French Women Quotes & Sayings

Real fairy tales are not for the fainthearted. Children get eaten by witches and chased by wolves; women fall into comas and are tortured by evil relatives. Somehow all that pain and suffering is worthwhile, though, when it leads to the ending: happily ever after. Suddenly it no longer matters if you got a B- on your midterm in French or you're the only girl in the school who doesn't have a date for the spring formal. Happily ever after trumps everything. But what if ever after could change? — Jodi Picoult

Rich women are not too put upon by their children. You don't have to do all the things for a child that those women who had to stay at home did. My Ann had a French governess who took care of her until she was twelve years old and went off to boarding school. — Clare Boothe Luce

Carla Hesse has given us an astonishing new look at women's struggle for independent expression and moral autonomy during the French Revolution and afterward. Denied the political and civil rights of men, literary women plunged into the expanded world of publication, answering the men's philosophical treatises with provocative novels about women's choices and chances. Lively and learned, The Other Enlightenment links women from Madame de Stael to Simone de Beauvoir in an alternate and daring path to the modern. — Natalie Zemon Davis

French cinema allows women to look ... a certain way and be talented at the same time. — Gina Bellman

Who do I like? I am a big fan of French and Saunders - not that that they are particularly stand-up I have to say, but I think they have been great for women and they are of themselves just incredibly funny whether they are male or female. — Jo Brand

Turning 50 can be difficult, sometimes dangerous, for women. The danger is in that blip that can come from the fact that you become invisible, and if you're not careful and don't embrace that, it can trip you up and you lose confidence. — Dawn French

Here is everything I know about France: Madeline and Amelie and Moulin Rouge. The Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe, although I have no idea what the function of either actually is. Napoleon, Marie Antoinette, and a lot of kings named Louis. I'm not sure what they did either, but I think it has something to do with the French Revolution, which has something to do with Bastille Day. The art museum is called the Louvre and it's shaped like a pyramid and the Mona Lisa lives there along with that statue of the women missing her arms. And there are cafes and bistros or whatever they call them on every street corner. And mimes. The food is supposed to be good, and the people drink a lot of wine and smoke a lot of cigarettes.
I've heard they don't like Americans, and they don't like white sneakers. — Stephanie Perkins

You have to adjust to where you are but the French are all together - the guys and the women. It's good. — Amelie Mauresmo

But there is no doubt that to attempt a novel of ideas is to give oneself a handicap: the parochialism of our culture is intense. For instance, decade after decade bright young men and women emerge from their universities able to say proudly: 'Of course I know nothing about German literature.' It is the mode. The Victorians knew everything about German literature, but were able with a clear conscience not to know much about the French. — Doris Lessing

That amenity which the French have developed into a great art ... conversation. — Cornelia Otis Skinner

Sometimes I feel I have more faith in European ideals than some of my British or French friends. For them, it's a financial burden. For me, Europe is primarily about values, about fundamental rights, freedom, women's rights. — Elif Safak

When I was in my teens and 20s, I looked to older Italian and French women. They always seemed so incredibly attractive to me because of their confidence. And because their faces had evidence of age: lines, dark circles, and half-lidded eyes, it made that confidence so rebellious. And that was incredibly attractive to me. — Justine Bateman

I speak of a Canada where men and women of aboriginal ancestry, of French and British heritage, of the diverse cultures of the world, demonstrate the will to share this land in peace, in justice and with mutual respect. — Pierre Trudeau

Morgan's argument that prehistoric societies practiced group marriage (also known as the primal horde or omnigamy - the latter term apparently coined by French author Charles Fourier) so influenced Darwin's thinking that he admitted, "It seems certain that the habit of marriage has been gradually developed, and that almost promiscuous intercourse was once extremely common throughout the world." With his characteristic courteous humility, Darwin agreed that there were "present day tribes" where "all the men and women in the tribe are husbands and wives to each other." In deference to Morgan's scholarship, Darwin continued, "Those who have most closely studied the subject, and whose judgment is worth much more than mine, believe that communal marriage was the original and universal form throughout the world ... . — Christopher Ryan

Sister Lucy is one of the kindest young women I've met. When it comes to French manicures and blow-drying, she has no equal. But I don't believe the poor girl has ever seen a map of England.
No wonder she is challenged by her jigsaw. — Rachel Joyce

La petite mort - that's what the French called orgasm. They believed that semen is sort of concentrated blood so that each time a man came he shortened his life a little by spilling blood that couldn't be replenished."
"And women?"
"Then, as now, men didn't much concern themselves with how women felt. — Michael Nava

French women will always look up at a man, even if he is four inches shorter than she is. — Alan Furst

When I was 20, I went to Paris and tried to meet French women. It didn't work. — Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Self-preservation and determination meant she could get away with anything. As her law-abiding, conventionally minded daughter, I secretly envied her this. She was not the clinging-vine type, nor one who could coax sugar from a lemon. Hers was the frontal attack with no inhibitions. She told the Nazis you could not trust Hitler, and they let her go. In the days of chaperones, she hitch-hiked a ride on a French destroyer along the coast of Crete; 'All quite proper, I had my cook with me,' she explained. — Mary Allsebrook

....one of those long, romantic novels, six hundred and fifty pages of small print, translated from French or German or Hungarian or something -- because few of the English ones have the exact feeling I mean. And you read one page of it or even one phrase of it, and then you gobble up all the rest and go about in a dream for weeks afterwards, for months afterwards -- perhaps all your life, who knows? -- surrounded by those six hundred and fifty pages, the houses, the streets, the snow, the river, the roses, the girls, the sun, the ladies' dresses and the gentlemen's voices, the old, wicked, hard-hearted women and the old, sad women, the waltz music -- everything. What is not there you put in afterwards, for it is alive, this book, and it grows in your head. 'The house I was living in when I read that book,' you think, or 'This colour reminds me of that book. — Jean Rhys

The Jardin Massey looked dismal today, rain lashed and deserted. She watched a bedraggled pigeon, feathers puffed out, sheltering beneath a branch.She'd never made a will, never considered whether she'd rather her body was buried or burnt to grey powder. And where would she want to be buried - in a French graveyard, gaudy with plastic flowers? If she made a will, could she state an aversion to plastic? — Jackie Ley

I am not a great French woman. George Sand, Marguerite Duras and Simone de Beauvoir are great French women. — Juliette Binoche

I listen to the things people want out of love these days and they blow my mind. I go to the pub with the boys from the squad and listen while they explain, with minute precision, exactly what shape a woman should be, what bits she should shave how, what acts she should perform on which date and what she should always or never do or say or want; I eavesdrop on women in cafes while they reel off lists of which jobs a man is allowed, which cars, which labels, which flowers and restaurants and gemstones get the stamp of approval, and I want to shout, Are you people out of your tiny minds? — Tana French

No women allowed.'
'I'm not a woman. I'm the boss. — Jackie French

That's the real reason why French women don't get fat: every day they make "petites" decisions that keep the larger weight loss struggle from ever having to begin. — Elizabeth Bard

I'm 50% Asian actually, so yes I was born in Paris but I feel more international than French so I can't talk about French women. — Berenice Marlohe

Beautiful features, always immaculately dressed, the kind of woman that makes a great impression. Their hair is always nicely curled. They major in French literature at expensive private women's colleges, and after graduation find jobs as receptionists or secretaries. They work for a few years, visit Paris for shopping once a year with their girlfriends. They finally catch the eye of a promising young man in the company, or else are formally introduced to one, and quit work to get married. They then devote themselves to getting their children into famous private schools. As he sat there, Tsukuru pondered the kind of lives they led. — Haruki Murakami

Italian men are beautiful in the same way as French women, which is to say - no detail spared in the quest for perfection. — Elizabeth Gilbert

You need mystery. You actually do. I think that's what foreign women, French women in particular, are good at. There's still a sense that you need to keep some of the unknown because that's where the soul resides, or something. — Jason Clarke

French women love bread and would never consider a life without carbs. — Mireille Guiliano

To get pleasure from eating, for example, you must notice that you are doing it. We found that French and American women spent about the same amount of time eating, but for Frenchwomen, eating was twice as likely to be focal as it was for American women. The Americans were far more prone to combine eating with other activities, and their pleasure from eating was correspondingly diluted. — Daniel Kahneman

The real reason French women don't get fat is not genetic, but cultural, and if the French subjected themselves to the American extremes of eating and dieting, the obesity problem in France would be much worse than what has struck America. — Mireille Guiliano

A little man in a threadbare coat spoke up for the poor as if he really knew what he was talking about. The women with the flowers threw them down for him. "That's Robert Speer," one said. "Something like that. He's our man. — Marge Piercy

Dear Uncle Bernard -
Your niece Frances - a four-eyed, French-plaited platypus awaiting the evaporation of h baby fat - thanks you very much for the romantic advice. But I've never been one to spend time thinking about why men and women take to each other, or why they don't. I think it can turn a lady neurotic, a term I despise but also am loath to have turned in my direction. — Carlene Bauer

The water nymphs who came to Poseidon
explained how little they desired to couple
with the gods. Except to find out
whether it was different, whether there was
a fresh world, another dimension in their loins.
In the old Pittsburgh, we dreamed of a city
where women read Proust in the original French,
and wondered whether we would cross over
into a different joy if we paid a call girl
a thousand dollars for a night. Or an hour.
Would it be different in kind or only
tricks and apparatus? I worried that a great
love might make everything else an exile.
It turned out that being together
at twilight in the olive groves of Umbria
did, indeed, measure everything after that. — Jack Gilbert

Life felt hideously empty. But she told herself that was only because women are educated to think that marriage will be a sudden panacea to all emptiness, and although she'd fought off such notions, she had no doubt been infected by them. — Marilyn French

Madame Tallien shared honors with Josephine Beauharnais in being mistress to Barras, an ex-nobleman and ex-terrorist whose appetite for beautiful women, beautiful young men, and money was the only wholesome trait in his character. — J. Christopher Herold

Women blow my mind. The stuff that routinely gets done to them would make most men curl up and die, but women turn to steel and keep on coming. Any man who claims he's not into strong women is fooling himself mindless: he's into strong women who know how to pout prettily and put on baby voices, and who will — Tana French

Now, now. Southern ladies don't French-kiss and tell. — Susan Elizabeth Phillips

DON Luigi Giussani used to quote this example from Bruce Marshall's novel To Every Man a Penny. The protagonist of the novel, the abbot Father Gaston, needs to hear the confession of a young German soldier whom the French partisans are about to sentence to death. The soldier confesses his love of women and the numerous amorous adventures he has had. The young priest explains that he has to repent to obtain forgiveness and absolution. The soldier answers, "How can I repent? It was something that I enjoyed, and if I had the chance I would do it again, even now. How can I repent?" Father Gaston, who wants to absolve the man who has been marked by destiny and who's about to die, has a stroke of inspiration and asks, "But are you sorry that you are not sorry?" The young man answers impulsively, "Yes, I am sorry that I am not sorry." In other words, he apologizes for not repenting. The door was opened just a crack, allowing absolution to come in ... . — Pope Francis

Nana's French knickers were surely a symbol of liberty and abandonment, worn only by women who didn't care for conventional frills or superficial nametags. Those french knickers were flags blowing in the wind, like a statement of victory. — Diana Janney

The Uberlingen Chief of Police Jakob Graf, was severely wounded in this explosion. It has now become questionable as to whether the weapons he collected were for the Gestapo or the invading French troops. — Hank Bracker

I have mastered many things in my life. Navigating the streets of London, speaking French without an accent, dancing the quadrille, the Japanese art of flower arranging, lying at charades, concealing a highly intoxicated state, delighting young women with my charms ... "
Tessa stared.
"Alas," he went on, "no one has ever actually referred to me as 'the master,' or 'the magister,' either. More's the pity ... — Cassandra Clare

The great thing about American women is their energy and the way they love to dress. French women don't really dress; they are too conservative, as it's always a question of money. In America, women are powerful and strong, determined. If they want to be an object, they choose to be in control. — Jean Paul Gaultier

Men's need to dominate women may be based in their own sense of marginality or emptiness; we do not know its root, and men are making no effort to discover it. — Marilyn French

There is a latent fairy in all women, but look how carefully we have to secrete her in order to be taken seriously. And fairies come in all shapes, colours, sizes and types, they don't have to be fluffy. They can be demanding and furious if hey like. They do, however, have to wear a tiara. That much is compulsory. — Dawn French

[G]reat progress was evident in the last Congress of the American 'Labour Union' in that among other things, it treated working women with complete equality. While in this respect the English, and still more the gallant French, are burdened with a spirit of narrow-mindedness. Anybody who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without the feminine ferment. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex (the ugly ones included). — Karl Marx

Abruptly the drumbeat softens into heartbeat. The camera becomes his eye. This was what had summoned him - a human heart beating from within a ripped-off, rolled-up tiny piece of cloth. A discarded newborn. Black. A useless, half-dead, famished, thrown-away boy. The madwoman's? No, she's beyond childbearing years. He approaches, his steps making no sound at all. When he reaches down to turn it over, the thing quivers. Suddenly Milo's brain fills with a soft cascade of men and women's voices from the past in French and English, German and Dutch, Cree and Gaelic. They gurgle and babble and blend as he stares at the unwanted infant. Is it breathing? Yes, — Nancy Huston

French women know one can go far with a great haircut, a bottle of champagne, and a divine perfume. — Mireille Guiliano

Women in the Arab world have a rich history in their active participation in political change from the Algeria revolution against the French occupation to the most recent revolution in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya among other countries. The question is not their participation. Their question is the incorporation of women's voices fully in the new definitions of the countries where change has happened. — Zainab Salbi

I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse. — Charles V

He had learned Lesson One: Let French women tell you what they want. — Peggy Kopman-Owens

The Robespierre women (as one tended to think of them now) were all on display. Madame looked actively, rather intimidatingly benevolent; it was her aim in life to find a Jacobin who was hungry, then to go into the kitchen and make extravagant efforts, and say, "I have fed a patriot!". — Hilary Mantel

Men seem unable to feel equal to women: they must be superior or they are inferior. — Marilyn French

Tom Ford once told me that he found French women sexier than American ones. He said, 'Americans are too clean ... ' I took no offense. — Linda Wells

Eliot was scornful of idle women readers who imagined themselves the heroines of French novels, and of self-regarding folk who saw themselves in the most admirable character in a novel, and she hoped for more nuanced engagement from her own readers. Even so, all readers make books over in their own image, and according to their own experience. — Rebecca Mead

Rachel," I snap, "I don't care if Janelle wants to work at Hooters. I don't care if you and the rest of the world want to go spend your money on dried-out chicken and ketchup-based sauces. And least of all - less than almost anything else I can imagine - I don't care how much sex your sister is or isn't having. That's kind of the deal with the whole uptight feminazi thing - we don't care when other women want to wear stupid orange Soffe shorts with white tennis shoes and have a lot of sex, or when they want to wear habits and live in a convent, or if they want to walk around in pasties and never French kiss, so long as they're allowed to do what they want. And right now, all I want is to go to bed. Okay? — Emily Henry

When a man loses superiority, he loses potency. That's what all this talk about castrating women is about. Castrating women are those who refuse to pretend men are better than they are and better than women are. The simple truth - that men are only equal - can undermine a culture more devastatingly than any bomb. Subversion is telling the truth. — Marilyn French

Only teenagers think boring is bad. Adults, grown men and women who've been around the block a few times, know that boring is a gift straight from God. Life has more than enough excitement up its sleeve, ready to hit you with as soon as you're not looking, without you adding to the drama. — Tana French

The biggest challenges are always getting into the rooms that you need to get into and having people open to the types of stories that I want to tell. And I feel that just being a female director and doing that is a big deal in this country. On my third movie I worked with a French DP. I asked him has he ever worked with a woman director before? He said in France a third of directors are women; so you can't avoid them. So I realized that the US is behind. — Kasi Lemmons

Oh, Jesus," he said, wheezing with the effort it took to control
himself. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. "You little
innocent. I'm fluent in French, but it isn't my first language." It
was plain by the mortified expression in those green eyes that she
didn't understand, so he explained. "Baby , if I can still think
clearly enough to speak French, then I'm not totally involved in
what I'm doing. It may sound pretty , but it doesn't mean
any thing. Men are different from women; the more excited we are,
the more like cavemen we sound. I could barely speak English with
you, much less French. As I remember, my vocabulary
deteriorated to a few short, explicit words, 'fuck' being the most
prominent."
To his amazement, she blushed, and he smiled at this further
evidence of her charming prudery. "Go to sleep," he said gently.
"Lindsey didn't even rate a replay. — Linda Howard

French women typically think about good things to eat. American women typically worry about bad things to eat. — Mireille Guiliano

And there are so much easier ways to destroy a woman. You don't have to rape her or kill her; you don't even have to beat her. You can just marry her. You don't even have to do that. You can just let her work in your office for thirty-five dollars a week. — Marilyn French

Ma and Mrs. Daly were on speaking terms, most of the time; women prefer to hate each other at close range, where you get more bang for your buck. — Tana French

Dissent and dissidence are overwhelmingly the work of the young. It is not by chance that the men and women who initiated the French Revolution, like the reformers and planners of the New Deal and postwar Europe, were distinctly younger than those who had gone before. Rather than resign themselves, young people are more likely to look at a problem and demand that it be solved. — Tony Judt

If you're creating a slave situation, you would almost never bring women. And if we look at Slavery for example, we look at the Greeks and the Romans, right? It was always men. They never brought any women. Because women carry the seeds of the revolution, right? And if you have the men by themselves, then you can do what the French did with the Blackfeet, which is breed them out. — Nikki Giovanni

All patriarchists exalt the home and family as sacred, demanding it remain inviolate from prying eyes. Men want privacy for their violations of women ... All women learn in childhood that women as a sex are men's prey. — Marilyn French

French women don't eat Wonder Bread. — Mireille Guiliano

Who who whose smell in the air of her room, whose fingerprints all over her friends' secret places. — Tana French

Paul Broca, for example, was a famous French craniologist in the nineteenth century whose name is given to Broca's area, the part of the frontal lobe involved in the generation of speech (which is wiped out in many stroke victims). Among his other interests, Broca used to measure brains, and he was always rather perturbed by the fact that the German brains came out a hundred grams heavier than French brains. So he decided that other factors, such as overall body weight, should also be taken into account when measuring brain size: this explained the larger Germanic brains to his satisfaction. But for his prominent work on how men have larger brains than women, he didn't make any such adjustments. Whether by accident or by design, it's a kludge. — Ben Goldacre

Scarlet O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were. In her face were too sharply blended the delicate features of her mother, a Coast aristocrat of French descent, and the heavy ones of her florid Irish father. But it was an arresting face, pointed of chin, square of jaw. Her eyes were pale green without a touch of hazel, starred with bristly black lashes and slightly tilted at the ends. Above them, her thick black brows slanted upward, cutting a startling oblique line in her magnolia-white skin-that skin so prized by Southern women and so carefully guarded with bonnets, veils and mittens against hot Georgia suns. — Margaret Mitchell

The smouldering eroticism of great European actresses like Jeanne Moreau demonstrated to my generations women's archetypal mystery and glamour, completely missing from the totalitarian world-view of the misogynist Foucault. For me, the big French D is not Derrida, but Deneuve. — Camille Paglia

I found out that many subjects were taboo from the white man's point of view. Among the topics they did not like to discuss with Negros were the following: American white women; the Ku Klux Klan; France, and how Negro soldiers fared while there; French women; Jack Johnson; the entire northern part of the United States; the Civil War; Abraham Lincoln; U.S. Grant; General Sherman; Catholics; the Pope; Jews; the Republican Party; slavery; social equality; Communism; Socialism; the 13th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution; or any topic calling for positive knowledge or manly self-assertion on the Part of the Negro. The most accepted topics were sex and religion. — Richard Wright

All the women I know feel a little like outlaws. — Marilyn French

Of course there are fat French women. There are fat people everywhere. — Mireille Guiliano

French novels generally treat of the relations of women to the world and to lovers, after marriage; consequently there is a great deal in French novels about adultery, about improper relations between the sexes, about many things which the English public would not allow. — Lafcadio Hearn

For men to focus on controlling women's reproduction to solve a society's problems seems nothing short of mad or, at best, superstitious. But men's superstition or insanity has real and dire consequences for the women who are its object. And states, too, home in on women's bodies, perhaps to create the illusion that men are in control of uncontrollable forces. Indeed, almost all governments try to control women's bodies and regulate their appearance in some way. — Marilyn French

The gracefulness of the slender fishing boats that glided into the harbor in Dakar was equaled only by the elegance of the Senegalese women who sailed through the city in flowing robes and turbaned heads. I wandered through the nearby marketplace, intoxicated by the exotic spices and perfumes. The Senegalese are a handsome people and I enjoyed the brief time that Oliver and I spent in their country. The society showed how disparate elements
French, Islamic, and African
can mingle to create a unique and distinctive culture. — Nelson Mandela

The beauty of being a woman, as the French say, "of a certain age", is that I can be invisible. Young people, both men and women, look right through me, unless I make the effort to be noticed. — Nanci Rathbun

And our footsteps rang and echoed till it sounded like the room was full of dancers, the house calling up all the people who had danced here across centuries of spring evenings, gallant girls seeing gallant boys off to war, old men and women straight-backed while outside their world disintegrated and the new one battered at their doors, all of them bruised and all of them laughing, welcoming us into their long lineage. — Tana French

What I like about the American woman is she usually has a lot of dynamism. In the U.S., women have a tendency to go forward, to be more exaggerated than in Europe. Many times the rough ideas come from the States, then they are refined in Europe. The American women and the French women are still the best-dressed. — Francoise Gilot

When the colonizers spoke of indigenous women - ignoring their own patriarchy, which they doubtlessly considered normal, just like today - it was always with tears in their eyes. They only referred to the differences between these two patriarchical regimes - the French one and the Algerian one - at the cost of any mention of their far more considerable commonalities. — Christine Delphy

Head on the crown and feet on the crowd,
That's how the French Revolution started.
Kings too proud, and people who bowed,
That's never a good tale to get mparted.

An evolution needs a revolution,
A revolution leads to a solution,
People have to follow intuition,
Then it will all come to fruition. — Ana Claudia Antunes

Sedatives and slim pills: French doctors are so obliging. That's why French women don't get fat. — L.S. Hilton

I was ecstatic they re-named 'French Fries' as 'Freedom Fries'. Grown men and women in positions of power in the U.S. government showing themselves as idiots. — Johnny Depp

It's funny because I think that both France and Britain are known for their distinctive styles, and everyone says that France is so chic and elegant but I think, more than that, French women are renowned for dressing in what suits them. — Alexa Chung

The craft passed directly below Scathach and she released her grip and dropped onto the top of the vimana alongside Joan with enough force to send the larger craft plunging down. The French immortal laughed. "So nice of you-"
"Don't you dare crack any dropping-in jokes," Scathach warned before her friend could finish.
The vimana dipped and spun, but the two women had firm grips on the transparent dome and held on while the pilot tilted the craft,attempting to shake them off.
"So long as he doesn't get too close to the lava," Scatty said, "we should be okay."
At that moment the vimana dropped straight down, zooming dangerously close to the lava's sluggish bubbling surface.
"I think he heard you," Joan said, coughing as the air became almost unbreathable. — Michael Scott

Women are afraid in a world in which almost half the population bears the guise of the predator, in which no factor - age, dress, or color - distinguishes a man who will harm a woman from one who will not. — Marilyn French

You asked me in Paris how many
women I'd loved. I said one. I should
have said two." He cupped her cheek,
his thumb rubbing over her bottom lip.
"As a child I loved my mother, and as a
man I love you. — Kitty French

I've always loved strong women, which is lucky for me because once you're over about twenty-five there is no other kind. Women blow my mind. The stuff that routinely gets done to them would make most men curl up and die, but women turn to steel and keep on coming. Any man who claims he's not into strong women is fooling himself mindless; he's into strong women who know how to pout prettily and put on baby voices, and who will end up keeping his balls in her makeup bags. — Tana French

French women don't have too many clothes - a few good pieces that last for a while and are classic and timeless. — Mireille Guiliano

Gay men are French women...with penises. — Simon Doonan

When Freemasons vainglory on their deeds during the French Revolution, they forget that many innocents paid with their own life for that, including pregnant women and children from the royal families, and those that have witness it didn't forget, and will likewise turn the karma back on them in the years to come, making their innocents pay for the guilty ones. — Robin Sacredfire

She was wearing combat trousers and a wine-colored woollen sweater with sleeves that came down past her wrists, and clunky runners, and I put this down as affectation: Look, I'm too cool for your conventions. The spark of animosity this ignited increased my attraction to her. There is a side of me that is most intensely attracted to women who annoy me. — Tana French

The topic of women's participation in the French Revolution has generally received little attention from historians, who have displayed a tendency to minimize the role of women in the major events of those years, or else to ignore it altogether. In the nineteenth century those who did attempt to deal with the topic chose to approach it with an emphasis on individual women who had for some reason attained a degree of notoriety. — Shirley Elson-Roessler

What I don't understand is where women suddenly get power. Because they do. The kids, who almost always turn out to be a pile of shit, are, we all know, Mommy's fault. Well, how did she manage that, this powerless creature? Where was all her power during the years she was doing five loads of laundry a week and worrying about mixing the whites with the colors? How was she able to offset Daddy's positive influence? How come she never knows she has this power until afterward, when it gets called responsibility? — Marilyn French

We were still at the age when girls are years older than guy, and the guys grow up by doing their best when the girls need them to. — Tana French

Funny how women are ashamed of their inner fairy whereas men are forever proudly displaying their inner cowboy or fireman — Dawn French

Such is the nature and make-up of the French that they are only good at the start. Then they are worse than devils, but, given time, they're less than women. — Francois Rabelais

On a recent HBO special, Roseanne Arnold, who, incidentally, collects Barbies, excoriated what she considered to be Barbie's middle-class-ness. Why didn't Mattel make, say, "trailer-park Barbie"? But to many upper-middle-class women, all post-1977 Barbies are Trailer Park Barbie. Ironically, given the knee-jerk antagonism to Barbie's body, it is one of her few attributes that doesn't scream "prole." Her thinness - indicative of an expensive gym membership and possibly a personal trainer - definitely codes her as middle- or upper-middle-class. In Distinction, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu notes that "working class women . . . are less aware of the 'market' value of beauty and less inclined to invest . . . sacrifices and money in cultivating their bodies." Likewise, Barbie's swanlike neck elevates her status. A stumpy neck is a lower-class attribute, Fussell says. — M.G. Lord