Shame For A Woman Quotes & Sayings

The Nuru men, and their women, had done what they did for more than torture and shame. They wanted to create Ewu children. Such children are not the children of forbidden love between a Nuru and an Okeke, nor are they Noahs, Okekes born without color. The Ewu are children of violence.

An Okeke woman will never kill a child kindled inside of her. She would go against even her husband to keep a child in her womb alive. However, custom dictates that the child is the child of her father. These Nuru had planted poison. An Okeke woman who gave birth to an Ewu child was bound to the Nuru through her child. — Nnedi Okorafor

The being who, for most men, is the source of the most lively, and even, be it said, to the shame of philosophical delights, the most lasting joys; the being towards or for whom all their efforts tend for whom and by whom fortunes are made and lost; for whom, but especially by whom, artists and poets compose their most delicate jewels; from whom flow the most enervating pleasures and the most enriching sufferings - woman, in a word, is not, for the artist in general ... only the female of the human species. She is rather a divinity, a star. — Charles Baudelaire

I'm not looking for clothes," Peter quickly explained, hoping she might like him better if she knew he hadn't come to invade her neatly folded shirts.
"That's a shame" the woman said. — Jack Lewis Baillot

I guess I was lucky I didn't drown, or smother in the thick, black, icy mud that the river left behind in its slow withdrawal back within its banks.

I didn't feel lucky.

When I regained consciousness, my head and ribs winning the battle with the rest of my body for sharp, almost unbearable pain, my first thought was Chrissy. Chrissy, pulled away from me by the merciless power of the water. Chrissy, lost somewhere, maybe injured, calling for me and I wasn't there for her. Chrissy, beautiful, wonderful Chrissy, quite probably lying in the mud, dead!

My scream of anguish, of pain and loss, echoed through the empty Liverpool streets. There was no shame or embarrassment in that shout, that bellow of emotion. I had lost the woman I loved. Nothing I'd ever felt compared to the agony, the gut-wrenching loss of that moment.

I cried. I sat there in the middle of a street I didn't recognise, not knowing how far the wave had carried me, and cried. — Neil Davies

As long as woman regards the Bible as the charter of her rights, she will be the slave of man. The bible was not written by a woman. Within its leaves there is nothing but humiliation and shame for her. — Robert Green Ingersoll

For me, the times that I dressed provocatively had been empowering. It felt good. It's those times that I felt comfortable in my own skin. Like really, really comfortable. And let's face it, body self-esteem issues are a hurdle many women struggle to overcome.
So when a person tears a woman down for how's she's dressed, they are tearing her down at a moment she feels at the top of her game. That's where the real shame is - not in how a woman is dressed, but in the desire to minimise her self-worth and empowerment. That's not kind, or well meaning. It's rude and cruel. — Annastacia Dickerson

Most men experience getting older with regret, apprehension. But most women experience it even more painfully: with shame. Aging is a man's destiny, something that must happen because he is a human being. For a woman, aging is not only her destiny ... it is also her vulnerability. — Susan Sontag

A woman scorn'd is pitiless as fate,
For then the dread of shame adds stings to hate. — William Gifford

As you say, DeWar, our shame comes from the comparison. We know we might be generous and compassionate and good, and could behave so, yet something else in our nature makes us otherwise." She smiled a small, empty smile. "Yes, I feel something I recognise as love. Something I remember, something I may discuss and mill and theorise over." She shook her head. "But it is not something I know. I am like a blind woman taking about how a tree must look, or a cloud. Love is something I have a dim memory of, the way someone who went blind in their early childhood might recall the sun, or the face of their mother. I know affection from my fellow whore-wives, DeWar, and I sense regard from you and feel some in return. I have a duty to the Protector, just as he feels he has a duty to me. As far as that goes, I am content. But love? That is for the living, and I am dead. — Iain M. Banks

HESTER. It is right that they should be punished, but don't let them be the only ones to suffer. If a man and woman have sinned, let them both go forth into the desert to love or loathe each other there. Let them both be branded. Set a mark, if you wish, on each, but don't punish the one and let the other go free. Don't have one law for men and another for women. You are unjust to women in England. And till you count what is a shame in a woman to be an infamy in a man, you will always be unjust, and Right, that pillar of fire, and Wrong, that pillar of cloud, will be made dim to your eyes, or be not seen at all, or if seen, not regarded LADY — Oscar Wilde

Beauty
isn't all about tooth whiteners, hard abs, and hundred-dollar lipstick. Beauty is
about growing old together, remembering when together, laughing together. If my
picture disgusts you, fine. Go look at the faces of women who named a price you
can buy them for. I'm not the kind of woman who will ever be for sale, and shame
on you for not expecting more from a woman, or from yourself. — Virginia Nelson

With time, she will disappear completely from his life, which is a shame because he's unlikely to find another woman like her, for all her defects. — Paulo Coelho

I am the dangerous daughter, thigh-stroking, soft-tongued lover, the pit, the well, and the well of horniness, laughter rolling up out of me like gravy boiling over the edge of a pan. I become the romantic, the mystic, the one without shame, rocking myself on the hip of a rock, a woman as sharp as coral. I make in my mind the muscle that endures, tame rage and hunger to spirit and blood. I become the rock. I become the knife. I am myself the mystery. The me that will be waits for me. If I cannot dream myself new, how will I find my true self? — Dorothy Allison

They hate me because I am the worst thing possible. I am the bad mother.

But here's a secret: in America there are no good mothers. They simply don't exist. Always, there are a thousand ways to fail at this singularly important job. There are failures of the body and failures of the heart. The woman who is unable to breastfeed is a failure. The woman who screams for the epidural is a failure. The woman who picks up her child late knows from the teacher's cutting glance that she is a failure. The woman who shares her bed with her baby has failed. The woman who steels herself and puts on noise-canceling earphones to erase the screaming of her child the next room has failed just as spectacularly. They must all hang their heads in guilt and shame because they haven't done it perfectly, and motherhood is, if anything, the assumption of perfection. — Nayomi Munaweera

Actually, I think you sound more Southern than me." "I blame my Mama for that, too," he replied. "She was an old-time rodeo queen from Amarillo, Texas. She homeschooled me and my brother Dirk until high school, so the Texas twang kinda stuck. Now as for Georgia, I find it a real shame you'd want to get rid of it. I find a woman with a soft Southern drawl incredibly sexy." "Tell you what, when I decide I want to be sexy for you, I'll be sure to turn it on full force."
She was a real firecracker, this Georgia girl. He liked that. He answered her with a grin. "I'll look forward to it." "In your dreams, cowboy," he thought he heard her mutter under her breath.
He cocked his head, "What was that?"
"Coffee?" She smiled wide. "If I recall, you promised me Starbucks. — Victoria Vane

When a man and woman married, nothing they did together had any shame or immodesty. It was all in the name of God. There was fruitfulness and joy in it, and it followed the Creator's own plan for continuing the human race. — Naomi Ragen

I won't walk through the wedding arch with you," she said.
"The arch is traditionally used by grooms with reluctant brides, for the arch is tall enough for a man with his woman on his shoulder."
As they reached the door, he bent and put his shoulder in her stomach. As if she were a sack of potatoes, he swung her up and over. Amy shrieked and gave his back a good hard thump.
He dropped her down until her rear sat uppermost on his shoulder and her head dangled almost to his trousers, and kept walking.
"Miss Victorine!" she shouted.
"I'll come as fast as I can, dears!" Miss Victorine called from the doorway.
"Shame on you for appealing to an old lady for rescue. — Christina Dodd

The kind of nonsense they put into a lass's head from day one! How is any woman expected to have a voice as strong as a man's, to have the will to overcome like a man, to conquer and triumph like a bloody soddin' pego-wielding Richard! They're not to! Oh no! That's the reason for the stories, lass! To lock you down good and tight, to wrap you up in guilt and shame just for being what you are. Bloody bastards! — R.S. Belcher

Sell yourself for money! why, if I were a man I would not sell one jot of liberty for mountains of gold. What! tie myself in the heyday of my youth to a person I could never love, for a price! perjure myself, destroy myself - and not only myself, but her also, in order that I might live idly! Oh, heavens! Mr Gresham! can it be that the words of such a woman as your aunt have sunk so deeply in your heart; have blackened you so foully as to make you think of such vile folly as this? Have you forgotten your soul, your spirit, your man's energy, the treasure of your heart? And you, so young! For shame, Mr Gresham! for shame - for shame. — Anthony Trollope

To the Kathakali Man these stories are his children and his childhood. He has grown up within them. They are the house he was raised in, the meadows he played in. They are his windows and his way of seeing. So when he tells a story, he handles it as he would a child of his own. He teases it. He punishes it. He sends it up like a bubble. He wrestles it to the ground and lets it go again. He laughs at it because he loves it. He can fly you across whole worlds in minutes, he can stop for hours to examine a wilting leaf. Or play with a sleeping monkey's tail. He can turn effortlessly from the carnage of war into the felicity of a woman washing her hair in a mountain stream. From the crafty ebullience of a rakshasa with a new idea into a gossipy Malayali with a scandal to spread. From the sensuousness of a woman with a baby at her breast into the seductive mischief of Krishna's smile. He can reveal the nugget of sorrow that happiness contains. The hidden fish of shame in a sea of glory. — Arundhati Roy

For she was his secret treasure, she was his shame and his bliss. And a chain and a keep are nothing, compared to a woman's kiss. — George R R Martin

If I wrote at all, I must throw myself headlong into the great political maelstrom, and would of course be swallowed up like a fishing-boat in the great Norway horror which decorated our school geographies; for no woman had ever done such a thing, and I could never again hold up my head under the burden of shame and disgrace which would be heaped upon me. But what matter? I had no children to dishonor; all save one who had ever loved me were dead, and she no longer needed me, and if the Lord wanted some one to throw into that gulf, no one could be better spared than I. — Jane Swisshelm

I almost panic then. The pleasure-power feeling flees, replaced by humiliation. It's obvious my husband doesn't recognize his own wife. Yet even in this public place, he can't be bothered to hide his admiration for a woman that he finds attractive.
He used to stare at me so intently, like I was the only thing in the world. Have I changed so much? Or maybe that mesmerizing gaze was just a weapon in his arsenal of appeal. Maybe he never actually saw.
Anger carries me the remaining distance. He is the one who should feel grimy with shame, not me. — Rae Carson

She does not reply. She would rather hide her face, and he knows why. Because of the disgrace. Because of the shame. That is what their visitors have achieved; that is what they have done to this confidant, modern young woman. Like a stain the story is spreading across the district. Not her story to spread but theirs: they are its owners. How they put her in her place, how they showed her what a woman was for. — J.M. Coetzee

We are all filled with a longing for the wild. There are few culturally sanctioned antidotes for this yearning. We were taught to feel shame for such a desire. We grew our hair long and used it to hide our feelings. But the shadow of Wild Woman still lurks behind us during our days and in our nights. No matter where we are, the shadow that trots behind us is definitely four-footed. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

I'd hate for you to waste away into nothing. It'd be a shame to lose the most beautiful woman in the world so soon into her immortal, wicked life. — Sarah J. Maas

Her type of woman has disappeared in this country today: free, brash, disobedient, aware of their body as a gift, not as a sin or a shame. The only time I saw a cold shadow come over her was when she told me about her domineering, polygamous father, whose lecherous eyes stirred up doubt and panic in her. Books delivered her from her family and offered her a pretext for getting away from Constantine; as soon as she could, she'd enrolled in the University of Algiers. — Kamel Daoud

No woman kills herself for love, and rarely for shame. It is the cruelty of hope that does a woman in; for no matter how many men a woman has given herself to, she never holds her life cheap until she foolishly believed it to be valued. — Sheri Holman

your abuser tried to map your life for you. But he does not own you, and you have the freedom and the power to overcome and transcend the (negative) associations. You deserve to be happy, to be free of any feelings of shame or guilt or fear. You have the right to a completely satisfying sexual life. You are a righteous young woman. If you can get in touch with the feelings and consciously change the awful associations, you can re-map your life. — Patti Feuereisen

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

A thoughtful expression crossed the woman's damp face. "I used to beat myself up over my body. What woman doesn't?" She paused, as if thinking about her words. "I finally decided I'd had enough. It was time to believe in me, without shame. I still slip up and have doubts. But for the most part, I take pride in who I am. — Abby Niles

Eaten up with guilt, shame, fears and insecurities and obtaining, if he's lucky, a barely perceptible physical feeling, the male is, nonetheless, obsessed with screwing; he'll swim a river of snot, wade nostril-deep through a mile of vomit, if he thinks there'll be a friendly pussy awaiting him. He'll screw a woman he despises, any snaggle-toothed hag, and, further, pay for the opportunity. Why? Relieving physical tension isn't the answer, as masturbation suffices for that. It's not ego satisfaction; that doesn't explain screwing corpses and babies. — Valerie Solanas

He was succeeded on the throne by RAGNAR. At this time Fro (Frey?), the King of Sweden, after slaying Siward, the King of the Norwegians, put the wives of Siward's kinsfolk in bonds in a brothel, and delivered them to public outrage. When Ragnar heard of this, he went to Norway to avenge his grandfather. As he came, many of the matrons, who had either suffered insult to their persons or feared imminent peril to their chastity, hastened eagerly to his camp in male attire, declaring that they would prefer death to outrage. Nor did Ragnar, who was to punish this reproach upon the women, scorn to use against the author of the infamy the help of those whose shame he had come to avenge. Among them was Ladgerda, a skilled amazon, who, though a maiden, had the courage of a man, and fought in front among the bravest with her hair loose over her shoulders. All-marvelled at her matchless deeds, for her locks flying down her back betrayed that she was a woman. — Saxo Grammaticus

The reader will probably think it very strange that Clare Arden should not have been utterly revolted by the thought that it was possible her kinsman could mean to make a speculation of her, and a mere stepping-stone to fortune. But she was not revolted. She had that personal objection to being married for her money which every woman has; but had not she herself been the heroine of the story, she would rather have felt approval than otherwise for Arthur Arden. What else could he do? she would have said to herself. He could not dig, and begging, even when one is little troubled with shame, is an unsatisfactory maintenance. And if everything could be put right by a suitable marriage, why should not he marry? It was the most natural, the most legitimate way of arranging everything. For the idea itself she had no horror. All she felt was a natural prejudice against being herself the subject of the transaction.{250} — Margaret Oliphant

It's a shame for a woman's history to be all about men-first boys, then other boys, then men, men, men. It reminds me of the way our school history textbooks were all about wars and elections, one war after another, with the dull periods of peace skimmed over when they happened. — Elizabeth Kostova

Starshine's greatest challenge is deciding whether a woman is too young to soothe or too old to shame. Handling the men is much easier. They may feign interest in figures and photos, but their underlying interest is for breasts and thighs. A generous smile often adds an extra zero to a check; an additional inch of exposed cleavage can clothe five Laotian children. The vast majority of these men do not expect to purchase Starshine's favors. They are husbands, fathers, pillars of the community, the sort of upstanding middle-aged patriarchs who would rather castrate their libidos than compromise their reputations, and even if their three-digit donations could earn them a quickie with the canvasser, they would deny themselves the pleasure. — Jacob M. Appel

The truth is, I am not unlike any other woman. I want to be with a man who accepts me for who I am. I would like for a man to love me for all my small quirks rather than shame me for them. And above all, I crave the affection of a man who will give it to me freely, not use it as a weapon against me. At — Belle Aurora

The sexier the other woman is, the more jealous your wife gets. And that's where slut shaming comes from. When a woman is too sexually attractive, when she's too good at attracting the attention of the opposite sex, other women will shame her for it, because they are afraid she will steal their men. — Oliver Markus

The bold defiance of a woman is the certain sign of her shame, - when she has once ceased to blush, it is because she has too much to blush for. — Charles Maurice De Talleyrand

Enthusiasm is the first step," she said. "Artfulness comes later."
"I hope I didn't disappoint you."
"I'm not displeased, Jovanno. Hells, having a lover that's new to the dance means you can train him properly. Give me a few nights and I'll have you whipped into proper form."
"The Asino brothers ... they always, well, they always invited me to go with them when they went out. To buy it, you know."
"There's no shame in doing that. And there's no shame in not having done it. But those two are hounds, Jovanno. Any woman could smell it a mile away. Sometimes a run with the hounds is just what you're in the mood for, but in the end they'll always roll around in muck and shit on your floor."
"Oh, they've got an endearing side," said Jean. "It comes out once a month, when the first moon is full. They're like backwards werewolves. — Scott Lynch

And me not sleeping tonight or tomorrow night or any night for a long while, now that this has started. And he thought of her lying on the bed with the two technicians standing straight over her, not bent with concern, but only standing straight, arms folded. And he remembered thinking then that if she died, he was certain he wouldn't cry. For it would be the dying of an unknown, a street face, a newspaper image, and it was suddenly so very wrong that he had begun to cry, not at death but at the thought of not crying at death, a silly empty man near a silly empty woman, while the hungry snake made her still more empty.

How do you get so empty? he wondered. Who takes it out of you? And that awful flower the other day, the dandelion! It had summed up everything, hadn't it? 'What a shame! You're not in love with anyone!' And why not? — Ray Bradbury

Democrats are liberals, and - to their profound embarrassment - liberalism is an old, white European male political philosophy. Liberalism is based on the thought of John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Paine, and - oh, the shame of it - slave-owning, woman-exploiting Thomas Jefferson. Liberalism is deeply confusing to liberals. America's first great liberal populist was Andrew Jackson, perpetrator of the genocidal Trail of Tears and annihilator of the Second Bank of the United States and hence of centralized economic control. (Sadly, Jackson put an end to the Second Bank of the United States before Hillary Clinton had a chance to claim large lecture fees for speaking to its executives.) Plus, liberalism is painfully unhip. Say "Great Society" to today's with-it young Democratic voters and they hear air quotes around the "Great." LBJ — P. J. O'Rourke

You should not have too many people waiting on you, you should have to do most things for yourself. Hotel service is embarrassing. Maids, waiters, bellhops, porters and so forth are the most embarrassing people in the world for they continually remind you of inequities which we accept as the proper thing. The sight of an ancient woman, gasping and wheezing as she drags a heavy pail of water down a hotel corridor to mop up the mess of some drunken overprivileged guest, is one that sickens and weighs upon the heart and withers it with shame for this world in which it is not only tolerated but regarded as proof positive that the wheels of Democracy are functioning as they should without interference from above or below. Nobody should have to clean up anybody else's mess in this world. It is terribly bad for both parties, but probably worse for the one receiving the service. — Tennessee Williams

Nothing is respectfully amazing than a man who finds no shame to tell the world how grateful he is for all the love and sacrifices his woman made.. — Himmilicious