Women and Love
No woman was happier in her choice -- no woman -- And after about two months of uninterrupted intercourse, there is still more and more cause for thankfulness; -- and more and more affection on his side -- He loves me better every day, he says … My health improves still, too.Elizabeth Barrett Browning - Letter to Mr H S Boyd
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You have opened up the prison gates of my womanhood. And all the passion that was unsatisfied in me for so many years, leaped into a wild reckless storm boundless as the sea.
Emma Goldman - Letter to Ben Reitman
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One can find women who have never had one love affair,
but it is rare indeed to find any who have had only one.
La Rochefoucauld
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In her first passion woman loves her lover;
In all the others, all she loves is love.
Lord Byron - Don Juan
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Woman begins by resisting a man's advances
and ends by blocking his retreat.
Oscar Wilde
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A woman in love will do almost anything for a
man, except give up the desire to improve him.
Nathaniel Branden
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A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration
to love, from love to matrimony, in a moment.
Jane Austen
Y
A woman unsatisfied must have luxuries. But a woman
who loves a man would sleep on a board.
D H Lawrence
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For this is one of the miracles of love; it gives-to both, but perhaps especially to the woman -- a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.
C S Lewis - A Grief Observed
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On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in her strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself -- on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger. In the meantime, love represents in its most touching form the curse that lies heavily upon woman confined in the feminine universe, woman mutilated, insufficient unto herself. The innumerable martyrs to love bear witness against the injustice of a fate that offers a sterile hell as ultimate salvation.
Simone de Beauvoir - The Second Sex
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Alas! the love of women! it is known
To be a lovely and a fearful thing!
Lord Byron - Don Juan
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A frog under you,
knees drawn up
ready to leap out of time,
a dog beside you,
snuffing at you, seeking
scent of you, an idea unformulated,
I give up on
trying to answer my question,
Do I love you enough?
It's enough to be so much here. And
certainly when I catch
your mind in the
act of plucking
truth from the dark surrounding nowhere
as a swallow skims a
gnat from the
deep sky,
I don't stop to ask myself
Do I love him? but
laugh for joy.
Denise Levertov - The Wife
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Women who sway men are like the sea, full of moods, changeful, hard to fathom, never twice the same and often quite as treacherous.
Minna Antrim -- Naked Truths and Veiled Illusions
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Heav'n has no rage like love to hatred turn'd,
Nor hell a fury like a woman scorn'd.
William Congreve
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I am an ordinary 27-year-old girl and I, too, am filled with love for all mankind, but for all I know I shall always continue to be in search of my one man. And I wonder to what extent that is a handicap, a woman's handicap. Whether it is an ancient tradition from which she must liberate herself, or whether it is so much part of her very essence that she would be doing violence to herself if she bestowed her love on all mankind instead of one single man. (I don't yet see how the two can be combined.) Perhaps that's why there are so few famous women scientists and artists: a woman always looks for the one man on whom she can bestow all her wisdom, warmth, love and creative powers. She longs for a man, not mankind.
Etty Hillesum - A Diary, 1941-43
