Quotes & Sayings About Kept Woman

The woman raised her voice. "I said, what are you doing?"
Tommy kept typing and looked up. "Pardon me, I was ignoring you. What did you say?"
"What are you doing?" She repeated.
"It's a note. Let me read it for you. 'Couldn't anyone else see that they were all slaves of Satan? I had to cleanse the world of their evil. I am the hand of God. Why else would security have let me into the building with an assault rifle in my suitcase? I am a divine instrument.' " Tommy paused and looked up. "That's all I have so far, but I'll guess I end it with an apology to my mom. What do you think?"
She smiled as if hiding gas pains and handed him an envelope. — Christopher Moore

A man who admires a fine woman, has yet not more reason to wish himself her husband, than one who admired the Hesperian fruit, would have had to wish himself the dragon that kept it. — Alexander Pope

What are you babbling on about, woman? sighed Chloe. She'd picked this phrase up from her father and imitated his weary tone perfectly. They'd made the mistake of laughing the first time she did it, so she'd kept it up, and said it just often enough, and with perfect timing, so that they couldn't help but keep laughing. — Liane Moriarty

The few times he made the mistake of relaxing in a woman's bed after a quick lay proved to be serious mistakes. They wanted to coddle and always asked the questions that made him cringe, 'What are you thinking?', 'Do you love me?', 'Where do you see this going?', 'Are you as happy as I am?', 'Why do you keep calling me by my sister's name?', or his personal favorite 'I wonder what our babies will look like.' No, sex was best kept at a woman's house, hotel room or better yet in the backseat of a car. Thank god his neighbor seemed to share the same attitude. He hated the idea of waking up to the sounds of another man grunting and moaning. With his luck the sounds would filter into his dream and he would end up having a gay dream. — R.L. Mathewson

My mother was kept very busy with her sewing; sometimes she would have another woman helping her. — James Weldon Johnson

I'm fine. Will put his hand on Amanda's foot again. He could feel a steady pulse near her ankle. He'd worked for this woman most of his career but still knew very little about her. She lived in a condo in the heart of Buckhead. She had been on the job longer than he had been alive, which put her age in the mid-sixties. She kept her salt-and-pepper hair coiffed in the shape of a football helmet and wore pantyhose with starched blue jeans. She had a sharp tongue, more degrees than a college professor, and she knew that his name was Wilbur even though he'd had it legally changed when he entered college and every piece of paper the GBI had on file listed his legal name as William Trent. — Karin Slaughter

Mother always said she was a size 7 woman she kept wrapped in fat to prevent bruising. — Haven Kimmel

Aidan's hands itched to strangle the woman. He had known Marie from the moment of her birth - sixty two years ago - and they had never exchanged a cross word. And he suddenly wanted to strangle her. He should have ripped Ivan's throat out. Flowers. Why hadn't he thought of flowers? Why hadn't Marie mentioned it to him first? Why had she accepted them? Whose side was she on, anyway? Flowers! He had the urge to rip those petals off one by one.
"Look," Marie cooed, "he even had the thorns removed so you wouldn't hurt yourself. What a thoughtful man."
"What time did you tell the police we would see them?" Aidan interrupted, afraid that if he didn't he would erupt into violence. He detested the way Alexandria kept caressing the petals of one of the white roses. — Christine Feehan

A woman could do that to you - reach that place in your soul where the best and worst of you was kept. And once she was there, she owned that place and never left. — Lisa Kleypas

If there is only one thing in my life that I am proud of, it's that I've never been a kept woman. — Marilyn Monroe

Here a year or two back me and Loretta went to a conference ... I got set next to this woman ... she kept talkin about the right wing this and the right wing that. I aint even sure what she meant by it ... She kept on, kept on. Finally told me, said: I dont like the way this country is headed. I want my granddaughter to be able to have an abortion. And I said well mam I dont think you got any worries about the way the country is headed. The way I see it goin I dont have much doubt but what she'll be able to have an abortion. I'm goin to say that not only will she be able to have an abortion, she'll be able to have you put to sleep. Which pretty much ended the conversation. — Cormac McCarthy

Seen on her own, the woman was not so remarkable. Tall, angular, aquiline features, with the close-cropped hair which was fashionably called an Eton crop, he seemed to remember, in his mother's day, and about her person the stamp of that particular generation. She would be in her middle sixties, he supposed, the masculine shirt with collar and tie, sports jacket, grey tweed skirt coming to mid-calf. Grey stockings and laced black shoes. He had seen the type on golf courses and at dog shows - invariably showing not sporting breeds but pugs - and if you came across them at a party in somebody's house they were quicker on the draw with a cigarette lighter than he was himself, a mere male, with pocket matches. The general belief that they kept house with a more feminine, fluffy companion was not always true. Frequently they boasted, and adored, a golfing husband. ("Don't Look Now") — Daphne Du Maurier

Thinking of her violation filled him with a kind of rage that had never been visited on him before. Although she was a beautiful woman and strong, his vision kept mixing her up with the vulnerable woman he'd taken on a picnic a couple of months ago. A pretty, young woman who'd just been left by her husband, and was crushed by the betrayal. And what fool would give her up? he thought. It was beyond him. The — Robyn Carr

I took classes taught by an elderly woman who wrote children's stories. She was polite about the science fiction and fantasy that I kept handing in, but she finally asked in exasperation, 'Can't you write anything normal?' — Octavia E. Butler

What a relief, Nadya thought; in that light he would not be able to tell that she had been crying.
"You mean if it weren't for the blackout you wouldn't have come?" Dasha took up Shchagov's tone, flirting unconsciously, as she did with every unmarried man she met.
"By no means, never. In bright light women's faces are deprived of all their charm; it reveals their spiteful expressions, their envious glances, their premature wrinkles, their heavy cosmetics."
Nadya shuddered at the words "envious glances" - it was as if he had overheard their argument.
Shchagov went on:" If I were a woman, I would make it a law that lights be kept low. Then everyone would soon have a husband."
Dasha looked disapprovingly at Shchagov. He always talked that way, and she didn't like it. All his phrases seemed memorized, insincere. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Lauren could smell the starch that kept Jared's shirtfront crisp, which blended intoxicatingly with tobacco and champagne. When he spoke in confidential tones to the silly woman, Lauren could feel the vibration of his voice in his chest. The bank director's wife moved away, and still Jared retained his possessive hold on her. His hand trembled slightly as his thumb moved upward and lightly stroked the side of her breast. Or did she only imagine it? Lauren thought she would die from the constriction in her chest that pounded up into her throat and sought release in a small moan.
Another guest walked toward them. Slowly, reluctantly, the strong fingers were withdrawn, leaving behind an imprint on Lauren's skin as scorching as a brand. — Sandra Brown

An intelligent, energetic, educated woman cannot be kept in four walls - even satin-lined, diamond-studded walls - without discovering sooner or later that they are still a prison cell.
(America's Medieval Women, Harper's Magazine, August 1938) — Pearl S. Buck

The best I ever got was that woman who kept having me come up to fix her TV. There was a lot of bending involved. I felt used and dirty.
It's the price you pay for being one of those weedy but good-looking types, Scarlett said.
Weedy? You hurt me. I prefer tall and scrawny. Unlike my partner, who's right behind you. — Maureen Johnson

She'd been an actress, an artist's model, once or twice a kept woman, through all a voracious reader. — Glen Duncan

This is the secret I kept from you, Bails, from myself too: I think I liked that Mom was gone, that she could be anybody, anywhere, doing anything. I liked that she was our invention, a woman living on the last page of the story with only what we imagined spread out before her. I liked that she was ours, alone. — Jandy Nelson

Male supremacy has kept woman down. It has not knocked her out. — Clare Boothe Luce

Within him, as he hurled himself forward, was born a love, a despairing fondness for this flag which was near him. It was a creation of beauty and invulnerability. It was a goddess, radiant, that bended its form with an imperious gesture to him. It was a woman, red and white, hating and loving, that called him with the voice of his hopes. Because no harm could come to it he endowed it with power. He kept near, as if it could be a saver of lives, and an imploring cry went from his mind. — Stephen Crane

I'd be happy to be taken as a woman - and that's what I was initially trying to do when I started throwing on dresses and stuff. But that wasn't going to happen because everyone kept calling me sir. So I thought I'd change the method and just start wearing what I wanted to wear. — Eddie Izzard

The intuition that had kept Kylar from Vi even from the first time she'd tried to seduce him at the Drake estate suddenly crystallized: You don't share your life with a woman's body, you share your life with a woman. — Brent Weeks

I'd always kept an eye on the house. I don't mean doing repairs, for as the house didn't belong to me that was not my place, but rather I'd keep watch over its decline. The changes come slowly, like watching a woman age: another line, the spread of crow's feet, age spots rising slowly to the surface. One day the face you know is ravaged. — Aminatta Forna

In 2004, I was on the West End stage in The Woman In White, and for every show I had to climb into a fat suit to play the obese Count Fosco. It was hard work, and unbearably hot, but I sailed through because I'd always kept myself fit. — Michael Crawford

Over the years, Gwen had found there were two kinds of men. Men who made eating a woman an art form because they were average - or barely - in size so they had to compensate. And men who were hung like horses but felt that nine-incher somehow exempted them from one of her favorite forms of entertainment.
Yet somehow that Irish luck that had kept Gwen alive all these years deigned to reward on her the highest blessing a woman could hope for. A well-hung man who loved to give his woman head. — Shelly Laurenston

How is it possible to miss a woman whom you kept at a distance, so that when she was gone you would not miss her? — Steve Martin

The secret of the nobility and beauty of great ladies lies in the art with which they can shed their veils. In such situations, they become like ancient statues. If they kept the merest scarf on, they would be lewd. Your bourgeois woman will always try to cover her nakedness. — Honore De Balzac

She would be like that character in a novel she read once about the woman who rid herself of everything she owned, item by item. She kept paring down, paring down until all she had left could fit in her handbag. Then she walked out the door and left the house behind, too. — Rebecca Kelley

I met rich men and they became my boyfriends. When I was a kept woman'it was a relationship. — Kola Boof

If she'd just kept her mouth shut, she would have been perfect, but no ... — Jennifer Crusie

Mariam kept her eyes to the ground, on her shadow, on her executioner's shadow trailing her.
Though there had been moments of beauty in it, Mariam knew that life for the most part had been unkind to her. But as she walked the final twenty paces, she could not help but wish for more of it. She wished she could she Leila again, wished to hear the clangour of her laugh, ...

Mariam wished for so much in those final moments.
Yet as she closed her eyes, it was not regret any longer but a sensation of abundant peace that washed over her. She thought of her entry into this world, the harami child of a lowly villager, an unintended thing, a pitiable, regrettable accident. A weed. And yet she was leaving the world as a woman who has loved and been loved back. She was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. A mother. A person of consequence at last.
This was a legitimate end to a life of illegitimate beginnings."
--A Thousand Splendid Suns — Khaled Hosseini

The gentleness, the sentimentality, of many Soviet troops toward small children in Prussia was noted at the time. A woman with a baby, local people learned, was practically immune to rape. But even sentimental troops, the men who kept their pockets full of sweets for hungry German kids, worried about their families back home. It was a long time since any had seen their children. — Catherine Merridale

While waiting for Brenna to prepare the drink he did as directed and worked through their conversation. It would've gone faster had he not kept getting distracted by the sight of her moving with feminine efficiency mere meters away. The sway of her hips were-"Don't I ever want to lick a woman all up?"
She squeaked, then swivelled to face him, bracing her hands on the counter behind her. "Not quite how I would've put it." Her tone was higher than normal.
"But yeah."
"You," he said quietly, no longer able to lie, "You tempt me."
"Oh." Her breasts rose up as she took a deep, shuddering breath. "You've never let on."
Yes, he had. If she ever saw the way he watched her when she wasn't looking, she'd be in no doubt as to the strength of his unacceptable reaction to her. — Nalini Singh

I kept thinking that. I don't know why it is I can't seem to learn that a woman'll do anything. — William Faulkner

Hester kept her company by bringing her meals and tea, fussing over Rosebud, washing Morrow's clothes, and doing her hair as if she was the colonel's lady. "Colonel Clark is sure taken wi' you," she said. "Neither man nor beast ever talks back to that man, but you shore put him in his place over that bad business at Fort Randolph. And lo and behold, I think he liked it. But for one little thing." Morrow looked up from nursing Rosebud. "He just can't figure out why a beautiful woman like yo'self would settle for a savage. — Laura Frantz

You can't cure people of their character,' she read.
After this he had crossed something out then gone on, 'You can't even change yourself. Experiments in that direction soon deteriorate into bitter, infuriated struggles. You haul yourself over the wall and glimpse new country. Good! You can never again be what you were! But even as you are congratulating yourself you discover tied to one leg the string of Christmas cards, gas bills, air letters and family snaps which will never allow you to be anyone else. A forty-year-old woman holds up a doll she has kept in a cardboard box under a bed since she was a child. She touches its clothes, which are falling to pieces; works tenderly its loose arm. The expression that trembles on the edge of realizing itself in the slackening muscles of her lips and jaw is indescribably sad. How are you to explain to her that she has lost nothing by living the intervening years of her life? How is she to explain that to you? — M. John Harrison

There are robberies that leave man or woman forever beggared of peace and joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer. — George Eliot

They say there's nothing inside but emptiness,' Maureen told me later. I made no comment, but filled in by kissing her hair or something of the kind. Maureen had at that time rather droopy hair, possibly owing to lack of vitamins during the war, which she kept off her brow with a big tortoiseshell slide. Her brow was really beautiful, and so were her eyes. They had that gentle look of being unequal to life, which, as I later realised, always attracts me in a woman. — Robert Aickman

Did was to locate a member of the current aristocracy, who thought it would be thrilling or exciting to work in Eternity. I placed her in this office and kept her under close observation to see if she were suitable for our purpose - " Harlan thought: Close observation! Yes! Again his anger focused itself on Finge rather than upon the woman. Finge was still speaking. "By all standards, she is suitable. We will now return her to her Time. Using her dwelling as a base, you will be able to study the social life of her circle. Do — Isaac Asimov

So," dark Susurre said quietly, "if you follow the curve ... in a way your Damon did die to save Fell's Church from another massacre like the one on that Japanease island. He kept saying that was what he'd come to the Nether World to do. Do you not think he would be satisfied? At peace?"
"At PEACE?!" Stefan spat bitterly, and Sage growled.
"Woman," you obviously have never met Damon Salvatore before." The tone in his voice
more resonant, more threatening somehow
made Elena finally break off her staredown with the red-haired Idola. She turned and looked
and saw the enormous room filled with Sage's outspread wings. — L.J.Smith

Remember me as the girl who married you, the woman who had your babies, who kept your house, weeded your garden, your soul mate and best friend. I was the woman who could make you laugh and cry. I could calm you when you were upset but yet infuriate you also like no other. For the passion and the love we shared, I thank-you. I could read your mind and finish your sentences. I knew everything you loved and hated and we had no secrets from one another. I knew what to say when you were upset to make things alright again. I felt your pain and I shared your joy. I embraced your strengths and celebrated your differences. I love you and everything about you and the physical limitations of worlds will not change that". — Annette J. Dunlea

I let my hands fall to the bed. Her mouth crafts a warm path to mine. There we share the taste of my tears as her top lip slides between my own and her tongue warms the inside of my mouth. Her hand slides up my neck, nails grazing the skin, till she finds purchase in my hair, tugging slightly at the tangle. Shivers lance my body.
Gone is any semblance of resistance. All the guilt that kept me from betraying Eo with Mustang is swept away in the chaos inside me. All the guilt I have for knowing she is a Gold and I am a Red vanishes. I'm a man, and she's the woman I want. — Pierce Brown

One Time, One Day
between Davie and Roberta ,
I asked my mom why she persisted,
kept on having baby after baby,
She looked
at me, at a spot between my eyes,
blinking like I had suddenly fallen
crazy. She paused before answering
as if
to confide would legitimize my fears.
She drew a deep breath, leaned against
the chair. I touched her hand and I thought
she might
cry. Instead she put baby Davie in my arms
Pattyn, she said, it's a woman's role.
I decided if it was my role, I'd rather
disappear. — Ellen Hopkins

All through life that piece of crape had hung between him and the world; it had separated him from cheerful brotherhood and woman's love and kept him in that saddest of all prisons his own heart; — Nathaniel Hawthorne

Now and then one sees a face which has kept its smile pure and undefiled. It is a woman's face usually; often a face which has trace of great sorrow all over it, till the smile breaks. Such a smile transfigures: such a smile, if the artful but knew it, is the greatest weapon a face can have. — Helen Hunt

Daniel murmured something like yes, he wouldn't miss it,but he was clearly distracted. He kept looking away from the woman. His eyes darted around the lawn, as if he sensed Luce behind the roses.
When his gaze swept over the bushes where she crouched,they flashed the most intense shade of violet. — Lauren Kate

I didn't feel like reading that night, so I went downstairs and watched a half-hour long commercial that advertised an exercise machine. They kept flashing a 1-800 number, so I called it. The woman who picked up the other end of the phone was named Michelle. And I told Michelle that I was a kid and did not need an exercise machine, but I hoped she was having a good night.
That's when Michelle hung up on me. And I didn't mind a bit. — Stephen Chbosky

Hearing this, the woman skooched her legs around each other, jingled her bells, leaned toward Everett till their shoulders touched, and laughed and squirmed the sorts of laughs and squirms that Jehovah may have witnessed on the day He created misogyny. The Cosmos kept its balance, though, because Everett was meanwhile leering the sort of testicular leer that Kali may well have had in mind when She inspired Man to create asbestos, carcinogenic beer, and the trenches in World War I. — David James Duncan

The world is a big place for a little heart like mine, I have kept it locked away until I meet warrior that tames my wild. — Nikki Rowe

Our friendship had been a long-distance one since we went off to college. But I never met another woman who meant to me what she did. No one else could make me laugh like she could. So my oldest friend remained my best friend, despite however many miles kept us apart, and it was for that reason that I made her my maid of honor. — Taylor Jenkins Reid

Well, eighteen, then. And I saw you with him the other night at the opera." She laughed nervously as she spoke, and watched him with her vague forget-me-not eyes. She was a curious woman, whose dresses always looked as if they had been designed in a rage and put on in a tempest. She was usually in love with somebody, and, as her passion was never returned, she had kept all her illusions. She tried to look picturesque, but only succeeded in being untidy. Her name was Victoria, and she had a perfect mania for going to church. — Oscar Wilde

Remaining relaxed in his seat, he murmured, "Take down your hood."
A slender white hand reached up, and she complied. The hood slipped away from hair so vividly red that it eclipsed the embers in the fireplace.
Sebastian shook his head in bemusement as he recognized the young woman. The ridiculous creature from the house party at Stony Cross Park. A shy, stammering twit, whose red hair and voluptuous figure might make her tolerable company as long as she kept her mouth shut. They had never actually spoken. Miss Evangeline Jenner, he recalled. She had the largest, roundest eyes he had ever seen, rather like the eyes of a wax doll... or a young child. — Lisa Kleypas

But the years came and went without bringing the careless boy; and when they met again Wendy was a married woman, and Peter was no more to her than a little dust in the box in which she had kept her toys. — J.M. Barrie

You are a man. You are an average, lazy, boring, cowardly, woman-fearing man. Without me, that's what you would have kept on being, ad nauseam. But I made you into something. You were the best man you've ever been with me. And you know it. The only time in your life you've ever liked yourself was pretending to be someone I might like. — Gillian Flynn

I shall never get used to not being the most beautiful woman in the room. It was an intoxication to sweep in and know every man had turned his head. It kept me in form. — Lady Randolph Churchill

There, he had seen every thing to exalt in his estimation the woman he had lost, and there begun to deplore the pride, the folly, the madness of resentment, which had kept him from trying to regain her when thrown in his way. — Jane Austen

Women are mere "beauties" in men's culture so that culture can be kept male. When women in culture show character, they are not desirable, as opposed to the desirable. A beautiful heroine is a contradiction in terms, since heroism is about individuality, interesting and ever changing, while "beauty" is generic, boring, and inert. While culture works out moral dilemmas, "beauty" is amoral: If a woman is born resembling an art object, it is an accident of nature, a fickle consensus of mass perception, a peculiar coincidence
but it is not a moral act. From the "beauties" in male culture, women learn a bitter amoral lesson
that the moral lessons of their culture exclude them. — Naomi Wolf

They are my men and this ship my responsibility. I vowed no woman would ever alter my path. Yet I kept them from ending you, and it makes me sick to the gut, for I would still rather die myself than see one hair on your head damaged by another man. — Saskia Walker

***A SMALL SUGGESTION***
Or maybe there was a woman on Grande Strasse who now kept her library window open for another reason - but that's just be being cynical, or hopeful. Or both. — Markus Zusak

You are a fine judge of character, child. You must have done well as the Wisdom of your village. It was Laras who went to Sheriam and demanded to know how long you three are to be kept to the dirtiest and hardest work, without a turn at lighter. She said she would not be a party to breaking any woman's health or spirit, no matter what I said. A fine judge of character, child. — Robert Jordan

So, you tumbled that wolf you were with?" Mercy was too much a pack animal to take offense at the personal question. She grinned. "How did you know it was me?" "Do I look senile to you?"
...
"Yes," Mercy said. "And I'm not doing it again." If she kept telling herself that, maybe her traitorous body would actually notice and shut up with its demands. The older woman gave her a sour look. "Damn shame. What, you like them prettier?" A snort. "In my day, we liked men who looked like men. — Nalini Singh

Whenever Jesus himself encountered gentiles, he always kept them at a distance and often healed them reluctantly. As he explained to the Syrophoenician woman who came to him seeking help for her daughter, "Let the children [by which Jesus means Israel] be fed first, for it is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs [by which he means gentiles like her]" (Mark 7:27). — Anonymous

I've always had a thing for Carmyn Rafferty. She carries herself as a reserved and proper woman, but I see a tension in her. A slight glitch in some of her movements lets me know she's aching to be liberated. She wants to let go. In a way she never has. A way she's afraid to get too close to. Her boyfriend's obviously never been able to take her there.
I could, though.
Maybe that's what has always kept me drawn to her. She wouldn't just be another lay to me. I'd be breaking her in, kind of like taming a horse, but I'd be setting her free. — Angeline Kace

There is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence. There are glances of hatred that stab and raise no cry of murder; robberies that leave man or woman forever beggared of peace and joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer - committed to no sound except that of low moans in the night, seen in no writing except that made on the face by the slow months of suppressed anguish and early morning tears. Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear. — George Eliot

This was the kind of woman who took her tea black, smoked cigars after midnight, played a mean game of cribbage, and kept a bevy of repulsive little dogs. — Gail Carriger

Here she tossed her foot impatiently, and showed an inch or two of calf. A sailor on the mast, who happened to look down at the moment, started so violently that he missed his footing and only saved himself by the skin of his teeth. 'If the sight of my ankles means death to an honest fellow who, no doubt, has a wife and family to support, I must, in all humanity, keep them covered,' Orlando thought. Yet her legs were among her chieftest beauties. And she fell to thinking what an odd pass we have come to when all a woman's beauty has to be kept covered lest a sailor fall from a mast-head. 'A pox on them!' she said, realizing for the first time what, in other circumstances, she would have been taught as a child, that is to say, the sacred responsibilities of womanhood ... — Virginia Woolf

My Nana Westbrook, true as a saint's prayer, always used to say the Devil was a woman thought up by the Good Lord Himself to test a man's mettle and drag him down to Hell if he came up short and, Lordy, I sure as hell kept my granny's wise words to heart, God rest her soul, never once dipping my stick in a place where it might get snapped. — Ojo Blacke

At times I feel as if I had lived all this before and that I have already written these very words, but I know it was not I: it was another woman, who kept her notebooks so that one day I could use them. I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously ... That's why my Grandmother Clara wrote in her notebooks, in order to see things in their true dimension and to defy her own poor memory. — Isabel Allende

Ruexner chuckled and put away his knife. Gisela kept her eyes on Valten. Even though her bottom lip trembled, she still looked like the bravest woman he had ever seen. — Melanie Dickerson

By the time I visited those battlefields, I knew that they had been retrofitted as the staging ground for a great deception, and this was my only security, because they could no longer insult me by lying to me. I knew - and the most important thing I knew was that, somewhere deep with them, they knew too. I like to think that knowing might have kept me from endangering you, that having understood and acknowledged the anger, I could control it. I like to think that it could have allowed me to speak the needed words to the woman and then walk away. I like to think this, but I can't promise it. The struggle is really all I have for you because it is the only portion of this world under your control. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

WAR CHILD is the true story of Magdalena (Leni) Janic whose name appears on The Welcome Wall at Sydney's Darling Harbour. The story spans 100 years starting in pre WWII Nazi Germany and ends in the suburbs of Adelaide. It's a window into what life was like for a young illegitimate German girl growing up in poverty, coping with ostracism, bullying, abuse and dispossession as society was falling down around her and she becomes a refugee. But it's also a story of a woman's unconditional love for her family, the sacrifices she made and secrets she kept to protect them. Her ultimate secret was only revealed in a bizarre twist after her death and much to her daughter's (and author) surprise involved her. A memorable tear-jerker! A sad cruel story told with so much love. — Annette Janic

Probably my mother. She was a very compassionate woman, and always kept me on my feet. And I think part of it is just the way you are, the way you're raised. And she had the responsibility for raising me. — Ed Bradley

The next minute he realized what had happened to him, but not before she'd caught him staring.
For a decade, I was fixated by her beauty. I wrote an entire article on the evolutionary significance of beauty as a rebuke to myself, that I, who understood the concepts so well, nevertheless could not escape the magnetic pull of one particular woman's beauty.
She knew. With surgical precision, she had peeled back his layers of defenses, until his heart lay bare before her, all its shame and yearning exposed.
He could have lived with this if only he'd kept his secret whole and buried. But she knew. She knew. — Sherry Thomas

I never knew her more than slightly and she was a woman who kept herself to herself. — W. Somerset Maugham

If you got a dope girl, there's going to be people that want her. But I don't know, I've always kept my 'A-game' on point. I just make a point to make sure the woman that I'm with is taken care of. You got to keep it new, so I go out of my way to make them feel special. — Lance Gross

Zenia has stolen something from him, the one thing he always kept safe before, from all women, even from Roz. Call it his soul. She slipped it out of his breast pocket when he wasn't looking, easy as rolling a drunk, and looked at it, and bit it to see if it was genuine, and sneered at it for being so small after all, and then tossed it away, because she's the kind of woman who wants what she doesn't have and gets what she wants and then despises what she gets. What — Margaret Atwood

Woman. My lord, said she, he is kept unlawfully in prison; they clapped him up before there was any proclamation against the meetings; the indictment also is false. Besides, they never asked him whether he was guilty or no; neither did he confess the indictment. One of the Justices. Then one of the justices that stood by, whom she knew not, said, My Lord, he was lawfully convicted. Wom. It is false, said she; for when they said to him, Do you confess the indictment? he said only this, that he had been at several meetings, both where there were preaching the Word, and prayer, and that they had God's presence among them. Judge Twisdon. Whereat Judge Twisdon answered very angrily, saying, What, you think we can do what we list; your husband is a breaker of the peace, and is convicted by the law, etc. Whereupon Judge Hale called for the Statute Book. Wom. But, said she, my lord, he was not lawfully convicted. — John Bunyan

Why did I stay? My self-esteem was ruined for a very long time. I was socially isolated from my family and friends. I kept everything that was going on in my marriage a secret. I feared for my safety if I left him. I was financially dependent on my spouse. I am an educated woman who was working towards a master's degree when I met him. He persuaded me to stop school after the birth of our first son. Eventually, he trapped me in his web of lies. I believe I suffered from Stockholm syndrome for many years. It isn't easy to leave. Unless you have lived in an abusive relationship, a typical person wouldn't understand. It seems perfectly logical to an outsider that it would be easy to leave an abusive relationship. It truly isn't and walking away is terrifying for a victim. No one deserves to live his or her life as a prisoner. Love shouldn't hurt and abuse is not love. - Mary Laumbach-Perez — Bree Bonchay

I scurry out to the three-way mirror. With an extra-large sweatshirt over the top, you can hardly tell that they are Effert's jeans. Still no Mom. I adjust the mirror so I can see reflections of reflections, miles and miles of me and my new jeans. I hook my hair behind my ears. I should have washed it. My face is dirty. I lean into the mirror. Eyes after eyes after eyes stare back at me. Am I in there somewhere? A thousand eyes blink. No makeup. Dark circles. I pull the side flaps of the mirror in closer, folding myself into the looking glass and blocking out the rest of the store. My face becomes a Picasso sketch, my body slicing into dissecting cubes. I saw a movie once where a woman was burned over eighty percent of her body and they had to wash all the dead skin off. They wrapped her in bandages, kept her drugged, and waited for skin grafts. They actually sewed her into a new skin. — Laurie Halse Anderson

It was the sea that made me begin thinking secretly about love more than anything else; you know, a love worth dying for, or a love that consumes you. To a man locked up in a steel ship all the time, the sea is too much like a woman. Things like her lulls and storms, or her caprice, or the beauty of her breast reflecting the setting sun, are all obvious. More than that, you're in a ship that mounts the sea and rides her and yet is constantly denied her. It's the old saw about miles and miles of lovely water and you can't quench your thirst. Nature surrounds a sailor with all these elements so like a woman and yet he is kept as far as a man can be from her warm, living body. That's where the problem begins, right there - I'm sure of it. — Yukio Mishima

He kept telling me his affair was over, but I kept catching him in lies. He wouldn't shake this woman, and I simply could not trust him anymore. — Brandi Glanville

I am well aware that many will accuse me of indecorum for presenting these pages to the public; for the experiences of this intelligent and much-injured woman belong to a class which some call delicate subjects, and others indelicate. This peculiar phase of Slavery has generally been kept veiled; but the public ought to be made acquainted with its monstrous features, and I willingly take the responsibility of presenting them with the veil withdrawn. I do this for the sake of my sisters in bondage, who are suffering wrongs so foul, that our ears are too delicate to listen to them. — L. Maria Child

That kind of betrayal could not, and would not be forgiven, he reminded himself. It wasn't much of a mantra, but it had kept him going all day while he knew that the woman that just very well might be the one was sitting in a restaurant that discriminated against him simply because he'd had the misfortune of being born into a family with a food disability. — R.L. Mathewson

A woman alone always seems a little unusual; it is not true that men respect women: they respect each other through their women - wives, mistresses, "kept" women; when masculine protection no longer extends over her, woman is disarmed before a superior caste that is aggressive, sneering, or hostile. As an "erotic perversion, — Simone De Beauvoir

Like a certain philosopher I would, upon my soul, have all young men from eighteen to twenty-five kept under barrels; seeing how often, in the lack of some such sequestering process, the woman sits down before each as his destiny, and too frequently enervates his purpose, till he abandons the most promising course ever conceived! — Thomas Hardy

Holy spirits, you walk up there
in the light, on soft earth.
Shining god-like breezes
touch upon you gently,
as a woman's fingers
play music on holy strings.

Like sleeping infants the gods
breathe without any plan;
the spirit flourishes continually
in them, chastely kept,
as in a small bud,
and their holy eyes
look out in still
eternal clearness.

A place to rest
isn't given to us.
Suffering humans
decline and blindly fall
from one hour to the next,
like water thrown
from cliff to cliff,
year after year,
down into the Unknown. — Friedrich Holderlin

He was thirty-one now, not too old, but old enough to be lonely. He hadn't dated since he'd been back here, hadn't met anyone who remotely interested him. It was his own fault, he knew. There was something that kept a distance between him and any woman who started to get close, something he wasn't sure he could change even if he tried. And sometimes in the moments right before sleep came, he wondered if he was destined to be alone forever. — Nicholas Sparks

Married women are kept women, and theyare beginning to find it out. — Logan Pearsall Smith

Imagine fifty thousand men trapped on a desert island, deprived of food and water and sex but somehow kept alive for fifty thousand years. Then, after they've been tormented a hundred steps beyond insanity, tortured past self-mutilation and cannibalism, somebody drops off a sculpture of a naked woman made from T-bone steaks. If you could then capture the sound of them simultaneously fucking and eating and tearing her to shreds and broadcast it into the center of your skull at ten thousand watts, it would still sound absolutely nothing like what I heard. — David Wong

her proficiency in the Classics would somehow stand her in better stead when opening and closing filing-cabinet drawers and conducting endless searches among a sea of buff-coloured folders. It wasn't quite the 'interesting job' she had envisaged but it kept her attention and over the next ten years she rose slowly through the ranks, in the bridled way that women did. ('One day a woman will be Prime Minister,' Pamela said. 'Maybe even in our lifetime.') Now Ursula had her own junior clericals to chase down the buff folders for her. She supposed that was progress. Since '36 she'd been working in the Air Raid Precautions Department. 'You've not heard rumours then?' Pamela said. 'I'm a lowly squaw, I hear nothing but rumours.' 'Maurice can't say what he does,' Pamela grumbled. 'Couldn't — Kate Atkinson

Odd, don't you think? I have seen war, and invasions and riots. I have heard of massacres and brutalities beyond imagining, and I have kept my faith in the power of civilization to bring men back from the brink. And yet one women writes a letter, and my whole world falls to pieces.
You see, she is an ordinary woman. A good one, even. That's the point ... Nothing [a recognizably bad person does] can surprise or shock me, or worry me. But she denounced Julia and sent her to her death because she resented her, and because Julia is a Jew.
I thought in this simple contrast between the civilized and the barbaric, but I was wrong. It is the civilized who are the truly barbaric, and the [Nazi] Germans are merely the supreme expression of it. — Iain Pears

The intelligence of women is not out in the world, acting on its own behalf; it is kept small, inside the home, acting on behalf of another. This is true even when the woman works outside the home, because she is segregated into women's work, and her intelligence does not have the same importance as the lay of her ass. — Andrea Dworkin

Now when I remember the woman I was - heaving herself off the couch to go on another Internet date, taking a deep breath before walking into the party where she'd see her ex and his new girlfriend - I don't feel a trace of contempt or embarrassment. I have a funny admiration for the girl who kept taking her licks and got back up again. That was me. Doing my best. Which, of course, is all any of us can do. — Sara Eckel

Thank you," Archer said again. She kept walking, listening for any sign of him moving to attack her back. "I knew you were a good woman," he said. Celaena halted. Turned. There was a hint of triumph in his eyes. He thought he'd won. Manipulated her again. One foot after another, she walked back toward him with predatory calmness. She stopped, close enough to kiss him. He gave her a wary smile. "No, I'm not," she said. Then she moved, too fast for him to stand a chance. Archer's eyes went wide as she slid the dagger home, jamming it up into his heart. He sagged in her arms. She brought her mouth to his ear, holding him upright with one hand and twisting the dagger with the other as she whispered, "But Nehemia was. — Sarah J. Maas

When my husband and I went into the bayou between New Orleans and Baton Rouge for a week of intensive marriage counseling after I started burning myself. My parents paid for it and kept the baby. It didn't work but we did have anal sex and the woman counselor gave me a recipe for oatmeal blueberry pancakes that I still make. — Merritt Tierce

But I've kept first of March as my birthday as I like to tease Zed about dating an older woman. And my parents wouldn't understand if I told them about the soulfinder bond and tried to change it."
"They don't know?"
"Well, I think they've picked up that there's something special between Zed and me but I'm not sure how I'd even start to explain to non-savants. I was exactly overjoyed when Zed filled me in about it all the first time."
"What did you do?"
"Thumped him with a shopping bag and told him he was a jerk."
"Ouch. — Joss Stirling

Adrian opened his mouth, undoubtedly ready with some inappropriate and mocking comment. Lissa gave him a sharp headshake that kept him quiet. "Aren't there any, I don't know, sleeveless options?"
The saleswoman's eyes widened. "No one has ever worn straps to a funeral. It wouldn't be right."
"What about shorts?" asked Adrian. "Are they okay if they're with a tie? Because that's what I was gonna go with."
The woman looked horrified. — Richelle Mead

Curran strode toward me, eyes blazing. "If I let her go, I'll need a replacement. Want to volunteer for the job."
He looked like he wouldn't be taking no for an anser. I swiped Slayer from its sheath and backed away from the edge of the roof. "And be girlfriend number twenty-three soon to be dumped in favor of girlfriend number twenty-four who has slightly bigger boobs? I don't think so."
He kept coming. "Oh Yeah?"
"Yeah, you get these beautiful women, make them dependent on you, and then you dump them. Well, this time a woman left you first, and your enormous ego can't deal with it. And to think that I hoped we could talk like reasonable adults. If we were the last two people on Earth, I'd find myself a moving island so I could get the hell away from you. — Ilona Andrews