Women Growing Up Quotes & Sayings

Hair is so linked to how we feel and everyone goes for something radical after a break-up, but my advice if you've suffered heartbreak or you've broken up with someone is not to touch your hair. It's the first thing women do but you're not in a fit state to make long-term decisions. You'll have to spend four years growing it out. Buy a lipstick instead. Go and kiss loads of other people, but don't f***ing touch your hair. — Alexa Chung

I didn't have a father growing up, and I was raised with all women, and I didn't really understand men. I thought they were like women, right? — Rene Russo

Inasmuch as every family is a part of a state, and these relationships are the parts of a family, and the virtue of the part must have regard to the virtue of the whole, women and children must be trained by education with an eye to the constitution, if the virtues of either of them are supposed to make any difference in the virtues of the state. And they must make a difference: for the children grow up to be citizens, and half the free persons in a state are women. — Aristotle.

It's really the story of a young woman, or two women, growing up in Naples in a poor neighborhood. The way that they get out of it - or don't get out of it - that's part of it. But it's also the story of the mid-20th century in Italy so it's really like a social, historical and personal novel. I think that even though I didn't live in Italy in those years, it did cover that same type of generational upbringing that someone like me might've had in America. — Ann Goldstein

Growing up, I looked up to real women. I didn't go in for hero worship and I still don't. Everybody has feet of clay. — Lucy Lawless

I understand why some women/girls/ladies don't want to be women-identified 'cuz it totally complicates your band identity and no one seems to pay much attention to the music or what you're doing. We have chosen to be girl-identified (although Billy isn't a girl!), because we want to encourage other women/girls to play music. When I was growing up, I found it discouraging to have all these women in bands not wanting to address the issue of gender ... we're interested in what women are doing. — Tobi Vail

When I was growing up, the men in my life were abusive; women were the ones I ran to for comfort. — Kevyn Aucoin

Growing up I was a total movie-holic, but I always wanted to play the role that Clark Gable was playing or Spencer Tracy was playing. I was really never interested in the parts that women were playing. I found the parts that guys were playing were so much more interesting. — Joyce DeWitt

Most of my close friends, growing up, were women - and even after I got married, I still maintained a lot of those friendships. But as they get married, and as I get older, I'm making a lot of the transition to the husbands. — Andrew Gurland

I've always been the goofy kid. Growing up, I always enjoyed the comedic aspect of relating to women. Even on camera, it was always the funny take on it. — Will Smith

In a patriarchal society like ours, says Horley, domestic violence will always be with us. "Women don't even have equal pay. Girls are still growing up with the message that the handsome prince on the white horse is the happy ending. For as long as there's an imbalance of power between the sexes, it's inevitable that that power will be abused by some men. — The Guardian

What if she doesn't worry about her body and eats enough for all the growing she has to do? She might rip her stockings and slam-dance on a forged ID to the Pogues, and walk home barefoot, holding her shoes, alone at dawn; she might baby-sit in a battered-women's shelter one night a month; she might skateboard down Lombard Street with its seven hairpin turns, or fall in love with her best friend and do something about it, or lose herself for hours gazing into test tubes with her hair a mess, or climb a promontory with the girls and get drunk at the top, or sit down when the Pledge of Allegiance says stand, or hop a freight train, or take lovers without telling her last name, or run away to sea. She might revel in all the freedoms that seem so trivial to those who could take them for granted; she might dream seriously the dreams that seem to obvious to those who grew up with them really available. Who knows what she would do? Who knows what it would feel like? — Naomi Wolf

I've always had a thing for old movies, old Hollywood. I've always just loved watching Marilyn Monroe and Greta Garbo. In all of those old movies from the '40s and '50s, women put themselves together so well, with a little bit of drama and elegance. That was fascinating to me growing up. — Tabatha Coffey

Generation after generation of women have pledged to raise their daughters differently, only to find that their daughters grow up and fervently pledge the same thing. — Elizabeth Debold

We need a temporary cessation in people having any opinions about any women, ever. I propose a, say, five-year moratorium on having opinions about women, in order to let one generation of girls get from one side of puberty to the other without growing up in a climate where women are constantly being scolded, chivvied, harassed, or subjected to thunderous opinion columns concluding that, yet again, some woman in the public eye has overreached herself and should wind her neck in. — Caitlin Moran

We women, me and you. Tell me something real. Don't just say I'm grown and ought to know. I don't. I'm fifty and I don't know nothing. What about it? Do I stay with him? I want to, I think. I want ... well, I didn't always ... now I want. I want some fat in this life."
"Wake up. Fat or lean, you got just one. This is it."
"You don't know either, do you?"
"I know enough to know how to behave."
"Is that it? Is that all it is?"
"Is that all what is?"
"Oh shoot! Where the grown people? Is it us?"
"Oh, Mama." Alice Manfred blurted it out and then covered her mouth.
Violet had the same thought: Mama. Mama? Is this where you got to and couldn't do it no more? The place of shade without trees where you know you are not and never again will be loved by anybody who can choose to do it? Where everything is over but the talking?
- Violet Trace and Alice Manfred — Toni Morrison

Women occupied many of the cubicles; they answered phones and sat in front of typewriters, but they also made hieroglyphic marks on transparent slides and conferred with my father and other men in the office on the stacks of documents that littered their desks. That so many of them were African American, many of them my grandmother's age, struck me as simply a part of the natural order of things: growing up in Hampton, the face of science was brown like mine. — Margot Lee Shetterly

Growing up in the time of Title IX - it was passed when I was 10 - I got a front-row seat to so many great moments in women's sports. Of course I didn't know it at the time. — Jackie Joyner-Kersee

When I was growing up, all the women in my house were using needles. I've always had a fascination with the needle, the magic power of the needle. The needle is used to repair damage. It's a claim to forgiveness. It is never aggressive, it's not a pin. — Louise Bourgeois

It is so demanding to be born into a house full of women, where everyone loves you so overwhelmingly that they end up suffocating with their love; a house where you, as the only child, have to be more mature than all the adults around ...
But the problem is that they want me to become everything they themselves couldn't accomplish in life ...
As a result, I had to work my butt off to fulfill all their dreams at the same time. — Elif Shafak

There's still a lot of misogynist pop music out there, and I think that hearing something that's so explicitly feminist and so angry - when we're still growing up in a culture where girls and women are not supposed to be angry - is a real revelation for young women. — Kathleen Hanna

family structure that produces the best outcomes for children, on average, are two biological parents who remain married. Divorced parents produce the next-best outcomes. Whether the parents remarry or remain single while the children are growing up makes little difference. Never-married women produce the worst outcomes. All of these statements apply after controlling for the family's socioeconomic status.14 I know of no other set of important findings that are as broadly accepted by social scientists who follow the technical literature, liberal as well as conservative, and yet are so resolutely ignored by network news programs, editorial writers for the major newspapers, and politicians of both major political parties. In — Charles Murray

There was something fundamentally embarrassing about being a young woman ... [the] embarrassment of wanting to be more assured, more substantive, more whole, of moving to tap resources that simply weren't there. — Michelle Orange

Repudiating the vulnerability I felt had wrecked the lives of women around me, I modelled myself on my controlled father. I wanted his freedom and his focus. To him, a family was an aquarium: controlled, contained. To the women I knew, a family was everything. — Antonella Gambotto-Burke

In the '60s, when I was growing up, one of the great elements of American culture was the protest song. There were songs about the civil rights movement, the women's rights movement, the antiwar movement. It wasn't just Bob Dylan, it was everybody at the time. — George Clooney

When young girls are encouraged to explore what they find interesting, they grow up to be interesting women. — Amy Poehler

[The Pigeon had learned something about [women] from his eight sisters, and if over the years he had absorbed only this one thing, it would stand as vindication that a boy does not suffer needlessly from growing up in a house with eight sisters. That thing was that a woman's heart is not bought by the currency of a man's emotion for her. A woman's heart is won over by her own feelings for herself when he just happens to be around ... — Brigid Pasulka

The idea of not being a kid anymore terrifies me. I am an adult and I have been hurled out of the world of boys and girls into the fray of men and women, and expected to function as a grown-up when I never functioned very well as a kid. — Kelley York

Growing up in a cathedral precinct, what did I know of the absurdities of communism, of how brave man and women in bleak and remote penal colonies were reduced to thinking day by day of nothing else beyond their own survival? — Ian McEwan

I think she is growing up, and so begins to dream dreams, and have hopes and fears and fidgets, without knowing why or being able to explain them. — Louisa May Alcott

Women I admired growing up - Debra Winger, Diane Keaton, Meryl Streep - were all beautiful and thin, but not too thin. There are a lot of actresses who are unhealthy-skinny - much, much too skinny. You can't Pilates to that. — Zooey Deschanel

When I was growing up in Nigeria - and I shouldn't say Nigeria, because that's too general, but in Afikpo, the Igbo part of the country where I'm from - there were always rites of passage for young men. Men were taught to be men in the ways in which we are not women; that's essentially what it is. — Chris Abani

It's great for my daughter to see Beyonce and Taylor Swift, women that are in charge of their own careers, writing songs from their own perspective and taking people to task. That's very different from when I was growing up - it was all like, 'Stand by your man.' — Corin Tucker

It was about half-past one - 'only half-past one,' Lucy complained - when she and Walter and Spandrell left the restaurant. 'Still young,' was Spandrell's comment on the night. 'Young and rather insipid. Nights are like human beings - never interesting till they're grown up. Round about midnight they reach puberty. At a little after one they come of age. Their prime is from two to half-past. An hour later they're growing rather desperate, like those man-eating women and waning middle-aged men who hop around twice as violently as they ever did in the hope of persuading themselves that they're not old. After four they're in full decay. And their death is horrible. Really horrible at sunrise, when the bottles are empty and people look like corpses and desire's exhausted itself into disgust. I have rather a weakness for the deathbed scenes, I must confess,' Spandrell added. 'I'm — Aldous Huxley

A little boy, he can play like he's a fireman or a cop
although fewer and fewer are pretending to be cops, thank God
or a deep-sea diver or a quarterback or a spaceman or a rock 'n roll star or a cowboy, or anything else glamorous and exciting (Author's note: What about a novelist, Jellybean?), and although chances are by the time he's in high school he'll get channeled into safer, duller ambitions, the great truth is, he can be any of those things, realize any of those fantasies, if he has the strength, nerve and sincere desire ... But little girls? Podner, you know that story as well as me. Give 'em doll babies, tea sets and toy stoves. And if they show a hankering for more bodacious playthings, call 'em tomboy, humor 'em for a few years and then slip 'em the bad news ... And the reality is, we got about as much chance of growing up to be cowgirls as Eskimos have got being vegetarians. — Tom Robbins

Even just pestering people with questions, and being nosey and pushy and getting her way, are things I think many young women grow up struggling with, to assert themselves. — Deborah Ann Woll

Something in one's heart takes fright, not at the thought of growing old, not at feeling one's youth used up in this mineral universe, but at the thought that far away the whole world is ageing. The trees have brought forth their fruit; the grain has ripened in the fields; the women have bloomed in their loveliness. But the season is advancing and one must make haste; but the season is advancing and still one cannot leave; but the season is advancing ... and other men will glean the harvest. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

The economic sense of possibility was so great when I was growing up that my parents had no question that I could do anything I wanted to do, even as a girl. I've always believed that the economics of a story intersects with the women's story - that stuff often happens at the time it happens because of the economy. — Gail Collins

The woman who grows up with the idea that she is simply to be an amiable animal, to be caressed and coaxed, is invariably a bitterly disappointed woman. A game of chess will cure such a conceit forever. The woman that knows the most, thinks the most, feels the most, is the most. Intellectual affection is the only lasting love. Love that has a game of chess in it can checkmate any man and solve the problem of life. — Charles Dickens

I hope our granddaughters and grandsons grow up knowing that they are not and have never been third-party observers of the priesthood. The blessings of the priesthood, which 'are available to men and women alike', are woven in and through and around their lives. Each of them is blessed by sacred ordinances, and each of them can enjoy the blessings of spiritual gifts by virtue of the priesthood. — Julie B. Beck

Beautiful surroundings, the society of learned men, the charm of noble women, the graces of art, could not make up for the loss of those light-hearted mornings of the desert, for that wind that made one a boy again. He had noticed that this peculiar quality in the air of new countries vanished after they were tamed by man and made to bear harvests. Parts of Texas and Kansas that he had first known as open range had since been made into rich farming districts, and the air had quite lost that lightness, that dry, aromatic odour. The moisture of plowed land, the heaviness of labour and growth and grain-bearing, utterly destroyed it; one could breathe that only on the bright edges of the world, on the great grass plains or the sage-brush desert. — Willa Cather

Well, you know what grown-ups are,' said Dinah. 'They don't think the same way as we do. I expect when we grow up, we shall think like them - but let's hope we remember what it was like to think in the way children do, and understand the boys and the girls that are growing up when we're men and women. — Enid Blyton

When I was growing up, I always saw Karen Millen as a resource for women who were a bit older. — Sophie Turner

Growing up with the childhood that I had, I learned to never let a man make me feel helpless, and it also embedded a deep need in me to always stick up for women. — Christina Aguilera

When growing up, I saw segregation. I saw racial discrimination. I saw those signs that said white men, colored men. White women, colored women. White waiting. And I didn't like it. — John Lewis

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.

It sounds so negative of me to say, but I don't feel like there were many coming-of-age films when I was growing up. I think that when I was a teenager, I felt really misrepresented in the teenage roles that I was watching onscreen. Especially in women. — Bel Powley

It was a real honor for me to get to be the first woman astronaut. I think it's really important that young girls that are growing up today can see that women can be astronauts too. There have actually been a lot of women, who are astronauts, that that's a career that's open to them. — Sally Ride

I didn't see a lot of women who looked like me on TV when I was growing up. — Kelly McCreary

My mom actually didn't let me read any women's magazines growing up. She also didn't let me see Pretty Woman. She thought that I was going to want to be a hooker. So, instead, I just got cast in Scary Movie. — Anna Faris

When I was growing up in Virginia, the Civil War was presented to me as glorious with dramatic courage and military honor. Later, I realized how death was central to the reality. It was at the core of women's lives. It's what they talked about most. — Drew Gilpin Faust

I lay in that tub on the seventeenth floor of this hotel for-women-only, high up over the jazz and push of New York, for near unto an hour, and I felt myself growing pure again. I don't believe in baptism or the waters of Jordan or anything like that, but I guess I feel about a hot bath the way those religious people feel about holy water. — Sylvia Plath

Growing up, I was not told that there were women's areas of preoccupation or male ones. — Rachel Kushner

I was very close with my mother growing up. I have four older sisters who were an important part of my life. And I've been very close to all the women I've dated. I feel most comfortable around women. — Jamie Johnson

I think everybody's always attracted to both sexes. I mean, I think that women are very attractive. I've kissed girls, but everybody experiments. It's part of growing up. — Monica Keena

At other times, at the edge of a wood, especially at dusk, the trees themselves would assume strange shapes: sometimes they were arms rising heavenwards, , or else the trunk would twist and turn like a body being bent by the wind. At night, when I woke up and the moon and the stars were out, I would see in the sky things that filled me simultaneously with dread and longing. I remember that once, one Christmas Eve, I saw a great naked women, standing erect, with rolling eyes; she must have been a hundred feet high, but along she drifted, growing ever longer and ever thinner, and finally fell apart, each limb remaining separate, with the head floating away first as the rest of her body continued to waver — Gustave Flaubert

I've an enormous respect for my mother who at the age of 39 raised three children, and I grew up with my grandmother in the household. And so it was a really strong household of women - my poor brother! It was great growing up with so many generations of women. — Cate Blanchett

For girls growing up, sometimes I think they get the wrong idea for what women should look like. — Lily James

The older dictators fell because they could never supply their subjects with enough bread, enough circuses, enough miracles, and mysteries. Under a scientific dictatorship, education will really work' with the result that most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution. There seems to be no good reason why a thoroughly scientific dictatorship should ever be overthrown. — Aldous Huxley

There is one unmistakable lesson in American history: A community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Growing up seems easier for men, maybe because their rites of passage are clearer. They perform acts of bravery on the battlefield or show they're men through physical labor or by making money. For women, it's more confusing. We have no rites of passage. Do we become women when a man first makes love to us? If so, why do we refer to it as a loss of virginity? Doesn't the word 'loss' imply that we are better off before? I abhor the idea that we become women only through the physical act of a man. No, I think we become women when we learn what is important in our lives, when we learn to give and to take with a loving heart. — Suzanne Elizabeth Phillips

Men grow up expecting to be the hero of their own story. Women grow up expecting to be the supporting actress in somebody else's. As a kid growing up with books and films and stories instead of friends, that was always the narrative injustice that upset me more than anything else. I felt it sometimes like a sharp pain under the ribcage, the kind of chest pain that lasts for minutes and hours and might be nothing at all or might mean you're slowly dying of something mundane and awful. It's a feeling that hit when I understood how few girls got to go on adventures. I started reading science fiction and fantasy long before Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, before mainstream female leads very occasionally got more at the end of the story than together with the protagonist. Sure, there were tomboys and bad girls, but they were freaks and were usually killed off or married off quickly. Lady hobbits didn't bring the ring to Mordor. They stayed at home in the shire. — Laurie Penny

We were still at the age when girls are years older than guy, and the guys grow up by doing their best when the girls need them to. — Tana French

When I was growing up, you didn't know there was a women's national team. Now girls grow up dreaming of playing for Canada. — Christine Sinclair

To see cartoon-me positioned (alphabetically) amongst so many of my women heroes and role models ... well, I just broke down and cried. Happy tears. I surely hope that this one-of-a-kind collection of radical American women reaches the hands of all children who want to grow up and become amazing women. — Kate Bornstein

Did you never wonder why the old books are so full of dragons chasing after maidens? The serpents think the girls are orphans, and long to get them away in a lair so that they may grow up strong and tall. — Catherynne M Valente

I think it's important for little girls growing up, and young women, to have one in every walk of life. So from that point of view, I'm proud to be a role model! — Sally Ride

Don't you wanna grow up to be just like me, I slap women and eat mushrooms then OD. — Eminem

I did an internship with Dove when they were doing the 'real beauty' campaign, and I was really inspired by that. Growing up in L.A., being a young woman, and seeing how the media tells young women to be everything you're not, I kind of wrote about that experience. — Katherine Schwarzenegger

I was banished from that world forever, I knew. I couldn't go back now. One day soon I would go away from here entirely; I would leave this house, perhaps never to return.
I hugged myself, comforting my fear. Very well then, I thought, I will be my own house. I will build myself a house out of my own flesh and bones where my frightened child-self can find shelter. After all, isn't that one of the things that women do? We are houses for our children, shielding them from harm within the stronghold of our bodies, until they are strong enough to breathe and walk alone. So surely I must be able to give myself shelter now. — Patrice Kindl

There are generations of women who left the workforce to be moms, and their kids grow up, and they think, "Well, what now?" — Kathryn Hahn

I have always championed the concept of administrators of color. My mother worked in advertising, and growing up, I saw my mother's community of women working behind the scenes. I had the opportunity from a young age to know that I could do this work. — Lisa Lucas

When I was growing up, we didn't have this super-skinny, flawless image to compete with. I find it unfortunate that young women may look at those images and think that is the ideal of beauty. It can cause a lot of problems and self-esteem issues if we don't remind girls that being healthy and exactly who you are is the main thing. I'm grateful I didn't grow up with those images. — Kellee Stewart

I'm not opposed to aging - even though society is kinder on men than women when it comes to getting old. How can I look at aging as the enemy? It happens whether I like it or not and no one is set apart from growing old; it comes to us all. Youth passes from everyone, so why deny it? I'm proud of my age. I'm proud that I've survived this planet for as long as I have, and should I end up withered, wrinkled and with a lifetime of great wisdom, I'll trade the few years of youth for the sophistication of a great mind ... for however long it lasts. — Donna Lynn Hope

For my writing, and because I love talking to young women about life, I often asked them which would they rather have - a father in the house with them while growing up or a big butt? I tell you 86 percent of the time, girls say a big butt because it gets them further. — Jill Scott

I always prayed the same way at night: "Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. Please bless my mother, father, sister, everyone in the word, and me. And please make my father quit drinking."
As a child growing up in a family battling alcoholism, this is what I know: Something bad is coming; it always does. I can't ask for help; I'm too ashamed. I can't talk about our secrets; no one understands. I can't trust anyone; they always leave.
Questions bounced off my self-constructed wall of values
a barricade I'd made from the fears I'd pushed into my darkness.
How could Ryan, a professional baseball player, really resist all those women? How could I really trust Jerry, my childhood friend? I'd barely awakened to sex and already boys were the seventh wonder of the world. Did anyone really trust another person? I needed proof. That proof hadn't revealed itself ... yet. — Pamela Taeuffer

Life is brief, young maiden, fall in love; before the crimson bloom fades from your lips, before the tides of passion cool within your hips, for those of you who know no tomorrow. (Gondola no Uta) — Kouhei Kadono

My gender has never been an issue or a limitation. I was fortunate enough to be surrounded by strong women growing up, and with them as my role models, I was never limited by the traditional roles women find themselves in. — Brenda Brathwaite

It was the world of Southern, rural, black growing up, of folks sitting on porches day and night, of folks calling your mama, 'cause you walked by and didn't speak, and of the switch waiting when you got home so that you could be taught some manners. It was a world of single black older women schoolteachers, dedicated, tough; they had taught your mama, her sisters, and her friends. They knew your people in ways that you never would and shared their insight, keeping us in touch with generations. It was a world where we had a history. — Bell Hooks

When I got my start, I kind of got my big break with The Princess Diaries and during the press rounds for that everyone asked me: "Did you always want to be a princess growing up?" And the truth was, no I wanted to be Catwoman. And I think a lot of women feel that way. And the fact that I am actually her is such a dream come true. It's such a pinch me moment. And the fact that I am Catwoman in Chris Nolan's Gotham to Christian Bale's Batman is unbelievably cool. — Anne Hathaway

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

In the Latina/o culture, blessing is a big deal. Growing up, I was brought up to see the blessings that surrounded me and my family. As a child, after I'd said my prayers, my mom would send me to bed with a blessing for a good night's rest. Whenever I would leave my abuelita's (grandmother's) house, she would tell me, "Dios te bendiga, mijito" ("God bless you, my little one"). In my family and in many Latina/o households, the women are the vessels of God's blessing, and thus bestowers and distributors of this blessing to their families. To this day, even though I am grown and have two children of my own, whenever I travel somewhere distant or am undertaking a major project, my mother will sit me down, lay hands on me, and say a prayer of blessing. — Francisco J. Garcia Jr.

When I was growing up we didn't have a massive house and there were five women running around, so my dad and I had to stick together! — Louis Tomlinson

I never felt I was attractive to women. I felt I was attractive to men when I was growing up. And even now, if a woman fancies me, I find that a bit alienating. — Russell Tovey

I have written this book to encourage women to dream big, forge a path through the obstacles, and achieve their full potential. I am hoping that each woman will set her own goals and reach for them with gusto. And I am hoping that each man will do his part to support women in the workplace and in the home, also with gusto. As we start using the talents of the entire population, our institutions will be more productive, our homes will be happier, and the children growing up in those homes will no longer be held back by narrow stereotypes. — Sheryl Sandberg

A dragon looks like a girl when it is young. — Catherynne M Valente

A self-made man - not of woman born but alchemized, through sheer force of will, by the man himself. This is what I want to be. I want to be a self-made woman. I want to conjure myself out of every sparkling, fast moving thing I can see. I want to be the creator of myself. I'm going to begat myself — Caitlin Moran

Israel had always thought that growing up was simply something that happened to you: you grew taller, more dextrous, you acquired language, learned to feed yourself, developed intellectually, went to school, got a mortgage, had children, got fatter and tired and full of regrets, and that was it, you were grown up, you were an adult. There was more to it than that though, apparently - and it was something that women knew, and men did not. — Ian Sansom

Young women dream of romance and passion as men dream of conquest because those dreams are necessary goads to leaving home and growing up. — Erica Jong

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

My mother told me two things constantly. One was to be a lady and the other was to be independent, and the law was something most unusual for those times because for most girls growing up in the '40s, the most important degree was not your B.A. but your M.R.S. — Ruth Bader Ginsburg

This Is Me": "For the record, I am not gay and all my sexual experiences have been straight. I'm attracted to women, I love children and aspire to have a family one day ... I know what it's like to grow up and be told what your sexuality is, then realising that it's not the full reality. I was accused of being gay before I knew who I was. — Ian Thorpe

I believe in a world of justice and human rights for all. A world where girls can grow up free of fear of abuse. A world where women are treated with the respect and dignity that is their right. A world where poverty is not acceptable. My dear young friends, you can make this your world. — Ban Ki-moon

Like many liberal men in the age of feminism, he believed women should have equal access to jobs and be given equal pay, but when it came to matters of home and heart he still believed caregiving was the female role. Like many men, he wanted a woman to be 'just like his mama' so that he did not have to do the work of growing up. — Bell Hooks

Growing up with Jennifer Lopez and Salma Hayek - people who were always trying to do something else - I wanted to follow in their footsteps. They gave people a different perspective of how women were supposed to look like and be. — Paula Garces

When I was growing up, there were very few women athletes. I remember watching Olga Corbett, but Peggy Fleming and Janet Lynn were my role models. I never dreamt that I could be at that level. I remember thinking they seemed so elegant and regal and powerful and feminine. — Dorothy Hamill

should do this, you should do that. The list is endless: education, socializing, hobbies. Growing up we bounce from should to should, building up a good stock of interests. But then we get married and, at least for women, all those interests are supposed to collapse to nothing when you become a mother? Yours certainly won't, so why should I have to make that choice? — Laura Matson Hahn

Someday Rufus would own the plantation. Someday, he would be the slaveholder, responsible in his own right for what happened to the people who lived in those half-hidden cabins. The boy was literally growing up as I watched - growing up because I watched and because I helped to keep him safe. I was the worst possible guardian for him - a black to watch over him in a society that considered blacks subhuman, a woman to watch over him in a society that considered women perennial children. I would have all I could do to look after myself. But I would help him as best I could. And I would try to keep friendship with him, maybe plant a few ideas in his mind that would help both me and the people who would be his slaves in the years to come. — Octavia E. Butler

I went through what I imagine thousands of other women have felt. I told myself to stay calm, to be strong, and that I had no reason to think I wouldn't live to see my children grow up and to meet my grandchildren. — Angelina Jolie

I grew up in Long Island City. When I was growing up, my parents owned a women's clothing store in Queens. It was for older women. I got my bras there, until I realized I didn't want those huge, taupe bras. Everything was beige, with massive amounts of hooks. — Jessica Valenti