Quotes & Sayings About Glass Ceiling

I once asked the servants why none of them had blue eyes like my aunts. They replied that only the ladies could afford to buy the blue glass cups in which they kept their eyes at night to make them more blue and beautiful, and furthermore, if we went on asking silly questions, the rats that steal the faces of inquisitive children in order to wear them as masks would come to take us to live in the twilit world between the ceiling and the roof where no one ever dared to go. — Jose Donoso

If you wanted to kill me, why haven't you smothered me in my sleep?" "No sport in that." She gestured towards the ceiling. "Can I expect to be strung up on that bar and gutted like a deer?" He looked up at the bar and frowned. "Too much sport. Lots of heave-hoeing. Big mess to clean up after. Instead, why don't you just drink the poison-laced whiskey?" He extended the glass toward her again and when she didn't move he said, "No? Okay then." He shot the drink. She might not want the edge taken off but he sure as hell did. — Sandra Brown

Women willing to think big and bold and brazen are the women who have shattered one glass ceiling after another to make shimmering stars for the rest of us to see our way by. — Toni Sorenson

To all the women, and especially the young women, who put their faith in this campaign and in me, I want you to know that nothing has made me prouder than to be your champion. Now, I know we have still not shattered that highest and hardest glass ceiling, but some day someone will and hopefully sooner than we might think right now. — Hillary Clinton

My daughter could do and be anything, without having to fight to get through the glass ceiling. Without having it be so extraordinary. If my daughter went to produce a soundtrack for a movie, there would be nothing extraordinary about a girl doing it. When I did it, it was highly unusual. — Ronee Blakley

I never thought I was breaking a glass ceiling. I just had to do what I had to do, and it never occurred to me not to. — Marian Wright Edelman

The walls were hung with rich tapestries representing the Triumph of Beauty. A large press, inlaid with agate and lapis-lazuli, filled one corner, and facing the window stood a curiously wrought cabinet with lacquer panels of powdered and mosaiced gold, on which were placed some delicate goblets of Venetian glass, and a cup of dark-veined onyx. Pale poppies were broidered on the silk coverlet of the bed, as though they had fallen from the tired hands of sleep, and tall reeds of fluted ivory bare up the velvet canopy, from which great tufts of ostrich plumes sprang, like white foam, to the pallid silver of the fretted ceiling. A laughing Narcissus in green bronze held a polished mirror above its head. On the table stood a flat bowl of amethyst. — Oscar Wilde

I walk through the glass doors and into the lobby, which is floor-to-ceiling glass and steel. This fascinates me to no end, because buildings back in Portland are made of grass and mud. — Fanny Merkin

Often we women are risk averse. I needed the push. Now, more than ever, young women need more seasoned women to provide that encouragement, to take a risk, to go for it. Once a glass ceiling is broken, it stays broken. — Jennifer Granholm

Dust coated the long-dark light fixtures on the ceiling, at least half of them busted, jagged glass screwed into rusty holes. — James Dashner

Many women have been successful at breaking the glass ceiling only to find a layer of men. — Jane Harman

And they were writing scripts where Christine had hit the glass ceiling. And I always thought Christine would never hit the glass ceiling. I thought her dreams would take her. Maybe her dreams wouldn't take her where she wanted, but she still had her dreams. — Sharon Gless

Van Houten was still staring at the ceiling beams. He took a drink. The glass was almost empty again. 'Lidewij, I can't do it. I can't. I can't.' He leveled his gaze to me. 'Nothing happens to the Dutch Tulip Man. He isn't a con man or not a con man; he's God. He's an obvious and unambiguous metaphorical representation of God, and asking what becomes of him if the intellectual equivalent of asking what becomes of the disembodied eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg in Gatsby. Do he and Anna's man get married? We are speaking of a novel, dear child, not some historical enterprise. — John Green

I practiced saying I was gay to inanimate objects around the house. I told the soap dish in the bathroom, the ceiling fan above my bed, the blue drinking glass I favored above all the others simply because over the years its entire family had perished one by one during various interactions with hard surfaces around the kitchen and I'd convinced myself our solitude was linked.
"I'm gay," I told these things. "I'm a homo."
I would wait for the orphaned drinking glass to shatter, the ceiling fan to drop, or for the soap dish to let out a bloodcurdling scream. But nothing ever happened. The world went on as ever. — Nick Burd

There are so many people who don't want her to succeed, and they've been doing everything to deny her what is literally her entitlement. And she has still triumphed over it all, the biggest crack in the glass ceiling ever, and it's Mrs. Hillary Clinton. — Rush Limbaugh

It occurred to me that some people couldn't handle too much love. That everyone loves as they're able, but more, they are loved as they're able. Some are indomitable and open, like an ocean, but others aren't made to tread those waves, cannot stay afloat those waters. We embrace the kind of love we can manage. Less can be the right measure. But when it isn't, we must learn we cannot squeeze a mountain into a room with a glass ceiling. Or everything shatters. — Jennifer DeLucy

her mother had never done what was expected of her, had seemed determined to ignore proprieties. In so doing she had broken the glass ceiling. And it was not all that she had broken. — Brian McGilloway

I gaze up at the ceiling. Through it. Past Kim and Chip's room on the second floor into the sky, space, heaven, hell. Who says hell is down? It could be up. It could be next door to heaven. Hell could be a subset of heaven, like a ghetto in the middle of a glass city. — Julie Anne Peters

Many women arrange their lives around the people they love. Unfortunately, that arrangement takes up most of our days. — Holly Robinson

This is the ultimate chicken and the egg situation. The chicken: Women will tear down the external barriers once we achieve leadership roles ... The egg: We need to eliminate the external barriers to get women into those roles in the first place. Both sides are right. — Sheryl Sandberg

As far as a glass ceiling, I feel that all you can do is give it your absolute best with whatever gifts the universe has given you. And if you make it in some way that other people can recognize, that's fine. But even if you don't quote-unquote make it, you're fine if you've given it your whole heart and soul. — Alice Walker

I believe women still face a glass ceiling that must be shattered. — Andrew Cuomo

Now journeys were not simple matters for Grace; nothing is simple if your mind is a fetch-and-carry wanderer from sliced perilous outer world to secret safe inner world; if when night comes your thought creeps out like a furred animal concealed in the dark, to fine, seize, and kill its food and drag it back to the secret house in the secret world, only to discover that the secret world has disappeared or has so enlarged that it's a public nightmare; if then strange beasts walk upside down like flies on the ceiling; crimson wings flap, the curtains fly; a sad man wearing a blue waistcoat with green buttons sits in the centre of the room, crying because he has swallowed the mirror and it hurts and he burps in flashes of glass and light; if crakes move and cry; the world is flipped, unrolled down in the vast marble stair; a stained threadbare carpet; the hollow silver dancing shoes, hunting-horns ... — Janet Frame

I'm not really into EDM music; I really like when someone plays their instrument and stuff. But I saw Deadmau5 at a festival, and it was pretty tight, I have to admit. He's got the giant mouse head on and tubes coming out of the ceiling and giant mirror glass things. — Brittany Howard

But they didn't. Because simply being able to vote isn't the same as true equality. It's difficult to see the glass ceiling because it's made of glass. Virtually invisible. What we need is for more birds to fly above it and shit all over it, so we can see it properly. In — Caitlin Moran

We can continue to say to our girls as they grow into women, 'Come up here and scrunch under this glass ceiling with me.' Or we can say to them, 'Let me break this ceiling so when you come up here with me, we can stand up straight under the open sky. — Joyce T. McFadden

She walked as if through a forest. The pillars were furrowed like ancient trees, and into the woods the light seeped, colorful and as clear as song, through the stained-glass windows. High overhead animals and people frolicked in the stone foliage, and angels played their instruments. At an even higher, more dizzying height, the vaults of the ceiling arched upward, lifting the church toward God ... The song cut through her like a blinding light. Now she saw how deep in the dust she lay. — Sigrid Undset

When I saw that, the evidence left by two people, of love or something like it, desire at least, at least touch, between two people now perhaps old or dead, I covered the bed again and lay down on it. I looked up at the blind plaster eye in the ceiling. I wanted to feel Luke lying beside me. I have them, these attacks of the past, like faintness, a wave sweeping over my head. Sometimes it can hardly be borne. What is to be done, what is to be done, I thought. There is nothing to be done. They also serve who only stand and wait. Or lie down and wait. I know why the glass in the window is shatterproof, and why they took down the chandelier. I wanted to feel Luke lying besides me, but there wasn't room. — Margaret Atwood

I thought ( ... ) the proverbial glass ceiling had been cracked ( ... ) and I believed that it was just a matter of time until my generation took our fair share of the leadership roles. — Sheryl Sandberg

Did you ever notice me at Keramzin?"
He was silent for a long moment, and when I glanced at him, he was looking up at the glass ceiling. He'd gone red as a beet.
"Mal?"
He cleared his throat, crossed his arms. "As a matter of fact, I did. I had some very ... distracting thoughts about you."
"You did?" I sputtered.
"And I felt guilty for every one of them. You were supposed to be my best friend, not ..." He shrugged and turned even redder.
"Idiot. — Leigh Bardugo

We always look at the 'Fortune 500,' and we say, men in power, but we don't look at the glass cellar as opposed to the glass ceiling and say, men also are the homeless, men are also the ones that are the garbage collectors. Men are also the ones dying in construction sites that aren't properly supervised for safety hazards. — Warren Farrell

Jon Stone spoke thirteen languages and was fluent in six, French being one. He spoke it so well the girls thought he was a native Parisian pretending to be an American. This ability to blend with the natives was a valuable tool when Jon plied his trade. Jon eased from the bed. Floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors lined the back of his house, ten-foot-tall, custom-designed monsters so Jon could Zen on the view. Golden lights glittered to the horizon, ruby flashes marked ghetto-bird prowlers, jets descending toward LAX were strung like pearls across a tuxedo black sky. The doors were heavy as trucks, but silent as silk when they slid open. Jon stepped out and went to the pool. Pike was a silhouette cutout, backlit by the city as Jon swaggered close. "What — Robert Crais

Trust your instincts. Do not confuse ego with instinct. Ego has to be set aside if you want to improve, and we should always want to improve. There is no glass ceiling on being better. — Catherine Cruzan

She stared, wide eyed as glass-walled elevators shot up fifty-two floors like pods in a launch tube. Everything - from the glaringly bright carpet swirling with psychedelic lines; to the hotel's open ceiling ringed by storey after storey of balconies, the distant roof so high it made her head spin; to the people decked out in cosplay - was torn from a science fiction novel. It seemed Liv had spent the last eighteen years in search of her people, and in one sudden explosion of fate, they'd all been brought together in this place in time. Her eyes filled with tears as a sudden awareness filled her.
They were all nerds. — Danika Stone

When it comes to politics, we have an internal glass ceiling. We stand as good a chance as a man to win a political race, but women don't want to run at the same rate as men do. People point to the work-family balance issue, but I think it's much more than that. Many women don't have children, or have children who are no longer at home. There are some deeper psychological and emotional issues in play, like the fact that many of us feel like the embarrassment, humiliation and personal demonization in politics are simply more than our hearts can take. What stops us is fear. — Marianne Williamson

Although we were not able to shatter that highest and hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you it has 18 million cracks in it, and the light is shining through like never before, filling us all with the hope and the sure knowledge that the path will be a little easier next time, and we are going to keep working to make it so, today keep with me and stand for me, we still have so much to do together, we made history, and lets make some more. — Hillary Rodham Clinton

It's difficult to see the glass ceiling because it's made of glass. Virtually invisible. What we need is for more birds to fly above it and shit all over it, so we can see it properly. — Caitlin Moran

loved tagging along when she pushed open the storeroom door and went inside. It was a small room but filled with an overwhelming array of sacks bulging with different kinds of beans, nuts, flour, sugar, rice, and a multitude of spices, emitting a symphony of assorted smells I can still summon into memory at will. Large glass jars squatted on the shelves, stacked to the ceiling, — Jean Naggar

I am glad you are pleased," said Mma Ramotswe. "You have broken the glass ceiling that stops secretaries from reaching their full potential."
Mma Makutsi looked up, as if to search for the ceiling that she had broken. There were only the familiar ceiling boards, fly-tracked and buckling from the heat. But the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel itself could not at that moment have been more glorious in her eyes, more filled with hope and joy. — Alexander McCall Smith

Still, I wonder if more women artists, musicians and writers aren't household names because we don't have enough faith in our own pursuits to give ourselves the time we desperately need to be transformed by a creative vision. Maybe that glass ceiling isn't really made of glass at all, but of sticky little fingers, dishes piled in the sink, and mortgages that demand two incomes. — Holly Robinson

From her concession speech: Although we weren't able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it's got about 18 million cracks in it ... You can be so proud that, from now on, it will be unremarkable for a woman to win primary state victories, unremarkable to have a woman in a close race to be our nominee, unremarkable to think that a woman can be the President of the United States. And that is truly remarkable. — Hillary Clinton

So let's raise our glass to the accident season,
To the river beneath us where we sink our souls,
To the bruises and secrets, to the ghosts in the ceiling,
One more drink for the watery road. — Moira Fowley-Doyle

The fleas would jump and jump to heights unknown. Then a man came along and upturned a glass jar over the fleas. The fleas jumped and hit the top of the jar and could go no farther. Then the man removed the jar and yet the fleas did not jump higher than they had grown accustomed, because they believed there to still be a glass ceiling. — Pierce Brown

The door opened to reveal a room with walls consisting mostly of inset mahogany bookcases covered by leaded glass doors. Intricate plasterwork adorned the ceiling in a flowered medallion style that matched the thick Aubusson carpet on the floor.
"Are all of these books for sale?" Amanda asked in a hushed voice, feeling as if she had entered a king's treasure room.
Fretwell nodded. "You'll find everything from antiques to zoology. We have a wide selection of antique maps and celestial charts, original folios and manuscripts..." He gestured around them, as if the extensive rows of books were self-explanatory.
"I would love to lock myself in here for a week," she said impulsively. — Lisa Kleypas

If women cut back on their ambitions en masse, institutional change will never happen and the glass ceiling will lower. We need to be there to demand equal pay, mandatory maternity leave, more human hours. Leaving the "dirty work" of working to the men is a way of muffling our own voices. — Emily Matchar

I certainly came up in an era where women were really making strides and making a point to beat down doors and find their place and crash through the glass ceiling. — Gina Torres

Although we weren't able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it's got about 18 million cracks in it. And the light is shining through like never before, filling us all with the hope and the sure knowledge that the path will be a little easier next time. — Hillary Rodham Clinton

I guess the glass ceiling is in the West. For us, it's the glass wall. — Reema Bint Bandar Al Saud

Ignore the glass ceiling and do your work. If you're focusing on the glass ceiling, focusing on what you don't have, focusing on the limitations, then you will be limited. My way was to work, make my short ... make my documentary ... make my small films ... use my own money ... raise money myself ... and stay shooting and focused on each project. — Ava DuVernay

I think we've broken a lot of barriers and kind of shattered our "glass ceiling" that was there for women. There are so many great fighters and we've proved a lot of people wrong. A lot of the times our fights are the best fights on the card. — Miesha Tate

He stripped to his trunks, then dove into the pool. We all watched as he broke the surface and climbed from the water, his muscles slick and wet, his green eyes glowing in the half light of the glass ceiling. I heard Natalie and Sara both sigh, and Harry murmur that it almost made him want to go gay. Coby stretched out on a chaise beside me and asked, So you still sorry you moved here? — Lee Nichols

The term 'glass ceiling' was coined in 1984. More than 20 years later, the ceiling has barely cracked. There isn't a single country in the world that has as many female as male politicians. In business, the situation is even worse. Its highest echelon - the board - remains a chauvinist's dream. — Noreena Hertz

The way they were writing Christine as this older woman who got married, which she shouldn't have. Obviously got divorced right away. Reached the glass ceiling in the police precinct. So there is a part of her that died because she knows she couldn't go any farther. — Sharon Gless

Someone's got to break the glass ceiling, and once it's broken, everybody else comes clamouring up behind. — Helen Clark

Women have broken through the glass ceiling, and they're now more and more in the power seats. — Aretha Franklin

The glass ceiling will go away when women help other women break through that ceiling. — Indra Nooyi

Imagine there was a table covered with fleas, he explains. The fleas would jump and jump to heights unknown. Then a man came along and upturned a glass jar over the fleas. The fleas jumped and hit the top of the jar and could go no farther. Then the man removed the jar and yet the fleas did not jump higher than they had grown accustomed, because they believed there still be a glass ceiling. — Pierce Brown

Peter Hart, who's a pollster that's - who's done many focus groups about Hillary Clinton, talks about a glass curtain. She talks about the glass ceiling. He says voters feel there's a glass curtain between themselves and Hillary Clinton. They can't relate to her. They feel they don't really understand her, and that's made it easier for her opponents, of which there have been many over many years, to define her the way they want to. — Tamara Keith

I don't do what I do to try and break a glass ceiling. — Kathryn Bigelow

I myself shall continue living in my glass house where you can always see who comes to call, where everything hanging from the the ceiling and on the walls stays where it is as if by magic, where I sleep nights in a glass bed, under glass sheets, where who I am will sooner or later appear etched by a diamond. — Andre Breton

We know the road of lack of recognition, of people telling us that we can't headline a movie because black women don't translate overseas, that every time we try to break the glass ceiling, people say no, people push back. And it's everything that people don't see out there. — Viola Davis

Walking into the library, I took in my breath sharply and stopped: glass fronted bookcases and Gothic panels, stretching fifteen feet to a frescoed and plaster-medallioned ceiling. In the back of the room was a marble fireplace, big as a sepulchre, and a globed gasolier
dripping with prisms and strings of crystal beading
sparkled in the dim.
There was a piano, too, and Charles was playing, a glass of whiskey on the seat beside him. He was a little drunk; the Chopin was slurred and fluid, the notes melting sleepily into one another. A breeze stirred the heavy, moth-eaten velvet curtains, ruffling his hair. — Donna Tartt

The best advice I can give women at all levels is increase training. There are still areas where we have to break through that glass ceiling. — Hilda Solis

The boy was twelve, reveling in the strange dust-smelling murk of a New Orleans library, watching motes flash gold in a beam of sun. He loved the ceiling lights on chains and the table lamps with their green glass shades. The room was as beautiful as another world. — Marly Youmans

It's big business baby and its smile is hideous.
Top down violence, structural viciousness.
Your kids are doped up on medical sedatives.
But don't worry bout that. Worry bout terrorists.

The water levels rising! The water levels rising!
The animals, the polarbears, the elephants are dying!
Stop crying. Start buying.
But what about the oil spill?
Shh. No one likes a party pooping spoil sport.

Massacres massacres massacres/new shoes
Ghettoised children murdered in broad daylight by those employed to protect them.
Live porn streamed to your pre-teens bedrooms.
Glass ceiling, no headroom. Half a generation live beneath the breadline. — Kate Tempest

In all societies, both women and men are powerfully conditioned to repress the daily realities of (sexual harassment and workplace glass ceilings) and to collude with the rest of society in keeping these dimensions of shared experiences hidden. — William Keepin

The glass ceiling doesn't apply when you're building your own house — Heidi Roizen

There's no such thing as a glass ceiling for women. It's just a thick layer of men. — Laura A. Liswood

Everything, including your set of hand-blown green glass dishes with the tiny bubbles and imperfections, little bits of sand, proof they were crafted by the honest, simple, hard-working indigenous aboriginal people of wherever, well, these dishes all get blown out by the blast. Picture floor-to-ceiling drapes blown out and flaming to shreds in the hot wind. — Chuck Palahniuk

I did once shatter a chandelier. I was singing with my college choir in Wales. I was the soloist and I hit the high note and there was this massive bang and all this glass came down from the ceiling. I'd like that to be my party trick if I can perfect it. — Katherine Jenkins

The glass ceiling of happiness is held in place by two stout pillars, one psychological, the other biological. On the psychological level, happiness depends on expectations rather than objective conditions. We don't become satisfied by leading a peaceful and prosperous existence. Rather, we become satisfied when reality matches our expectations. The bad news is that as conditions improve, expectations balloon. Dramatic improvements in conditions, as humankind has experienced in recent decades, translate into greater expectations rather than greater contentment. If we don't do something about this, our future achievements too might leave us as dissatisfied as ever. On — Yuval Noah Harari

A Hillary Clinton presidency would symbolically break the glass ceiling for women in the United States, but it would be unlikely to break through the military-industrial complex that has been keeping our nation in a perpetual state of war--killing people around the world, many of them women and children. — Liza Featherstone

Breakthrough the glass ceiling of limitation that has been placed over your life, be the star of your own team and Champion yourself to victory! — Dwaun S. Cox

No glass ceiling was ever shattered by a whiner. — Melanie Hope

We've heard a lot in recent polemic about how to win the fight for the corner office. But pushing up against a glass ceiling is practically a luxury when you consider the millions of women who can feel the floor dropping beneath their feet. — Tina Brown

But I would be happier if my daughter and her friends were crashing through the glass ceiling instead of the sexual ceiling,' Jong continued. 'Being able to have an orgasm with a man you don't love or having Sex and the City on television, that is not liberation. If you start to think about women as if we're all Carrie on Sex and the City, well, the problem is: You're not going to elect Carrie to the Senate or to run your company. Let's see the Senate fifty percent female; let's see women in decision-making positions
that's power. Sexual freedom can be a smokescreen for how far we haven't come. — Ariel Levy

My objective as Secretary of Labor is to look through the 'glass ceiling' to see who is on the other side, and to serve as a catalyst for change ... — Elizabeth Dole

Beyond our grim circle, the underground station looked like the aftermath of a nightclub bombing. Steam from burst pipes shrieked forth in ghostly curtains. Splintered monitors swung broken-necked from the ceiling. A sea of shattered glass spread all the way to the tracks, flashing in the hysterical strobe of red emergency lights like an acre-wide disco ball. — Ransom Riggs

It's very tough to give advice because it's tough out there for everybody but for a girl it's even tougher, because I don't think the glass ceiling has changed at all in the past 30 years. Otherwise the radio would be covered with girl bands, or girls in bands, so I don't think much has changed on that level. But I think that bands can still have a lot of success trying to go another route. — Joan Jett

blood from the gash had seeped through her shirt and the blanket, pooling on the floor. Looking at it intensified the dizziness that its loss had caused. With the most pressing of her concerns attended to, Myranda set her mind to the task of escaping. She assessed the situation. Of course, her pack was gone. A pull on the door revealed it to be solidly secured from the outside. The windows were all small and near to the high ceiling. There would be no escape through any of those. The sole window large enough to allow her to escape was the shattered stained glass window behind the pulpit, but it was even further out of her reach. She had to try the door — Joseph R. Lallo

The question is, are you going to grow or are you going to just stay as you are out of fear and waste your precious human life by status quo-ing instead of being willing to break the sound barrier? Break the glass ceiling, or whatever it is in your own life? Are you willing to go forward? I suggest finding the willingness to go forward instead of staying still, which is essentially going backward, particularly when you have a calling in some direction. That calling needs to be answered. And it's not necessarily going to work out the way you want it to work out, but it is taking you forward, and you are leaving the nest. And that never can be a mistake - to fly instead of staying in the nest with all the poop and everything that's in there. TS: — Pema Chodron