Wild Women Talk Back - Autumn Stephens

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thank God I am endowed with such qualities that if I were turned out of the Realm in my petticoat I were able to live in any place in Christendom.

      —Elizabeth I, Queen of England

      I will not be vanquished.

      —Rose Kennedy, matriarch

      Vinegar he poured on me all his life; I am well marinated; how can I be honey now?

      —Tillie Olsen, political activist/award-winning short story writer

      I belong to that group of people who move the piano by themselves.

      —Eleanor Robson Belmont, nurse/playwright/founder of Metropolitan Opera Guild

      Did you hear what I said? It was very profound.

      —(Dr.) Laura Schlessinger, sharp-tongued radio shrink

      In southern Spain, they made me eat a bull's testicles. They were really garlicky, which I don't like. I prefer to take a bull by the horns . . .

      —Padma Lakshmi, actress

      There's a very good reason why women live longer than men. They deserve it.

      —Estelle Ramey, endocrinologist

      So long has the myth of feminine inferiority prevailed that women themselves find it hard to believe that their own sex was once and for a very long time the superior and dominant sex.

      —Elizabeth Gould Davis, liberated librarian

      It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere.

      —Agnes Repplier, essayist

      When I fight, there is usually a funeral and it isn't mine.

      —Henrietta Green, fearless financier of the nineteenth century

      You show people what you're willing to fight for when you fight your friends.

      —Hillary Clinton, lawyer, politician, and veteran presidential spouse

      The question is not whether we will die, but how we will live.

      —Joan Borysenko, mind-body healer

      A woman who is willing to be herself and pursue her own potential runs not so much the risk of loneliness as the challenge of exposure to more interesting men— and people in general.

      —Lorraine Hansberry, Raisin in the Sun playwright

      My master had power and law on his side; I had a determined will. There is might in each.

      —Harriet Ann Jacobs, author of the autobiographical Incidents in the Life of a Slave Woman

      Women are natural guerrillas. Scheming, we nestle into the enemy's bed, avoiding open warfare, watching the options, playing the odds.

      —Sally Kempton, journalist turned yoga guru

      We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat. They do not exist.

      —Victoria, the velvet-gloved Queen of England

      No one really listens to anyone else, and if you try it for a while you'll see why.

      —Mignon McLaughlin, aphorist

      Remember, if you write anything nasty about me, I'll come round and blow up your toilet.

      —Courtney Love, macho musician

      Passivity and quietism are invitations to war.

      —Dorothy Thompson, the first American journalist banned from Nazi Germany

      You have to be taught to be second class; you're not born that way.

      —Lena Horne, entertainer/civil rights activist

      It is, indeed, a trial to maintain the virtue of humility when one can't help being right.

      —Judith Martin, aka the venerable Miss Manners

      It requires philosophy and heroism to rise above the opinion of the wise men of all nations and races.

      —Elizabeth Cady Stanton, suffragist leader

      The first and worst of all frauds is to cheat one's self. All sin is easy after that.

      —Pearl Bailey, entertainer of Hello Dolly fame

      I came out of the womb a diva. All it means is you know your worth as a woman.

      —Cindi Lauper, proud pop singer

      Why is there so much pressure to spend Independence Day with other people?

      —Betsy Salkind, comedienne

      Get your cut throat off my knife.

      —Diane di Prima, beat bard

      I am my own Universe, I my own Professor.

      —Sylvia Ashton-Warner, New Zealand writer

      I'm so popular it's scary sometimes. I suppose I'm just everybody's type.

      —Catherine Deneuve, femme fatale of many a French film

      Some feminists feel that a woman should never be wrong. We have a right to be wrong.

      —Alice Childress, actress/playwright/director

      Prudent people are very happy; ‘tis an exceeding fine thing, that's certain, but I was born without it, and shall retain to my day of Death the Humour of saying what I think.

      —Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, world traveler and letter writer of the eighteenth century

      In spite of honest efforts to annihilate my I-ity, or merge it in what the world doubtless considers my better half, I still find myself a self-subsisting and alas! self-seeking me.

      —Jane Welsh Carlyle, one-half of very literary nineteenth-century marriage

      Do what you are afraid to do.

      —Mary Emerson, the righteous aunt of Ralph Waldo

      Nothing is so pleasant as to display your worldly wisdom in epigram and dissertation, but it is a trifle tedious to hear another person display theirs.

      —Ouida, luxury-loving novelist of nineteenth-century England

      If you send up a weather vane or put your thumb up in the air every time you want to do something different, to find out what people are going to think about it, you're going to limit yourself. That's a very strange way to live.

      —Jessye Norman, opera singer

      By whom?

      —Dorothy Parker, toast of the Algonquin Table, on being told that she was “outspoken”

      A real diva would never scream at her guests to get out. She would ask her assistants to make the guests get out. This is one of the rules of divadom.

      —Donatella Versace, an expert in the ways of her kind

      The world is wide, and I would not waste my life in friction when it could be turned into momentum.

      —Frances Willard, nineteenth-century social reformer, on learning to ride a bicycle

      CHAPTER TWO

      Love

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