurse Jared Axen was holding a dying hospice patient's hand when he began to sing an old hymn. The woman, who didn't speak English, hadn't been responsive in days. But when Axen sang to her, she squeezed his hand, a response that soothed the woman's family. Six years later, Axen, a classically trained musician, sings to some of his patients every day. "It gives them their humanity back," he said. "Music is a common language that helps me connect with my patients." Many patients also claim to feel better and to need fewer pain medications, Axen said. "It's become a vital tool for my patients and their families. — Alexandra Robbins

On handing the book back to my friend, the woman inquired "Is he gay?" No, said my friend. The woman pondered for a moment. "Is he English?" she asked. — Terry Eagleton

I saw this French woman, this English man in Italy. It was a film [Certified Copy] I knew well, but I had already seen it, and I was familiar with it, and I had no feeling of anxiety or responsibility toward it. — Abbas Kiarostami

I believe that every English poet should read the English classics, master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them, travel abroad, experience the horrors of sordid passion, and - if he is lucky enough - know the love of an honest woman. — Robert Graves

Beauvoir lent Maheu a recent English novel she had enjoyed, The Green Hat, by Michael Arlen. She admired its independent heroine, Iris Storm. Maheu did not. 'I have no liking for women of easy virtue,' he told her. 'Much as I like a woman to please me, I find it impossible to respect any woman I've had.' Beauvoir was indignant. 'One does not HAVE an Iris Storm! — Hazel Rowley

I'm in fact Australian but my mother's English so I've got no problem playing a domineering English woman. — Jacki Weaver

Taxing Women is a must-have primer for any woman who wants to understand how our current tax system affects her family's economic condition. In plain English, McCaffery explains how the tax code stacks the deck against women and why it's in women's economic interest to lead the next great tax rebellion. — Patricia Schroeder

On the kitchen table a MakerBot was producing a small plastic part, watched intently by a young woman who was talking on her phone in a mix of English and Mandarin. — Neal Stephenson

She was a woman of combined beauty and quiet strength. No wonder he had fallen in love with her so many years ago. No wonder he was in love with her now.
And she would never know it. — Christy English

Is it true that the English government is calling on women to do work abandoned by men?
Yes, it is true.
Is not a woman's place the home?
No, not when men need her services outside the home.
Will she never be told again that her place is the home?
Oh, yes, indeed.
When?
As soon as men want their jobs back again. — Alice Duer Miller

It could have been quite worse," he agreed magnanimously.
"And those two guys who felt up your butt while the maintenance dude was working on that hinge were kicked out because they violated the 'must have fondler's consent' rule, or so that pink-haired woman who spoke English said, so at least they won't do that to the next guy trapped in the stocks."
"I will sleep easier knowing that. — Katie MacAlister

I draw because words are too unpredictable.
I draw because words are too limited.
If you speak and write in English, or Spanish, or Chinese, or any other language, then only a certain percentage of human beings will get your meaning.
But when you draw a picture everybody can understand it.
If I draw a cartoon of a flower, then every man, woman, and child in the world can look at it and say, That's a flower. — Sherman Alexie

It's almost as if all the sleazy men in this country attended the same seminar, where they learned that all American women go to Italy to sleep with them. The teacher at the seminar told them, "You don't need to learn English to seduce an American woman, you only need to learn one word: 'bella.' If you say it, their belts will snap and pants fall from their hips.If I ever find that seminar teacher, I'm going to kick him in the shin. — Rita Stradling

Deep down inside, I'm a selfish bastard, but I'm a selfish bastard that will love her in ways no other man ever will. She has been mine since that first day in English class, since the first time I kissed her and told her I loved her. And really, it's not my fault another man fell in love with the woman whose heart belongs to me. — Stevie J. Cole

My firm resolve was to escape my wicked cousin and my English captors. But the wind was howling, and rain was coming down in sheets. And even as I relaxed in a hot bath in my snug apartments, the clamor of the storm outside was counseling me to be patient and wait.
A wise woman never does anything in a hurry. — Margaret George

Genevieve Windham was not pretty, she was exquisite. Pretty in present English parlance meant blond hair and blue eyes, regular features, and a willingness to spend significant sums at the modiste of the hour. Unless a woman was emaciated or obese, her figure mattered little, there being corsets, padding, and other devices available to augment the Creator's handiwork. Failing those artifices, one resorted to the good offices of the portraitist, who could at least render a lady's likeness pretty even if the lady herself were not. Lady Jenny left pretty sitting on its arse in the mud several leagues back. Her eyes were a luminous, emerald green, not blue. Her hair was gold, not blond. Her figure surpassed the willowy lines preferred by Polite Society and veered off into the realms of sirens, houris, and dreams a grown man didn't admit aloud lest he imperil his dignity. The itching over Elijah's body faded in the face of the itch he felt to sketch her. She — Grace Burrowes

Mrs Ratlow was a widow, and she was head of English, but she still did all the cooking and cleaning for her two sons, and she never took holidays because she said
and I will never forget it
When a woman alone is no longer of any interest to the opposite sex, she is only visible where she has some purpose. — Jeanette Winterson

In my mind's eye, the image of bodies dancing quickly fades into the image of a group of men standing in a circle outside a club, trading stories in perfect American English, and then to the awkward silence caused by the sudden appearance of a middle-aged woman in tattered clothes, a baby strapped to her chest, a hand stretched out for loose change. — Bobby Benedicto

Is there any wilderness of sand in the deserts of Arabia, is there any prospect of desolation among the ruins of Palestine, which can rival the repelling effect on the eye, and the depressing influence on the mind, of an English country town in the first stage of its existence, and in the transition state of its prosperity? — Wilkie Collins

Had the girl had any common sense, she would have dropped the line at once. But she had no sense. She made no sense. She was a pale English rose of a governess, adrift in a watery wilderness, on her way to a grueling post on a godforsaken island, when any fool could have told her-a woman so lovely need never work for her keep.
Had the men around her any sense, they would have cut the rope immediately. But they were idiots, bloody shite-for-brains idiots, too entranced by the pretty girl in peril to reach for their knives.
Had Gray his own knife, he would have drawn it. But he wasn't wearing his knife, because he wasn't the captain on this ship, was he? Nor an officer, nor even part of the crew. He was just a stupid, overdressed passenger who hadn't strapped on a goddamned knife that morning because it might ruin the lines of his goddamned brand-new coat. — Tessa Dare

The most difficult thing for a wise woman to do is to pretend to be a foolish one. — W. Somerset Maugham

I look at the white woman's cards and listen to her bold English words - dog, cat, house - and there is all the evidence of what is to come in my life. I am not to go the way of the two people I long for in the thick terror of the night. The first man I love and the first woman I adore, my father and my mother with their Spanish words, are not in these cards. The road before me is English and the next part too awful to ask aloud or even silently: What is so wrong with my parents that I am not to mimic their hands, their needs, not even their words? — Daisy Hernandez

He lighted a cigarette, and in the curling smoke of it caught visions of his English mother, and wondered if she would understand how her son could love a woman who cried because she could not be skipper of a schooner in the cannibal isles. — Jack London

A well-chosen tie could make me almost merry; a good book, an excursion in a motor car or an hour with a woman left me fully satisfied. It particularly pleased me to ensure that this way of life, like a faultlessly correct suit of English tailoring, did not make me conspicuous in any way. I believe I was considered pleasant company, I was popular and welcome in society, and most who knew me called me a happy man. — Stefan Zweig

Grandmother's English heritage meant that she had that Empire voice, that come-out-of-your-grass-huts-and-give-us-your-treasures-for-our-museums kind of voice. The woman could boom. It was seriously terrifying. Even years later when my father imitated her and she seemed part Margaret Thatcher and part horse Aeney and I were still frightened. — Niall Williams

Aomame knew that he worked for a corporation connected with oil. He was a specialist on capital investment in a number of Middle Eastern countries. According to the information she had been given, he was one of the more capable men in the field. She could see it in the way he carried himself. He came from a good family, earned a sizable income, and drove a new Jaguar. After a pampered childhood, he had gone to study abroad, spoke good English and French, and exuded self-confidence. He was the type who could not bear to be told what to do, or to be criticized, especially if the criticism came from a woman. He had no difficulty bossing others around, though, and cracking a few of his wife's ribs with a golf club was no problem at all. As far as he was concerned, the world revolved around him, and without him the earth didn't move at all. He could become furious - violently angry - if anyone interfered with what he was doing or contradicted him in any way. — Haruki Murakami

She hit us," the woman shrieked. That was the gist of it anyway. There were a lot of unladylike words that began with "F," with various "C" words thrown in for leavening.
...
"Ben's better," I murmured. "He's more creative when he swears."
"He does it in that English accent, which is too cool. — Patricia Briggs

There are other ways women have been made to disappear. There is the business of naming.In some cultures women keep their names, but in most their children take the father's name, and in the English-speaking world until very recently, prefaced by Mrs. You stopped, for example, being Charlotte Bronte and became Mrs. Arthur Nicholls. Names erased a woman's genealogy and even her existence. — Rebecca Solnit