Welcome to the web’s most comprehensive site of quotations by women. 43,939 quotations are searchable by topic, by author's name, or by keyword. Many of them appear in no other collection. And new ones are added continually.
Search by Topic:
Find quotations by TOPIC (coffee, love, dogs)
or search alphabetically below.
Search by Last Name:
Search by Keyword:
Molly Haskell
-
“[On swingers:] They have gone from Puritanism into promiscuity without passing through sensuality.”
-
“But one of the attributes of love, like art, is to bring harmony and order out of the chaos, to introduce meaning and affect where before there was none.”
-
“The big lie perpetrated on Western society is the idea of women's inferiority, a lie so deeply ingrained in our social behavior that merely to recognize it is to risk unraveling the entire fabric of civilization.”
-
“... the propaganda arm of the American Dream machine, Hollywood.”
-
“American eroticism has always been of a different provenance and complexion than the European variety, an enjoyment both furtive and bland that is closer to a blushing cartoon than a sensual celebration.”
-
“There are two cinemas: the films we have actually seen and the memories we have of them.”
-
“Madness is always fascinating, for it reveals the ungluing we all secretly fear: the mind taking off from the body, the possibility that the magnet that attaches us to a context in the world can lose its grip.”
-
“As so often happens in marriage, roles that had begun almost playfully, to give line and shape to our lives, had hardened like suits of armor and taken us prisoner.”
-
“Hospitals, like airports and supermarkets, only pretend to be open nights and weekends.”
-
“The thought that we are enduring the unendurable is one of the things that keep us going.”
-
“Being alone and liking it is, for a woman, an act of treachery, an infidelity far more threatening than adultery.”
-
“Movies both reflect and create social conditions, but their special charm is to offer fantasy clothes as virtual reality, a world where people consume without the tedium of labor. Characters float in a world where the bill never comes due ... and we wonder why we're a debtor nation!”
Molly Haskell, U.S. film critic, writer
(1939)