Quotes & Sayings About Grown Woman

But at some point, a full-grown woman has to be accountable for her own self, and for the choices she's made. — Cherie Priest

She wanted to say, I am made of smoke. My mind is smoke, my thoughts are smoke, I am all smoke and only smoke. This body is a garment I put on, which by my magic art I have made capable of functioning as a human body functions, it's so biologically perfect that it can conceive children and pop them out in threes, fours and fives. Yet I am not of this body and could, if I chose, inhabit another woman, or an antelope, or a gnat. Aristotle was wrong, for I have lived for aeons, and altered by body when I chose, like a garment of which I had grown tired. The mind and the body are two, she wanted to say, but she knew it would disappoint him to be disagreed with, so she held her tongue. — Salman Rushdie

A woman impudent and mannish grown
Is not more loath'd than an effeminate man. — William Shakespeare

She was a grown young woman when she was overtaken by what she supposed to be the climax of her fate. It was when the face and figure of a great tragedian began to haunt her imagination and stir her senses. The persistence of the infatuation lent it an aspect of genuineness. The hopelessness of it colored it with the lofty tones of a great passion. — Kate Chopin

Alma had grown as tall as a man by now, with broad shoulders ... This need not have necessarily precluded her from marriage. Some men liked a larger woman, who promised a stronger disposition, and Alma, it could be argued, had a handsome profile
at least from her left side. She certainly had a fine, friendly nature. Yet she was missing some invisible, essential ingredient, and so, despite all the frank eroticism that lay hidden within her body, her presence in a room did not kindle ideas of ardor in any man.
It did not help that Alma herself believed she was unlovely. She believed this only because she had been told it so many times, and in so many different ways. Most recently, the news of her homeliness had come straight from her father ... — Elizabeth Gilbert

A meditator cannot smoke, for the simple reason that he never feels nervous, in anxiety, in tension. Smoking helps - on a momentary basis - to forget about your anxieties, your tensions, your nervousness. Other things can do the same - chewing gum can do the same, but smoking does it the best. In your deep unconscious, smoking is related with sucking milk from your mother's breast. And as civilization has grown, no woman wants the child to be brought up by breast-feeding - naturally; he will destroy the breast. The breast will lose its roundness, its beauty. — Rajneesh

Now. When a woman has five grown-up daughters, she ought — Jane Austen

All three men looked at the woman in the doorway, but they all saw different things.
Alex saw a rather attractive young lady with a remarkable air of vitality in her silver eyes.
John saw the woman he'd come to like and admire tremendously this past week, looking rather fetching and grown-up in her new gown and coiffure.
Dunford saw an angel. — Julia Quinn

A dread of white people now came to live permanently in my feelings and imagination. As the war drew to a close, racial conflict flared over the entire South, and though I did not witness any of it, I could not have been more thoroughly affected by it if I had participated directly in every clash. The war itself had been unreal to me, but I had grown able to respond emotionally to every hint, whisper, word, inflection, news, gossip, and rumor regarding conflicts between the races. Nothing challenged the totality of my personality so much as this pressure of hate and threat that stemmed from the invisible whites. I would stand for hours on the doorsteps of neighbors' houses listening to their talk, learning how a white woman had slapped a black woman, how a white man had killed a black man. It filled me with awe, wonder, and fear, and I asked ceaseless questions. One evening I heard a tale that rendered — Richard Wright

She was a grown-up, divorced woman now, on her own. She'd gotten herself this far, she could get herself around Italy too. — Carol Grace

I believe most Afghan men, on an individual level, are far from extremist or fundamentalist.
Hope rests with those men, who control what happens to their daughters. Behind every discreetly ambitious young Afghan woman with budding plans to take on the world, there is an interesting father. And in every successful grown woman who has managed to break new ground and do something women usually do not, there is a determined father, who is redefining honor and society by promoting his daughter. There will always be a small group of elite women with wealthy parents who can choose to go abroad or to take high positions in politics. They will certainly inspire others, but in order for significant numbers of women to take advantage of higher education and participate in the economy on a larger scale, it will take powerful men educating many other men — Jenny Nordberg

Keegan rested his forearm on the wheel. "If the spell is fading, you could've grown old with this woman. She never had to know you were the Quartermaster on the Sea Dog when it sank in 1795."

"All true." Colton glanced over his shoulder toward the bow. "But every man she's ever known has lied to her. I didn't want to be another one. — Lisa Kessler

He's a woman.
He's a grown woman
He's a old woman. — Patrick Ness

He could have loved her as a man loves a woman, protected her, provided for her, given her children, grown old with her and passed on to the next life with her. Damn — J.R. Barrett

There are many things worth telling that are not quite narrative. And eternity itself possesses no beginning, middle or end. Fossils, arrowheads, castle ruins, empty crosses: from the Parthenon to the Bo Tree to a grown man's or woman's old stuffed bear, what moves us about many objects is not what remains but what has vanished. There comes a time, thanks to rivers, when a few beautiful old teeth are all that remain of the two-hundred-foot spires of life we call trees. There comes a river, whose current is time, that does a similar sculpting in the mind. — David James Duncan

There is no remedy for this poison,' Sudhakar said. 'You must live with the consequences, as must I.'
'Then why did you let her have it?' Quill said savagely. 'You knew she was impulsive. You should have guessed she might take it herself!'
Sudhakar looked at him. 'Now, why would that occur to me? I saw a young woman consumed with anxiety for her husband, prepared to ruin her marriage in order to save him from further suffering. I saw nothing self-destructive about her.'
'She thought it was harmless,' Quill whispered harshly. 'She had no idea. You shouldn't have given it to her.'
'Do you think she is a child? She is a grown woman. Her rash actions are her own.'
It was only when Quill fixed him with a brutal gaze that he realized that Sudhakar was also suffering. — Eloisa James

As The Pioneer Woman has grown and the revenue has grown, the prizes keep getting better, and that certainly feels good. — Ree Drummond

The first decade of the twentieth century was not a great time to be born black and poor and female in St. Louis, Missouri, but Vivian Baxter was born black and poor, to black and poor parents. Later she would grow up and be called beautiful. As a grown woman she would be known as the butter-colored lady with the blowback hair. — Maya Angelou

First they ask me to tell the life of the child who is mother to the woman. Then they make me my own daughter and ask for an account of grown-up sensations. Finally I am requested to write about my dreams, and thus I become an anachronical grandmother; for it is the special privilege of old age to relate dreams. — Helen Keller

Archer disliked her use of the word "clever" almost as much as her use of the word "common"; but he was beginning to fear his tendency to dwell on the things he disliked in her. After all, her point of view had always been the same. It was that of all the people he had grown up among, and he had always regarded it as necessary but negligible. Until a few months ago he had never known a "nice" woman who looked at life differently; and if a man married it must necessarily be among the nice. — Edith Wharton

Suddenly, quite miraculously, you are a grown-up beautiful woman. You look so much like your mother, but you are still uniquely you. You have thoughts I will never know. Desires I will never understand. Friends I will never meet. Passions I will never share. You have a life. You have an entire world in front of you. — Karin Slaughter

Legislative proposals that would enable an employer to determine whether or not a woman's insurance would cover the cost of birth control strikes women as particularly bizarre. Is the boss going to take care of the children that are conceived accidentally? Stop treating us like children. Women are grown ups. — Madeleine M. Kunin

Candy. He spoke of candy. Was he still in the child's world where candy stood for something sweet enough to hold back tears? I had grown older, and had lost enthusiasm for childish delights. I wanted what every teenager wants
freedom to develop into a woman, freedom to have full control over my life! Though I tried to tell him this, my voice had dried up along with my tears. — V.C. Andrews

She fell in love with freedom. In the Sommers' home she had lived shut up within four walls, in a stagnant atmosphere where time moved in circles and where she could barely glimpse the horizon through distorted windowpanes. She had grown up clad in the impenetrable armor of good manners and conventions, trained from girlhood to please and serve, bound by corset, routines, social norms, and fear. Fear had been her companion: fear of God and his unpredictable justice, of authority, of her adoptive parents, of illness and evil tongues, of anything unknown or different; fear of leaving the protection of her home and facing the dangers outside; fear of her own fragility as a woman, of dishonor and truth. Hers had been a sugar-coated reality built on the unspoken, on courteous silences, well-guarded secrets, order, and discipline. She had aspired to virtue but now she questioned the meaning of the word. — Isabel Allende

I'm not this unusual," she said. "It's just my hair."
She looked at Bobby and she looked at me, with an expression at once disdainful and imploring. She was forty, pregnant, and in love with two men at once. I think what she could not abide was the zaniness of her life. Like many of us, she had grown up expecting romance to bestow dignity and direction.
"Be brave," I told her. Bobby and I stood before her, confused and homeless and lacking a plan, beset by an aching but chaotic love that refused to focus in the conventional way. Traffic roared behind us. A truck honked its hydraulic horn, a monstrous, oceanic sound. Clare shook her head, not in denial but in exasperation. Because she could think of nothing else to do, she began walking again, more slowly, toward the row of trees. — Michael Cunningham

had my share of beauty, but I do not pretend to be anything extraordinary now. When a woman has five grown-up daughters, — Jane Austen

There's still a little girl inside every grown woman who would love to be able to fall into the arms of her mother and cry her eyes out every now and then. — Toni Sorenson

On Egdon there was no absolute hour of the day. The time at any moment was a number of varying doctrines professed by the different hamlets, some of them having originally grown up from a common root, and then become divided by secession, some having been alien from the beginning. West Egdon believed in Blooms-End time, East Egdon in the time of the Quiet Woman Inn. Grandfer Cantle's watch had numbered many followers in years gone by, but since he had grown older faiths were shaken. Thus, the mummers having gathered here from scattered points, each came with his own tenets on early and late; and they waited a little longer as a compromise. — Thomas Hardy

Man with goatee. Man who looked like a Beatle. All the Beatles at once. Woman wearing newspaper hat. I'd grown used to how weird New Yorkers were, and I could fit them into types. — Olivia Sudjic

If you're all grown up, as you insist, then you're old enough to recognize heat between a man and a woman. And it's there between us. I'm not a saint, Saskia. I'm not one of your respectful human boys. If you ask me, I'm not going to be a gentleman."

"Sainted bloody earth." She'd finally found her tongue. Her cheeks still blushed pink, but her eyes were furious. "How is that no woman has killed you before now? — M.J. Scott

It was the cheapest kind of rebuke, to call a woman ugly, but one to which small boys and grown men seemed equally quick to stoop when feeling challenged. — Helen Simonson

The shy girl she had known at Riverrun had grown into a woman who was by turns proud, fearful, cruel, dreamy, reckless, timid, stubborn, vain, and, above all, inconstant. — George R R Martin

As they approached a puddle, he laid his hand against the small of her back to steer her around it, and her stomach flipped over.
Stupid, traitorous stomach, performing acrobatics for the likes of Dom Manton. Why couldn't it do that with Edwin? He, at least, wanted to marry her.
But sadly, Edwin didn't have smoldering eyes the exotic color of the finest jade. Or hair cropped unfashionably short, which only emphasized the carved masculine lines of his face. Or a body that looked so amazing in blue superfine it made a grown woman want to weep.
She would not weep over Dom's body, curse it! — Sabrina Jeffries

He died at the wrong time, when there was much to be clarified and established. They hadn't even started to be grown-ups together. There was this piece of heaven, this little girl he'd carried around the shop on his shoulders; and then one day she was gone, replaced by a foreigner, an uncooperative woman he didn't know how to speak to. Being so confused, so weak, so in love, he chose strength and drove her away from himself. The last years he spent wondering where she'd gone, and slowly came to realise that she would never return, and that the husband he'd chosen for her was an idiot. — Hanif Kureishi

ROXANE:
Live, for I love you!
CYRANO:
No, In fairy tales
When to the ill-starred Prince the lady says 'I love you!' all his ugliness fades fast
But I remain the same, up to the last!
ROXANE:
I have marred your life
I, I!
CYRANO:
You blessed my life!
Never on me had rested woman's love.
My mother even could not find me fair:
I had no sister; and, when grown a man,
I feared the mistress who would mock at me.
But I have had your friendship
grace to you
A woman's charm has passed across my path.
— Edmond Rostand

[...] I became a haver-of-authentic emotions, an openhearted, well-adjusted, and thriving person, a dependable employee, a woman who could go out to a deli and order a sandwich and eat it and read the newspaper without thinking of the sentence I AM A GROWN WOMAN, EATING OFF A PLATE, AND READING THE NEWS, because I was not an observer of myself, but a be-er of myself, a person who just WAS instead of a person who was almost. — Catherine Lacey

I'm a grown woman and sometimes, I might be a little fat, you know? Am I alone there? Not really. — Leighton Meester

YEARS AGO I WORKED ON A GOVERNMENT TASK force studying fatherhood and healthy families. As we met in DC, I learned one of the main causes of the breakdown of the American family was the Industrial Revolution. When men left their homes and farms to work on assembly lines, they disconnected their sense of worth from the well-being of their wives and children and began to associate it with efficiency and productivity in manufacturing. While the Industrial Revolution served the world in terrific ways, it was also a mild tragedy in our social evolution. Raising healthy children became a woman's job. Food was no longer grown in the backyard, it was bought at a store with money earned from the necessary separation of the father. Within a few generations, then, intimacy in family relationships began to be monopolized by females. — Donald Miller

She is a woman. No matter how hard you think she has grown, she always has her softer parts. Feel her there. — Akif Kichloo

You're a grown woman, and a clever one. I believe you understand the situation. And I'm going to trust that you know your own mind. — Tessa Dare

Where once Kathryn had embraced a delicate child in the body of a young woman, now she received the tenderness of a mother's love from a spirit grown unimaginably old. — Kirsten Beyer

Being a grown-up woman doesn't mean you can't look beautiful, individual and different. — Twiggy

He'd been trying to save this woman in his dreams for years. Now here she was, all grown up, and he still felt helpless. — B. J. Daniels

In my criminal work anything that wears skirts is a lady, until the law proves her otherwise. From the frayed and slovenly petticoats of the woman who owns a poultry stand in the market and who has grown wealthy by selling chickens at twelve ounces to the pound, or the silk sweep of Mamie Tracy, whose diamonds have been stolen down on the avenue... — Mary Roberts Rinehart

Nothing special has happened today; no one can say she was more provoked than usual. It is only that every day one grows a little, every day something is different, so that in the heaping up of days suddenly a thing that was impossible has become possible. This is how a girl becomes a grown woman. Step by step until it is done. — Naomi Alderman

Do you remember the lake?' she said, in an abrupt voice, under the pressure of an emotion which caught her heart, made the muscles of her throat stiff, and contracted her lips in a spasm as she said 'lake.' For she was a child, throwing bread to the ducks, between her parents, and at the same time a grown woman coming to her parents who stood by the lake, holding her life in her arms which, as she neared them grew larger and larger in her arms until it became a whole life, a complete life, which she put down by them and said, 'This is what I have made of it! This!' And what had she made of it? What indeed? sitting there sewing this morning with Peter. — Virginia Woolf

There were stalls nestled around the castle the way the lights were, not in rows but in odd spots, as if the stalls had grown there or alighted on random places like birds. There was one stall with ringing chimes that was set halfway up a ruined wall, so the customers had to climb sliding pieces of slate to get to it. There were more stalls set in the grassy hollows among the stones and nestled into the corners of the walls. One woman had actually turned a ruined wall into her stall, brightly colored jars arranged on the jagged, protruding shards of stone.
All through the fragments of a lost castle lit by magic moved the people of the Goblin Market. There was a man hanging up knives alongside wind chimes, which made dangerous and beautiful music as they rang together in the sea breeze. There was a boy who looked about twelve stirring something in a cauldron with a rich-smelling cloud handing over it, and bark cups ranged along his stall. — Sarah Rees Brennan

It helps being from somewhere other than Hollywood, not having grown up with that sense of film-making. I really wasn't exposed to that as a young woman. — Saffron Burrows

When I originally came from 'Cheetah Girls,' I was making music that was real to me but not believable. I think there was a disconnect there. I am a grown woman, and I've been through a lot. The most important thing about my music is that we don't jump the gun and throw anything out there. — Adrienne Bailon

In fact, in recent years I have become more and more didactic about pubic hair - to the point where I now believe that there are only four things a grown, modern woman should have: a pair of yellow shoes (they unexpectedly go with everything), a friend who will come and post bail at 4 a.m., a fail-safe pie recipe, and a proper muff. A big, hairy minge. A lovely furry moof that looks - when she sits, naked - as if she has a marmoset sitting in her lap. A tame marmoset, that she can send of to pickpocket things, should she so need it - like that trained monkey in Raiders of the Lost Ark. — Caitlin Moran

For in the latter days of that passionate life that lay now so far behind him, the conception of a free and equal manhood had become a very real thing to him. He had hoped, as indeed his age had hoped, rashly taking it for granted, that the sacrifice of the many to the few would some day cease, that a day was near when every child born of woman should have a fair and assured chance of happiness. And here, after two hundred years, the same hope, still unfulfilled, cried passionately through the city. After two hundred years, he knew, greater than ever, grown with the city to gigantic proportions, were poverty and helpless labour and all the sorrows of his time. — H.G.Wells

Men have grown embarrassingly weak, but only through observation. Their resolve can easily be broken by a woman. Their emotions can be easily manipulated by a woman. Their power can be easily taken by a woman. Their pride can be easily stripped by a woman. Their entire life can easily be ruined by a woman. While physically stronger, their manipulative prowess can be wittingly outclassed by a woman. And while their dreams are stronger, the realities of women are stronger. — Lionel Suggs

MAN AND WOMAN

Man is a like a desert without the rain of a woman. Nothing can be born and grown without her nourishment. She is a life-giving river that gives and loves without holding anything back. And without her water, man would walk around aimlessly, feeling incomplete and hollow like an empty well. The longer he roams, the deeper the hole within his soul expands, growing bigger and bigger like a barren tree whose branches resemble the cracks on hard, dry soil. And he shall continue to feel incomplete and malnourished, until he encounters a godly woman. To show him life and quench his thirst. — Suzy Kassem

I think as a woman, the more you embrace who you are, and your own opinions, and how you feel, and the body you have been given- I think the more confident you are and the more beautiful you look. I definitely feel that my confidence has grown as I've entered my 30s. I have my own opinion - it's very valid - and that shows on the outside as well. — Cat Deeley

We fall in love for a smile, a glance, a bare shoulder. That is enough; then, in the long hours of hope or sorrow, we fabricate a person, we compose a character. And when later on we see much of the beloved person, we can no longer, whatever the cruel reality that confronts us, strip off that good character, that nature of a woman who loves us, from the person who bestows that glance, bares that shoulder, than we can when she has grown old eliminate her youthful face from a person whom we have known since her girlhood. — Marcel Proust

As Liljana sat stitching a sampler or darning a sock, she dreamed her way into life as a grown woman with her own household to run, her own home to tidy, her own children to mind, and her own husband to cheer after a long day's work as they sat together by the fire. The life that future generations would dismiss as dull and degrading offered Liljana the liberating prospect of being mistress in her own home rather than living to serve others. — Fiorella De Maria

Was emotionally true because I had already grown to feel that there existed men against whom I was powerless, men who could violate my life at will. I resolved that I would emulate the black woman if I were ever faced with a white mob; I would conceal a weapon, pretend that I had been crushed by the wrong done to one of my loved ones; then, just when they thought I had accepted their cruelty as the law of my life, I would let go with my gun and kill as many of them as possible before they killed me. The story of the woman's deception gave form and meaning to confused defensive feelings that had long been sleeping in me. My imaginings, of course, had no objective — Richard Wright

We fit our sphere as a Chinese woman's foot fits her shoe, exactly, as though God had made both - and yet He knows nothing of either. In some of us the shaping to our end has been quite completed. The parts we are not to use have been quite atrophied and have even dropped ott, but in others, and we are not less to be pitied, they have been weakened and left. We wear the bandages, but out limbs have not grown to them, we know that we are compressed, and chafe against them. — Olive Schreiner

Daniel, I did not knowwhat I wanted when I was agirl. And then I was a fool in every sense of the word. And now that I am a woman grown, I know that I love you and I want this son of yours, and our children who will come. I have seen a woman break her heart for love: my Queen Mary. I have seen another break her soul to avoid it: my Princess Elizabeth. I don't want to be Mary or Elizabeth, I want to be me: Hannah Verde Carpenter."
"And we shall live somewhere that we can follow our belifs without danger," he insisted.
"Yes," I said, "in the England that Elizabeth will make. — Philippa Gregory

I was a scared little girl barely into my teens then. Now I'm a grown woman. I can kill you whenever I want. Again — Stieg Larsson

As a grown woman, I saw the first black president reach down a hand and touch the face of a child like I once was, lifting his eyes toward a better future. But I have never, ever, in all my years seen a leader so committed to delivering that better future to America's children as Hillary Clinton. — Donna Brazile

When I was 5 years old I started singing in church and I hated my voice because I sounded like a grown woman, not a child. I was ashamed of it. — Loleatta Holloway

I knew it! I knew you'd hate my body!" She slammed her hands on her hips, marched over to the bed, and glared down at him. "Well, for your information, mister, all those cute little sex kittens in your past might have had perfect bodies, but they don't know a lepton from a proton,and if you think that I'm going to stand here and let you judge me by the size of my hips and because my belly's not flat, then you're in for a rude awakening." She jabbed her finger at him. "This is the way a grown woman looks, buster! This body was designed by God to be functional, not to be stared at by some hormonally imbalanced jock who can only get aroused by women who still own Barbie dolls"
"Damn. Now I've got to gag you." With one swift motion, he pulled her down on the bed, rolled on top of her, and covered her lips with his own. — Susan Elizabeth Phillips

A queen is wise. She has earned her serenity, not having had it bestowed on her but having passer her tests. She has suffered and grown more beautiful because of it. She has proved she can hold her kingdom together. She has become its vision. She cares deeply about something bigger than herself. She rules with authentic power. — Marianne Williamson

Was I the only woman in the world who, at my age - and after a lifetime of quite rampant independence - still did not quite feel grown up? — Dodie Smith

Protect yourself like you would your cubs - as a grown woman, you're no one's cub anymore. — Karen Finerman

Pam (from The Office) is not intimidating, like one of those women who wears makeup and tailored clothes, and has a good job that she enjoys, and confidence, and an adult woman's sexuality. There's nothing scary about Pam, because there's no mystery; she's just like the boys who like her; mousy and shy. The ultimate emo-boy fantasy is to meet a nerdy, cute girl just like him, and nobody else will realize she's pretty. And she'll melt when she sees his record collection because it's just like hers ... and she'll never want to go out to a party for which he'll be forced to comb his hair, or buy grown-up shoes or tie a tie, or demonstrate a hearty handshake, or make eye contact, or relate to people who work in different fields, or to basically act like a man. — Julie Klausner

For me, 'I Am Woman' is all about transition. I turned 21 in December, so I'm not completely grown up yet but I'm not a little girl anymore. Just in that in-between stage. The song is everything I have ever heard a woman say. I loved this song for me and every young lady, girl and woman to be able to feel empowered in being female. — Jordin Sparks

I don't care if I tell that story and John Roderick gets up afterward and yells, 'I hope you enjoyed the white privilege, mortality comedy of John Hodgman!' That's me! I'm going to play a sad Handsome Family song at the end and I guarantee you everyone is going to love it because, sometimes, you need a grown man or woman to tell you what you like. — John Hodgman

We have gone on too long blaming or pitying the mothers who devour their children, who sow the seeds of progressive dehumanization, because they have never grown to full humanity themselves. If the mother is at fault, why isn't it time to break the pattern by urging all these Sleeping Beauties to grow up and live their own lives? There never will be enough Prince Charmings or enough therapists to break that pattern now. It is society's job, and finally that of each woman alone. For it is not the strength of the mothers that is at fault but their weakness, their passive childlike dependency and immaturity that is mistaken for "femininity." Our society forces boys, insofar as it can, to grow up, to endure the pains of growth, to educate themselves to work, to move on. Why aren't girls forced to grow up - to achieve somehow the core of self that will end the unnecessary dilemma, the mistaken choice between femaleness and humanness that is implied in the feminine mystique? — Betty Friedan

when my mother was pregnant with her second child i was four i pointed at her swollen belly confused at how my mother had gotten so big in such little time my father scooped me in his tree trunk arms and said the closest thing to god on this earth is a woman's body it's where life comes from and to have a grown man tell me something so powerful at such a young age changed me to see the entire universe rested at my mother's feet — Rupi Kaur

He touched me as if I were the curved and delicate handle of a china cup, but he held me tightly just as I was, flesh and blood and full of human flaws and fears. In his arms I wasn't a girl dreaming of sailing the high seas, and I wasn't a farm kid jumping the train, either, but a fully grown woman riding the soft side of a crescent moon. — Ann Howard Creel

The woman above him had tumbled out of his dreams, and now stood like a half-waking ghost, a photograph double exposed, showing him in one moment the fallacy of his past as it bled into his future. The image of Maria Sophia had grown too large for him to bear. He had made it so. In his industry and creativity he had transformed her into something so wonderful that the very fact she might now be anything less terrified him almost as much as the prospect she might exceed it. — F.D. Lee

Underneath my stiffened gown
Is the softness of a woman bathing in a marble basin,
A basin in the midst of hedges grown
So thick, she cannot see her lover hiding,
But she guesses he is near,
And the sliding of the water
Seems the stroking of a dear
Hand upon her. — Amy Lowell

He felt that he had always been there, among the apple trees, watching for the woman in the tower to come to her window. Seasons may have passed, years may have grown green on the bough, then withered and fallen, but he would stand there and wait for a chance to keep a promise he had made. — Ava Zavora

Heartbreaking and brave, Rachel Resnick masterfully pulls the past to the present, exploring how the seeds of addiction planted during an unhappy girlhood can blossom into a grown-up woman's frantic search for love. LOVE JUNKIE is a memoir unlike any other; it will blow your mind. — Lee Montgomery

Dreams are for little girls to whisper to each other. They don't really come true. I'm a fully grown woman now, Frances Catherine. I don't imagine impossible things. — Julie Garwood

I had grown up. I had learned that being a woman was knowing when to stand firm and when to compromise. I had learned to laugh and weep; I had learned that I was weak as well as strong. I had learned to love. I was no longer a rigid, upright tree that would not flex and bow, even though the gale threatened to snap it in two; I was the willow that bends and shivers and sways, and yet remains strong. — Juliet Marillier

I had grown up in a house with a fence around it, and in this fence was a white smooth wooden gate, two holes bored round and low together so the dog could see through. One night, the moon high, late for me home from the school dance, I remember that I stopped, hand on the gate, and spoke so quietly to myself and to the woman that I would love that not even the dog could have heard.
I don't know where you are, but you're living right now, somewhere on this earth. And one day you and I are going to touch this gate where I'm touching it now. Your hand will touch this very wood, here! Then we'll walk through and we'll be full of a future and of a past and we'll be to each other like no one else has ever been. We can't meet now, I don't know why. But some day our questions will be answers and we'll be caught in something so bright ... and every step I take is one step closer on a bridge we must cross to meet. — Richard Bach

42. Your process of thinking should change as you get older. If it doesn't, then you haven't grown up. If you still have the same mindset and perception of life that you had 10 plus years ago, then you are still a child. And this is the problem with many black communities today; we are grown up children, still looking, talking, and acting like we did when we were kids. Back in the day, you could tell a man from a boy or a woman from a girl by the way he/she dressed and talked. But today, you have to see someone drivers license in order to tell their age. This is a sign that we as a people are still stuck in our youth. And until our way of thinking matures, our circumstances will remain the same. — Maurice W. Lindsay

How dare you - "
"How dare I offer you more than you could've ever dreamed?"
"How dare you waltz in here and presume - "
"Presume to prescribe a future with hope and promise?"
I shut my mouth abruptly, glaring at him. Then, "Are you quite finished?"
"Are you?" he asked.
"I am a free woman, Mr.Kensington. Grown. I can do as I wish.I may be blood kin to you, but I am not your employee." My eyes cut to Mama, but hers remained on the barn.
"Regardless, you shall do as I say."
I let out a sputtering, exasperated laugh. "And if I do not?"
He traced the edge of his chipped china saucer. "That would be ill advised. — Lisa Tawn Bergren

I wouldn't say I'm a mummy's girl, but I have grown to have a tremendous appreciation of her as a woman. I was very much a daddy's girl. — Gwyneth Paltrow

I'm a grown woman. I've earned my experiences, my scars. — Tori Amos

Just think of the possibilities, the potential. Every little boy that has just been born becomes an heir to this glorious, glorious program. When he is grown, he meets a lovely woman; they are married in the holy temple. They live all the commandments of the Lord. They keep themselves clean. And then they become sons of God, and they go forward with their great program-they go beyond the angels, beyond the angels and the gods that are waiting there. They go to their exaltation. — Spencer W. Kimball

Women over fifty already form one of the largest groups in the population structure of the western world. As long as they like themselves, they will not be an oppressed minority. In order to like themselves they must reject trivialization by others of who and what they are. A grown woman should not have to masquerade as a girl in order to remain in the land of the living. — Germaine Greer

A moustache to a man is the same as a fringe is to a woman. When you've got it, you want to grow it out; when you've grown it out, you want to cut it. — Billy Childish

I've been on two tours. I've seen limbs blown off, bones protruding ... smashed, I've seen the incomplete bodies of children brought in and out of my helo. I've seen intestines on the outside of a man's body more than once. I've seen eyeballs hanging from their sockets. I've seen grown men bawling and begging for their moms to save them from the death they knew was just minutes away. I've seen horrible. The woman I wanted to spend the rest of my life with died in my arms, and then again when I put a bullet in her brain. That was fucking gruesome. — Jamie McGuire

Jillian had chosen their cutest dresses that made grown woman start talking in abnormally high voices. ("Oh, just look at you! Aren't you just so cute!" This wouldn't be so worrisome if it wasn't the same voice that women used with puppies.) — Wen Spencer

I have only known you about five months. But you know every piece of my life, all the ugly details. Now I'm asking you to trust me with yours - not because I want to know your stuff, but because I want to know you. What made you this amazing woman that you are, this woman that I've grown to admire and love. I want to know her story. — Denise Hildreth Jones

He was a little boy, and she was grown up. She huddled by the fire not daring to move, helpless and guilty, a big woman. — J.M. Barrie

These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through that darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman's place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep. — Audre Lorde

The woman in whose body I had grown, in whose house I'd been raised was, in some vital ways, a stranger to me. I'd gone thirty years without ascribing her any more dimension than the paper dollies I'd played with as a girl with the pasted on smiles and the folding tab dresses. — Kate Morton

She assured them,too, of her firm belief, that, at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven's own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to stablish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

There are so many things to grieve ... All the dogs & cats & birds & snakes we have loved & lost, & old lovers, but what else? ... it took me forever to see that one of them was my own daughter, my baby, a young woman I thought of only as a girl, a child, & there she was, suddenly a woman, & I felt this ache gnaw at me as if I hadn't eaten in a year ... I stood there watching my daughter gesture & move & laugh with the grace of a grown-up, & I just started crying like a baby. It wasn't unlike the same type of sorrow we all feel when we realize something we once had that was very precious is not longer there. That it is forever lost, changed, deceased. Like a baby, gone, except in your memory ... My own daughter is now a woman. I get it. Another passage, another form of loss, another reason to grieve, another part of this life process. — Kris Radish

It dawned on him that he had never loved a woman wholeheartedly and that he had always been the loved one. This must have been the reason why he knew so little about love and women. In other words, emotionally he hadn't grown up. His instinct and ability to love passionately had withered away before they had had an opportunity to blossom. If only he had fallen in love soulfully just once in his life, even though it might have broken his heart, paralyzed his mind, made him live in a daze, bathed his face in tears, and frowned him in despair! — Ha Jin

Who would guess that this woman beside him had routed the Commons? What a secret to keep. A man might live his entire life in greedy contentment, knowing such a secret. Crispin had grown up aware of such possibilities, of marriages in which great men drew their strength and brilliance from the women at their side. But he had thought it a distant myth for himself. — Meredith Duran

Rising, the woman who had carried the jar began to dance to the music of the rebab, fevered music that was like to the flashing of the recurved blade she flourished aloft. Ever the chimings of the red-gold finger cymbals slipped through, around, and over the exigent strains, and in a minute or three (though it had grown dark) the fluting notes of a syrinx joined them, an eerie piping, more distant far in time than space, that railed against death and the desert, and like a child forlorn sobbed of wildflowers. "Flitting — Gene Wolfe

I now believe that there are only four things a grown, modern woman should have: a pair of yellow shoes (they unexpectedly go with everything), a friend who will come and post bail at 4 a.m., a fail-safe pie recipe, and a proper muff. — Caitlin Moran

I am grown, with children of my own. But inside I am still a daughter. A daughter is a woman who remains internally dependent, who does not shape her identity and direction as a woman, but tends to accept the identity and direction projected onto her. She tends to become the image of woman that the cultural father idealizes. — Sue Monk Kidd

My father had been a forester and I had grown up on those hills. I had seen forests and streams disappear. I jumped into Chipko movement and started to work with the peasant women. I learned from them about what forests mean for a rural woman in India in terms of firewood and fodder and medicinal plants and rich knowledge. — Vandana Shiva