Category: womanhood
Quotes of Category: womanhood
If you grow up the type of woman men want to look at,
You can let them look at you.
But do not mistake eyes for hands,
Or windows for mirrors.
Let them see what a woman looks like.
They may not have ever seen one before.
If you grow up the type of woman men want to touch,
You can let them touch you.
Sometimes it is not you they are reaching for.
Sometimes it is a bottle, a door, a sandwich, a Pulitzer, another woman –
But their hands found you first.
Do not mistake yourself for a guardian, or a muse, or a promise, or a victim or a snack.
You are a woman –
Skin and bones, veins and nerves, hair and sweat
You are not made of metaphors,
Not apologies, not excuses.
If you grow up the type of woman men want to hold,
You can let them hold you.
All day they practice keeping their bodies upright.
Even after all this evolving it still feels unnatural,
Still strains the muscles, holds firm the arms and spine.
Only some men will want to learn what it feels like to curl themselves into a question mark around you,
Admit they don't have the answers they thought they would by now.
Some men will want to hold you like the answer.
You are not the answer.
You are not the problem.
You are not the poem, or the punchline, or the riddle, or the joke.
Woman, if you grow up the type of woman men want to love,
You can let them love you.
Being loved is not the same thing as loving.
When you fall in love,
It is discovering the ocean after years of puddle jumping.
It is realising you have hands.
It is reaching for the tightrope after the crowds have all gone home.
Do not spend time wondering if you are the type of woman men will hurt.
If he leaves you with a car alarm heart.
You learn to sing along.
It is hard to stop loving the ocean,
Even after it's left you gasping, salty.
So forgive yourself for the decisions you've made,
The ones you still call mistakes when you tuck them in at night,
And know this.
Know you are the type of woman who is searching for a place to call yours.
Let the statues crumble.
You have always been the place womenwomen-s-strengthwomanhoodwomen-s-inspirationalThe best I can say, it's like this. A man's in his skin, see, like a nut in its shell ... It's hard and strong, that shell, and it's all full of him. Full of grand man-meat, man-self. And that's all. That's all there is.A woman's a different thing entirely. Who knows where a woman begins and ends? Listen mistress, I have roots, I have roots deeper than this island. Deeper than the sea, older than the raising of the lands. I go back into the dark ... I go back into the dark! Before the moon I am, what a woman is, a woman of power, a woman's power, deeper than the roots of trees, deeper than the roots of islands, older than the Making, older than the moon. Who dares ask questions of the dark? Who'll ask the dark its name? book-quotewomenmenmanhoodA naked woman was amazing.He'd never seen it this way, in full light, without half-off clothes or a beach blanket across the lap or sex in a dark car. This was her whole body naked in light, standing and lying and front and back and open and showing and then different when she walked, surer than he was, unclunky and smooth-moving, with parts that didn't bounce. She knew how to be naked. She looked like she'd been raised naked in this room, a skinny girl when she was a girl, probably, and skinny in a certain way, with a little bulgy belly and ashamed of her feet, but grown out of shyness and wrong proportions now, and being married of course, used to being seen, and she didn't have curves and swerves but was good looking naked and stuck to him when they fucked like a thing fighting for light, a great wet papery moth. book-quotewomanwomanhoodIt was getting late in the year, the sky had been low and overcast for days, and I was drinking tea in a glassy room with a woman without children, a gate through which no one had entered the world. She was turning the pages of an expensive book on a coffee table, even though we were drinking tea, a book of colorful paintings- a landscape, a portrait, a still life, a field, a face, a pear and a knife, all turning on the table. Men had entered there but no girl or boy had come out, I was thinking oddly as she stopped at a page of clouds aloft in a pale sky, tinged with red and gold. This one is my favorite, she said, even though it was only a detail, a corner of a larger painting which she had never seen. Nor did she want to see the countryside below or the portrayal of some myth in order for the billowing clouds to seem complete. This was enough, this fraction of the whole, just as the leafy scene in the windows was enough now that the light was growing dim, as was she enough, perfectly by herself somewhere in the enormous mural of the world. book-quotefeminismwomenwoman
