When You Are The Other Woman Quotes & Sayings

You are wrong when you say there is no power in being a woman. When I think of my mother and the women in my tribe, and the hidden women in the harem, I know there are many types of power in this world ... I found power in accepting the truth of who I am. It may not be a truth that others can accept, but I cannot live any other way. How would it be to live a lie every minute of your life? I don't think I could do it. — Alison Goodman

I noticed then that the red-haired woman was buying the food you eat when you live alone: a box of cereal, a few apples, a plastic container of plain yogurt ... With an abrupt clarity, I saw how I had been launched into another category. I had been the red-haired woman; for a decade of my adult life, I had bought cereal and yogurt, I'd stood near couples and watched them nuzzle, and now I was part of such a couple. And I would not be launched back, I was certain. But I recognized her life, I knew it so well! I wanted to clasp her freckled hand, to say to her
surely we understood some shared code (or surely not, surely she'd have thought me preposterous)
It's good on the other side, but it's good on your side too. Enjoy it there. The loneliness is harder and the loneliness is the biggest part; but some things are easier. — Curtis Sittenfeld

Two moral forces shaped how we think and live in this shining twentieth century: the Virgin, and the Dynamo. The Dynamo represents the desire to know; the Virgin represents the freedom not to know.

What's the Virgin made of? Things that we think are silly, mostly. The peculiar logic of dreams, or the inexplicable stirring we feel when we look on someone that's beautiful not in a way that we all agree is beautiful, but the unique way in which a single person is. The Virgin is faith and mysticism; miracle and instinct; art and randomness.

On the other hand, you have the Dynamo: the unstoppable engine. It finds the logic behind a seeming miracle and explains that miracle away; it finds the order in randomness to which we're blind; it takes the caliper to a young woman's head and quantifies her beauty in terms of pleasing mathematical ratios; it accounts for the secret stirring you felt by discoursing at length on the nervous systems of animals. — Dexter Palmer

Too racy?" I asked.
She snorted. "Too asinine. For being such a brilliant woman in all other respects, apparently, she was completely flummoxed by sex. When she wrote about it, it was either all buttoned up or completely, pardon the expression,screwy. Between you and me, the letters to Willing are just sloppy and boring. The spicy bits read like old Cosmopolitans now. The rest is just simpering and scolding him for not writing in kind."
"Of course he didn't. He loved Diana."
Maxine swept a shred of paper from her desk with a quick backhand. "Oh, for heavens sake." She huffed out a breath. "The heart of a teenager. — Melissa Jensen

Oh, he's joining the team," Dean declares. "I don't care if I have to suck his dick to get him to agree to it."

Laughter breaks out all around him.

"Sucking dick now, are we?" I ask pleasantly.

An evil gleam lights his eyes. "You know what? I won't just suck it," he says slowly. "I'll suck him off. You know, give him an orgasm."

The other guys exchange mystified looks, but Dean's mocking look tells me exactly where he's going with this. Jackass.

"I'm not sure if you all know this, but an orgasm is the point of completion in the pleasure process." Dean gives me an innocent smile. "Men and women achieve it in different ways. For example, when a woman reaches completion, she might moan or gasp or - — Elle Kennedy

Whenever anyone has called me a bitch, I have taken it as a compliment. To me, a bitch is assertive, unapologetic, demanding, intimidating, intelligent, fiercely protective, in control - all very positive attributes. But it's not supposed to be a compliment, because there's that stupid double standard: When men are aggressive and dominant, they are admired, but when a woman possesses those same qualities, she is dismissed and called a bitch.
These days, I strive to be a bitch, because not being one sucks. Not being a bitch means not having your voice heard. Not being a bitch means you agree with all the bullshit. Not being a bitch means you don't appreciate all the other bitches who have come before you. Not being a bitch means since Eve ate that apple, we will forever have to pay for her bitchiness with complacence, obedience, acceptance, closed eyes, and open legs. — Margaret Cho

So what are you thinking?" I asked.
I meant about the case, obviously, but Cassie was in a giddy mood
she generates more energy than most people, and she'd been sitting indoors most of the day.
"Will you listen to him? A woman asking a guy what he's thinking is the ultimate crime, she's clingy and needy and he runs a mile, but when it's the other
"
"Behave yourself," I said, pulling her hood over her face.
"Help! I'm being oppressed!" she yelled through it. "Call the Equality Commission." The stroller girl gave us a sour look.
"You're overexcited," I told Cassie. "Calm down or I'll take you home with no ice cream. — Tana French

In the West, marriage is collapsing because it is based on love. And a marriage that is based on love is bound to fail. There is a reason for this: whenever two persons fall in love, both of them present what is beautiful in themselves to the other and hide the ugly. When you fall in love, whether you are a man or a woman, you show your most beautiful face to the other - but it is not your reality, it is not your totality. — Rajneesh

Baby Girl," I say. "I need you to remember everything I told you. Do you remember what I told you?"
She still crying steady, but the hiccups is gone. "To wipe my bottom good when I'm done?"
"No, baby, the other. About what you are."
I look deep into her rich brown eyes and she look into mine. Law, she got old-soul eyes, like she done lived a thousand years. And I swear I see, down inside, the woman she gone grow up to be. A flash from the future. She is tall and straight. She is proud. She got a better haircut. And she is remembering the words I put in her head. Remembering as a full grown woman.
And then she say it, just like I need her to. "You is kind," she say, "you is smart. You is important. — Kathryn Stockett

They maintain he wrote The Art of War. Personally, I believe it was a woman. On the surface, The Art of War is a manual about tactics on the battlefield, but at its deepest level it describes how to win conflicts. Or to be more precise, the art of getting what you want at the lowest possible price. The winner of a war is not necessarily the victor. Many have won the crown, but lost so much of their army that they can only rule on their ostensibly defeated enemies' terms. With regard to power, women don't have the vanity men have. They don't need to make power visible, they only want the power to give them the other things they want. Security. Food. Enjoyment. Revenge. Peace. They are rational, power-seeking planners, who think beyond the battle, beyond the victory celebrations. And because they have an inborn capacity to see weakness in their victims, they know instinctively when and how to strike. And when to stop. You can't learn that, Spiuni. — Jo Nesbo

"Why are you so nice? It doesn't make sense. I'm not your woman. I'm not your people"
"We're all each other's people. Just like we're all our brothers' keepers. We forget it sometimes. When everything's going to pieces, people can forget. But in the end? We're all in it together ... "
"I used to know this Indian guy ... the thing he said that stuck with me was that people are one here in America. They're all alone. And they don't trust anyone except themselves, and they don't rely on anyone except themselves. He said that was why he thought India would survive all this apocalyptic shit, but America wouldn't. Because here, no knew their neighbors." He laughed at that. "I can still remember his head wagging back and forth, 'No one is knowing their neighbors. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Lleu is a hard lord," said Huw, "He is killing Gronw without anger, without love, without mercy. He is hurt too much by the woman and the spear. Yet what is there when it is done? His pride. No spear. No friend."
Roger started at Huw. "You're not so green as you're grass-looking, are you?" he said. "Now you mention it, I have been thinking - That bloke Gronw was the only one with any real guts at the end."
"But none of them is all to blame," said Huw. "It is only together they are destroying each other."
"That Blod-woman was pretty poor," said Roger, "however you look at it."
"No," said Huw. "She was made for her lord. Nobody is asking her if she wants him. It is bitter twisting to be shut up with a person you are not liking very much. I think she was longing for the time when she was flowers on the mountain, and it is making her cruel, as the rose is growing thorns. — Alan Garner

A Muslim woman must not feel wild, or free, or any of the other emotions and longings I felt when I read those books. A Muslim girl does not make her own decisions or seek control. She is trained to be docile. If you are a Muslim girl, you disappear, until there is almost no you inside you. In Islam, becoming an individual is not a necessary development; many people, especially women, never develop a clear individual will. You submit: that is the literal meaning of the word islam: submission. The goal is to become quiet inside, so that you never raise your eyes, not even inside your mind. But — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

One does not dislike the half of everything. You bore me, you young people, when you talk about one sex or the other, as if they were separate things. There is only one human entity and that is a man and a woman. The man is the silhouette, the woman is the detail. The one often spoils or makes the other. But apart they are so much material. Don't be a fool. — Margery Allingham

Ah yes," Gabe said, "Pinter is ever the gallant when it comes to the ladies. He wouldn't risk leaving us alone with poor Miss Lake, for the fear one of us might spirit her off to our lair."
"Why?" Miss Lake asked, with a lift of her brow. "Do you three make a habit of spiriting women off?"
"Only on Tuesdays and Fridays," Masters said. "Seeing as how it's Wednesday, your safe."
"Unless you're wearing a blue garter, madam," Gabe quipped. "On Wednesdays, Masters and I have a great fondness for blue garters. Are your gaters blue, Miss Lake?"
"Only on Mondays and Thursdays." She dealt thirteen cards apiece to the two of them, then put the rest aside as the stock, turning the top card faceup. "Sorry gentlemen. I guess you'll have to spirit off some other woman. — Sabrina Jeffries

Begin ... where you are, NOT where you want to be. Begin stuck in the doldrums of your false story
if that is where you are. Begin there because, in truth, there is no other place to start from. Tell yourself that you are going to listen for the sound of your own voice
and remind yourself when you forget. And you will forget, over and over again. — Florence Falk

When you have lived as long as I, you will see that every human being has his shell, and that you must take the shell into acount. By the shell I mean the whole envelope of circumstances. There is no such thing as an isolated man or woman; we are each of us made up of a cluster of apurtenances. What do you call one's self? Where does it begin? Where does it end? It overflows into everythng tht belongs to us - and then flows back again. ( ... ) One's self - for other people - is one's expression of one's self; and one's house, one's clothes, the books one reads, the company one keeps - these things are all expressive. — Henry James

When ladies as young, and good, and beautiful as you are," replied the girl steadily, "give away your hearts, love will carry you all lengths
even such as you, who have home, friends, other admireres, everything to fill them. When such as I, who have no certain roof but the coffin-lid, and no friend in sickness or death but the hospital nurse, set our rotten hearts on any man, and let him fill the place that has been a blank through all our wretched lives, who can hope to cure us? Pity us, lady
pity us for having only one feeling of the woman left, and for having that turned, by a heavy judgment, from a comfort and a pride, into a new means of violence and suffering. — Charles Dickens

We begin to say something that cannot be said. When you see on the front page a woman in Iraq who's just seen her husband blown up, you see her there, her mouth wide open, you know the sound coming out of her, a howl of grief and pain
that's the beginning of language.
Trying to express that, it's inexpressible, and poetry is really to say what can't be said. And that's why people turn to it in these moments. They don't know how to say this, [but] part of them feels that maybe a poem will say it. It won't say it, but it'll come closer to saying it than anything else will.
I think there are always two sides, and one of them is the unsayable. The utterly singular. Who you are; who you can never tell anybody. And on the other hand, there is what you can express. How do we know about this thing we talk about? Because we talk about it. We're using words. And the words never say it, but the words are all we have to say it. — W.S. Merwin

Any man or woman who neglects to maintain inward vigilance, and only makes an outward show of holiness in dress, speech, and behavior, is a wretched creature. For they watch the doings of other people and criticize their faults, imagining themselves to be something when in reality they are nothing. In this way they deceive themselves. Be careful to avoid this, and devote yourself inwardly to His likeness by humility, charity, and other spiritual virtues. In this way you will be truly converted to God. — Walter Hilton

I folded my arms over my chest. "Oh, that is just like a man! To credit something inexplicable to the feeble mind of an hysterical woman."
He gave me a slow smile. "I think I have proven amply that I, at least, do not believe your sex to be the weaker. On the contrary, my dear, your kind has brought kingdoms to ruin and heroes to their knees. I would not dare to underestimate you."
"And yet," I muttered.
"And yet, I will point out any flaw in your logic because you are capable of better," he returned rather more sternly. "You've a fine mind when you aren't haring off in one direction or other. — Deanna Raybourn

Young white men in the eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-old range are often coming to grips with the fact that life isn't as easy as they were promised. I've been there myself. When you realize that life isn't going to hand you the job you want or the woman you want to fuck, you look around for someone to blame, and feminism becomes an easy target. If only women were subservient objects who stayed at home, there would be more jobs open to young white men and more women with no other option but to have sex with them for sustenance.
I realize that white-man utopia sounds really pleasing to these guys, but it's basically everyone else's worst nightmare It's not so great for them either, but they won't get that for a long time, if ever.
Suffice to say you won't convince them of this in an online comments section, either. — Kameron Hurley

Where's tomorrow?'
That is what she has asked me.
When children cry, you talk to them about tomorrow. If they hurt themselves and are inconsolable, even though you pick them up, then you tell them where they are going tomorrow, who they are going to visit. You move their awareness on a day, away from their tears. You introduce time into their lives.
The woman has the knack of doing it gently, somehow. Without promising anything specific, without trying to deny the pain, tenderly she draw the child with her into the future. as if to say, we all have to learn about time. They even so it is possible to grow up without being damaged.
...
I knew what she meant. She had grasped the concept of changes in space, that places are different, also from each other. Now time had been introduced into her life, but she could not grasp it. So she tried to explain it in terms of space, which she had grasped. — Peter Hoeg

And if you think you have wronged me by giving me your friendship, and occasionally admitting me to the enjoyment of your company and conversation, when all hopes of closer intimacy were vain - as indeed you always gave me to understand - if you think you have wronged me by this, you are mistaken; for such favours, in themselves alone, are not only delightful to my heart, but purifying, exalting, ennobling to my soul; and I would have your friendship than the love of any other woman in the world! — Anne Bronte

As long as you are forced to be a woman first instead of a person, by default, you need to be a feminist. That's it. Men are people, women are women? Screw that. Screw that. I am sick of having words aimed to shut me up. I am sick of having to be anything other than a person first. Zounds! I enjoy being a girl, whatever that means. For me, that meant Star Wars figurines, mounds of books, skirts and flats. It meant Civil War reenacting and best girlfriends I'd give a kidney to and best guy friends I'd ruin a liver with and making messes and cleaning up some of them and still not knowing how to apply eye shadow. That's being a girl. That's being a person. It's the same damn thing. I wish Rush had just called me an idiot. I'm happy to be called an idiot! On the day when someone on the Internet calls me an idiot first and ugly second, I will set down my feminist battle flag and heave a great sigh. Then I will pick it back up and keep climbing. There are many more mountains to overcome. — Alexandra Petri

When you put a man and a woman together, there are some things they simply have to do. They embrace, they warm each other. All the rest is dead and empty. — Ugo Betti

People hate themselves, people condemn themselves - they go on condemning; they go on thinking that they are rotten. How can the other love you, such a rotten person. No, nobody can love you really - the other must be befooling, cheating; there must be some other reason. She must be after something else; he must be after something else. You know your rottenness, worthlessness - love seems to be out of the question. And when some woman comes and says she adores you, you cannot trust. When you go to a woman and you say you adore her, and she hates herself, how can she believe you? It is self-hatred that is creating the anxiety. There — Osho

APPROACH
Rain is falling. Winter approaches. I drive towards it. In the slow rain. In the semi-darkness. Cello music is playing in the car. The deep sad sound of the cello. It almost swamps me. Routine endeavours to swamp me. The everyday paying of bills.
But I paint men walking in a city of icebergs and crystal. Some of the icebergs are red. I paint a woman swimming in green wavy water. Surrounded by desert mesas. Bright orange in the sunlight. With darker orange for shadows. I paint two people. With purple and pink and yellow and blue circles overlapping the boundaries of their bodies. Dancing.
Life is not ordinary. When I see you tonight I will press my lips to your eyelids. Each one in turn. I will rub my fingertips over the skin on the back of your hands and around your wrists. I will sigh. I will growl. I will whinny. I will gallop into your smile. One sharp foot after the other. — Jay Woodman

One thing I more and this is all I have to say...High School is not a separate unit from you. We are apart of you. Every man, woman, and child in this community is a part...Your ways of life in your homes and your town reflect here in the school. You can help us or you can hurt us. Our success depends largely on you. I used to think when I first started teaching school that it was all up to the teachers and the pupils. I have changed my mind. The little island of humanity that is each one of you must unite with other islands and become a mainland if we are to have a successful school. — Jesse Stuart

There's a saying in Africa, if you give a woman empowerment, you empower a community, you empower men, you empower man. When women become empowered and live in their strength it's beneficiary to others, and I think as young women today we sometimes forget that we are standing on the struggle of other women. Those women had to stand up to make a change, and they were not popular, and now we're making them unpopular again. — Danai Gurira

I just believe that us as women - should not criticize nor pull down other women. And why? Because we're all just trying our best to be beautiful! We all just want to be loved, we want to be beautiful, we're all trying to leave our own legacy! The good news is that the universe is unending and that means there is enough space for each woman on earth to leave her own mark and to be her own legacy. To be her own kind of beautiful. So why spend even a second on trying to take away from another woman? Trying to steal, trying to criticize, trying to oppress? There is enough space for every woman and every kind of beautiful, in this vast cosmos! When you waste any amount of time trying to take what is another's - you are wasting your huge chunk of a galaxy that's already been given to you! — C. JoyBell C.

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
-But who is that on the other side of you? — T. S. Eliot

I am only trying to make up for ... " she began timidly, and jumped when the other woman roared.
"MAKE UP? You are trying to make me less!"
"No, no, it is not that, truly, I am to blame ... "
"You take responsibility for my actions?" Bergitte broke in fiercely. "I chose to speak to you in Tel'aron'rhiod, I chose to help you, I chose to track Moghedien, and I chose to take you to see her, me, not you Nyneave, me! I was not your puppet, your pack hound then, and I will not be now. — Robert Jordan

What are the years from twenty to forty? Fettered and bound by personal and emotional relationships. That's bound to be. That's living. But later there's a new stage. You can think, observe life, discover something about other people and the truth about yourself. Life becomes real
significant. You see it as a whole. Not just one scene
the scene you, as an actor, are playing. No man or woman is actually himself (or herself) till after forty-five. That's when individuality has a chance. — Agatha Christie

Perhaps I love you. Perhaps I love you very much. But probably just for this reason it would be better if we remain as we are. I think a man and a woman love each other all the more when they don't live together and when they know about each other only that they exist, and when they are grateful to each other for the fact that they exist and that they know they exist. And that alone is enough for their happiness. — Milan Kundera

I AM RAPHAEL, ONE OF THE SEVEN ARCHANGELS WHO PASS IN and out of the presence of the Holy One, blessed be he. I bring him the prayers of all who pray and of those who don't even know that they're praying. Some prayers I hold out as far from me as my arm will reach, the way a woman holds a dead mouse by the tail when she removes it from the kitchen. Some, like flowers, are almost too beautiful to touch, and others so aflame that I'd be afraid of their setting me on fire if I weren't already more like fire than I am like anything else. There are prayers of such power that you might almost say they carry me rather than the other way round - the way a bird with outstretched wings is carried higher and higher on the back of the wind. There are prayers so apologetic and shamefaced and halfhearted that they all but melt away in my grasp like sad little flakes of snow. Some prayers are very boring. — Frederick Buechner

If God is present with you everywhere you go (and he is), and if he is sovereign over every situation, relationship, and location of your life (and he is), then when you blame other people for your circumstances or for the wrongs that you do, you are, in fact, blaming God. You are saying that God didn't give you what you needed to be what he has called you to be and to do what he has called you to do. You are essentially saying: "My problem isn't a heart problem; my problem is a poverty of grace problem. If only God had given me _, I wouldn't have had to do what I did." This is the final argument of a self-excusing lifestyle. This argument was first made in the garden of Eden after the rebellion of Adam and Eve. Adam: "The woman you gave me made me do it." Eve: "The Devil made me do it." It is the age-old self-defensive lie of a person who doesn't want to face the ugliness of the sin that still resides in his or her heart. — Paul David Tripp

'Venus in Fur' is very Polanski: you have the knife of 'Rosemary's Baby'; you have Thomas disguised as a woman as in 'The Tenant,' when Vanda puts makeup on him, it's like 'Cul de Sac'; the dress of Tess and other details that are very Polanski. He fell in love with the play because it was so much him. — Emmanuelle Seigner

Between takeoff and landing, we are each in suspended animation, a pause between chapters of our lives. When we stare out the window into the sun's glare, the landscape is only a flat projection with mountain ranges reduced to wrinkles in the continental skin. Oblivious to our passage overhead, other stories are unfolding beneath us. Blackberries ripen in the August sun, a woman packs a suitcase and hesitates at her doorway, a letter is opened and the most surprising photograph slides from between the pages. But we are moving too fast and we are too far away; all the stories escape us, except our own. When I turn away from the window, the stories recede into the two-dimensional map of green and brown below. Like a trout disappearing into the shade of an overhanging bank, leaving you staring at the flat surface of the water and wondering if you saw it at all. — Robin Wall Kimmerer

I draw because words are too unpredictable.
I draw because words are too limited.
If you speak and write in English, or Spanish, or Chinese, or any other language, then only a certain percentage of human beings will get your meaning.
But when you draw a picture everybody can understand it.
If I draw a cartoon of a flower, then every man, woman, and child in the world can look at it and say, That's a flower. — Sherman Alexie

Literary friendship is impossible, it seems; at least, it is impossible for me. Indeed, all male friendships outside of work sometimes seem to be impossible: you look at each other at the restaurant at some point in the conversation and you know that each of you is thinking, man, this is futile, why are we here, we're wasting our time, we have nothing to say, we're not involved in some project together that we can bitch about, we can't flirt, we feel like dummies discussing movies or books, we aren't in some moral bind with a woman that we need to confess, we've each said the other is a genius several times already, and the whole thing is depressing and the tone is false and we might as well go home to our wives and children and rent buddy movies like Midnight Run or Planes, Trains, and Automobiles or The Pope of Greenwich Village when we need a shot of the old camaraderie. — Nicholson Baker

There is some pressure when you are a woman doing what I do that you must support all other women unconditionally, no matter what they're projecting, or writing, or producing, or putting forth as their art. I think that's equally arbitrary and random and unfair, and kind of sexist. The secretly sexist way. I have really high standards for what I think is funny. I have that for everything, and I think it would be disingenuous of me to blanket-ly love everything a woman has produced simply to make a statement that we're all in this together. — Mindy Kaling

Some guys will say all kinds of things to look macho and save face," Max said. "Guys are jerks sometimes. But in his heart, a man loves his wife or girlfriend for so many reasons besides her outward appearance. Think of it - as a couple they've probably been through a lot together. Unless their sex life is trashed or they can't trust each other or they're fighting all the time, there's so much more to a relationship than just looks.
And you have to understand, when a guy really loves a woman, he can't imagine his life without her. Even if she isn't the most beautiful woman in the world anymore, she's still the woman who captured his heart. — Jenell Hollett

OMG, I think I've become a feminist. I mean, I've always been in favor of women voting and being paid the same as men for doing the same job. But then, the other day on the train, I didn't get up and give a woman my seat. I thought about it. But then I thought it might insult her, might imply that I considered her weaker than a senior citizen, maybe even inferior in some way. But that's not what prompted me to fire up my laptop. I was brushing my teeth this morning and thinking about romance. People do that when they get older, I suppose. Romance is one area where men and women are still different - unisex lavatories and fashions notwithstanding. And here's the difference: a romantic woman envisions a knight on a white horse; a romantic man envisions a dragon in a dark cave. Think about it next time you brush your teeth. — Ron Brackin

I never wanted to marry anyone before," he said. "When two people marry, they surrender a small part of themselves. They become more like each other. I never met a woman who was better than me at things I take pride in, and I never wanted to be like them. I always knew that whoever I was with was temporary. There was always a new woman around the corner. I've seen marriages shatter. Twice. My mother left, then Richard's wife. It almost broke my brother."
"So how do I know that you won't move on and leave me broken?"
"Because you are the one. You are better than me in some things, and I am better than you in others." He drew her into his arms. "I don't mind being a bit like you. I hope you don't mind being a bit like me. — Ilona Andrews

It's definitely difficult being a woman and growing up a girl. When you're graceful, people say you lack personality; when you're serene, people say you're boring; when you're confident, people say you're arrogant; when you're feminine, people say you're too girly; and when you climb trees, people say you're too much of a tomboy! As a woman, you really need to develop a very strong sense of self and the earlier you can do that, the better! You have to be all the things that you are, without allowing other people's ignorance change you! I realized that they don't know what grace is, they can't identify serenity, they have inferiority complexes, they are incapable of being feminine, and they don't know how to climb trees! — C. JoyBell C.