Well Behaved Women Quotes & Sayings

I don't feel sure about doing good in any way now; everything seems like going on a mission to a people whose language I don't know. — George Eliot

Why have such scores of lovely, gifted girls
Married impossible men?
Simple self-sacrifice may be ruled out,
And missionary endeavour, nine times out of ten.
Repeat 'impossible men': not merely rustic,
Foul-tempered or depraved
(Dramatic foils chosen to show the world
How well women behave, and always have behaved).
Impossible men: idle, illiterate,
Self-pitying, dirty, sly,
For whose appearance even in City parks
Excuses must be made to casual passers-by.
Has God's supply of tolerable husbands
Fallen, in fact, so low?
Or do I always over-value woman
At the expense of man?
Do I?
It might be so. — Robert Graves

These past two days, I've seen a fire in your eyes that I never have before. Granted, it's mostly anger and frustration, but it's still emotion. — Rebecca Donovan

Why had Althea's crazed words affected Etta like this? Then the answer came to him: she was pregnant. Women always behaved strangely when they were pregnant. — Robin Hobb

I had experience with PTSD myself; probably that's why I felt so close to the soldiers and the testimony. Also, because I had experienced this myself, I wanted to make a really physical and carnal film. — Alice Winocour

When they told me I couldn't sit on the Senate floor with an iPad - that the technology wasn't even permitted - I breathed deep and knew that I was going to have to start pushing. — Cory Booker

Where the label had peeled — Craig Johnson

I played more of an advisory role with Public Enemy. I really trusted them to make the music that they wanted to make, and the way The Bomb Squad worked with the ... they created their whole own world of music. — Rick Rubin

One of course is to insure greater supply of energy for California's needs now and in the future in the sense that we are in discussions with representatives of Oregon and Washington, where they do have a surplus supply of energy available, and at what we hope will be a very reasonable price. — George Deukmejian

So what do people see when they read that well-behaved women rarely make history? Do they imagine good-time girls in stiletto heels or do-good girls carrying clipboards and passing petitions? Do they envision an out-of-control hobbyist or a single mother taking down a drunk in a bar? I suspect that it depends on where they stand themselves. — Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Give me a piece of cake from your love-life;
I'll show you how to lick fidelity's cream
off every layer you mistrust. — Munia Khan

Farm to table is a personal choice. — Tom Douglas

It was mild monsters like these that made Jack the Ripper go after young women, she decided: who could tolerate yielding the world to someone who behaved as if she had given birth to the very world herself? — Gregory Maguire

She was coming to look on men and women as fellow survivors; well-dissemblers of their woes, who, with few signals of grief, had contained, assimilated, or just put to use their own destruction. Of those who had endured the worst, not all behaved nobly or consistently. But all, involuntarily, became part of a deeper assertion to life.
Though the dissolution of love created no heroes, the process itself required some heroism. There was the risk that endurance might appear enough of an achievement. That risk had come up before. — Shirley Hazzard

Well behaved women do not make history. — Mae West

Carpe Diem - Seize the Moment. Every moment must be seized. Every little moment sets you up for the big moments. If you don't seize the small ones you won't be ready for the big ones. — Bobby F. Kimbrough Jr.

Here are just a few of the unnecessary burdens women are often made to bear. Single women are made to feel that they are "less than" other women; women who are gifted for a career are made to feel that college or a career is a waste of time and that these women are resisting "God's best" for them. Women whose interests, giftings, and opportunities do not fit the mold of post-industrial-revolution suburbia are disdained by other women who have been gifted with husbands, fruitful uteruses, and inclinations that better portray what has been elevated to the greatest expression of godliness for a woman: the stay-at-home mom. And stay-at-home moms are weighted with additional pressures: it's not enough to be home; they must also serve on every committee, live in a perfectly decorated (and always clean) house, and have perfectly behaved children. — Elyse M. Fitzpatrick

Composure and self-restraint were not only desirable characteristics in a woman, they were essental.
As my mother put it later, it was bad enough having to worry yourself sick every time your husband went up in an airplane; now, she was being told, she was also supposed to feel responsible if his plane crashed. Anger and discontent, lest they kill, were to be kept to oneself. The military, even more so than the rest of society, clearly put a premium on well-behaved, genteel, and even-tempered women. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Often I have heard the taunt that suffragists are women who have failed to find any normal outlet for their emotions, and are therefore soured and disappointed beings. This is probably not true of any suffragist, and it is most certainly not true of me. My home life and relations have been as nearly ideal as possible in this imperfect world. — Emmeline Pankhurst

Genesis supplements "created in God's image" with the affirmation that God thus made humanity "male and female." Women and men together comprise this image. The statement is an extraordinary one in this opening chapter of Genesis, written in a patriarchal culture. One might wonder whether the author of Genesis saw the implications of this declaration. Certainly generation after generation of Christians have not seen it. We have often talked and behaved as if the male was the normal and full form of a human being, with the female a deviant and slightly inferior form. But both male and female belong to the image. You have the image of God represented in humanity only when you have both men and women there. When women are not present and involved in God's work in the world (and in the church), the image of God is not present. — John E. Goldingay

The position of women, over the years, has definitely changed for the worse. we women have behaved like mugs, We have clamoured to be allowed to work as men work. Men, not being fools, have taken kindly to the idea. Why supoort a wife? What's wrong with a wife supporting herself? She wants to do it. By golly, she can go on doing it!
it seems sad that having established ourselves so cleverly as the "weaker sex" we should now be broadly on a par with the women of primitive tribes who toil in the fields all day, walk miles to gather camelthorn for fuel, and on trek carry all the pots, pans, and household equipment on their heads, while the gorgeous, ornamental male sweeps on ahead, unburdened save for one lethal weapon with which to defend his women. — Agatha Christie

A capable, clear-eyed sovereign, she knew how to build a fleet, suppress an insurrection, control a currency, alleviate a famine. An eminent Roman general vouched for her grasp of military affairs. Even at a time when women rulers were no rarity she stood out, the sole female of the ancient world to rule alone and to play a role in Western affairs. She was incomparably richer than anyone else in the Mediterranean. And she enjoyed greater prestige than any other woman of her age ... Cleopatra descended from a long line of murderers and faithfully upheld the family tradition but was, for her time and place, remarkably well behaved. She nonetheless survives as a wanton temptress, not the last time a genuinely powerful woman has been transmuted into a shamelessly seductive one. — Stacy Schiff

Men reacted as they always did; some with an extreme of generosity, giving what little they could spare to strangers; others behaved with an equal and opposite extreme of harshness, demanding outrageous things in exchange. Honest men became thieves, honest women prostitutes, criminals became saints, all driven onward by an idea of what they were leaving behind. — Iain Pears

They [heterosexual cis women] are accepted in the straight mainstream way more readily than I [trans woman] will ever be. But they are marginalized in their day-to-day lives because they are feminine. To argue that they are reinforcing the binary, or the patriarchy or the hegemonic gender system, because they are conventional feminine (as opposed to subversively feminine) essentially implies that they are enabling their own oppression. This is just another variation of the claim that rapists make when they insinuate that the woman in question was 'asking for it' because of what she was wearing or how she behaved. — Julia Serano

Hip to the fact that well-behaved women rarely make history, Diane [Wilson] has already inspired a new movement of totally uncontrollable, irresistible and unreasonable women! — Medea Benjamin

I dealt with it the same way I deal with everything. I just tended my own garden, didn't pay much attention, behaved - I suppose - deviously. I mean I didn't actually let too many people know what I was doing. — Joan Didion

Ever since there have been people, there have been explorers, looking in places where other hadn't been before. Not everyone does it, but we are part of a species where some members of the species do-to the benefit of us all. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

When I was a boy I remember the women, how they dressed, how they behaved, what was important to them at the time. Like Lee Marvin and Gloria Grahame in The Big Heat. — Manolo Blahnik

Have I been conditioned to believe that if I am not solicitous, if I am not forthcoming, if I am not a never-ending cornicopia of entertaining delights, they will take their collections of milk-bottle tops and their mangy one-eared teddy bears and go away into the woods by themselves to play snipers? Probably. What my mother things was merely cute may have been lethal. — Margaret Atwood

For each self-criticism, there were many criticisms. My mother's two comrades insisted that she had behaved in a 'bourgeois' manner. They said she had not wanted to go to the country to help collect food; when she pointed out that she had gone, in line with the Party's wishes, they retorted: "Ah, but you didn't really want to go." Then they accused her of having enjoyed privileged food cooked, moreover, by her mother at home and of succumbing to illness more than most pregnant women. Mrs. Mi also criticized her because her mother had made clothes for the baby.
"Who ever heard of a baby wearing new clothes?"she said.
"Such a bourgeois waste! Why can't she just wrap the baby up in old clothes like everyone else?" The fact that my mother had shown her sadness that my grandmother had to leave was singled out as definitive proof that she 'put family first," a serious offense. — Jung Chang

Well-behaved women seldom make history. — Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

The 'futures' and 'careers' for which American students now prepare are for the most part intellectual and moral wastelands. This chrome-plated consumers' paradise would have us grow up to be well-behaved children. But an important minority of men and women coming to the front today have shown they will die rather than be standardized, replaceable, and irrelevant. — Mario Savio

One glance and I knew exactly who and what he was. The classic alpha male, the kind who had spurred evolution forward about five million years ago by nailing every female in sight. They charmed, seduced, and behaved like bastards, and yet women were biologically incapable of resisting their magic DNA. — Lisa Kleypas

Much of what is considered "good" in little girls is considered downright repulsive in little boys. Physical timidity or hypercautiousness, being quietly "well behaved", and depending on others for help and support are thought to be natural - if not outright charming - in girls. Boys, however, are actively discouraged from the dependent forms of relating, which are considered "sissyish" in male children. — Colette Dowling

The movie, if I recall, didn't have to do with the television show because there were concerns from everyone that they didn't want it to be like the TV show. — David Selby

I know you think I've behaved like a cad, so I'm coming clean. I love you, Tess. I have for a long time. I ache for you. Every morning I wake up, wishing you were in my arms. Back when Cassie was at her mom's, I was relieved to be thinking about you and not her so much anymore, until I realized it meant that I was in love with you. I fell for you that first morning, when I saw you coming out of the garage with Dave. I couldn't tell you the other day, but I wanted you to know." He leaned in and kissed her cheek. "Maybe I have been protecting myself, but mostly, I wanted to protect you. — Lilly Christine

Boy, I'll tell you, when the Rams drafted me No. 1, it surprised me. I was walking on air for days. — Jack Youngblood