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.

See All TOPICS Available:
See All AUTHORS Available:

Search by Topic:

  • topic cats
  • topic books
  • topic moon

Find quotations by TOPIC (coffee, love, dogs)
or search alphabetically below.

Search by Last Name:

  • Quotes by Zora Neale Hurston
  • Quotes by Louisa May Alcott
  • Quotes by Chingling Soong

Find quotations by the AUTHOR´S LAST NAME
or alphabetically below.

Search by Keyword:

  • keyword fishing
  • keyword twilight
  • keyword Australie

Eve Merriam

  • “You understand / That personally I feel / Indeed, I'd just as soon shake hands / Why, lots of them are just as / Why / As you and I.”

    • Eve Merriam,
    • "Restricted," Jewish Life ()

  • “Scratch a Jew and you'll find a Wailing Wall.”

    • Eve Merriam,
    • "The Wall," in Nathan and Marynn Ausubel, eds., A Treasury of Jewish Poetry ()

  • “Go sow your wild oats / And reap as you will; / I hoe in one furrow / And heap all my fill.”

    • Eve Merriam,
    • "Monogamania," The Double Bed, From the Feminine Side ()

  • “Sing a song of subways, / Never see the sun; / Four-and-twenty people / In a room for one.”

    • Eve Merriam,
    • "Sing a Song for Subways," The Inner City Mother Goose ()

  • “Isn't it strange / That however I change, / I still keep on being me?”

    • Eve Merriam,
    • "Me, Myself and I," Rainbow Writing ()

  • “When something is too beautiful or too terrible or even too funny for words, then it is time for poetry.”

    • Eve Merriam,
    • in The Horn Book Magazine ()

  • “Is it robin o'clock? / Is it five after wing? / Is it quarter to leaf? / Is it nearly time for spring?”

  • “I dream of giving birth to a child who will ask, 'Mother, what was war?'”

    • Eve Merriam,
    • "Fantasia," A Sky Full of Poems ()

  • “A cliché is / what we all say / when we're too lazy / to find another way.”

  • “... there is no gentling downward, / there is only the one way / climbing.”

    • Eve Merriam,
    • "Last Poems," in Ms. ()

  • “Mean-spirited, / I huddle, pinch, hoard, / envy others' health, / would steal from their well-stocked store.”

    • Eve Merriam,
    • "Last Poems," in Ms. ()

  • “If you are so inclined, a part-time lover is not hard to find. / To the slight impediment of marriage / no one pays much mind.”

    • Eve Merriam,
    • "The Deceiving Wife," The Double Bed ()

  • “but a boat is called a kayak. / ... / In a kayak / you sit anywhere you like / and always dip with / a double paddle / neither side is the head / either side is the head / since both pull with equal weight / and you grasp in the center: / kayak, a most peculiar word / that you can spell / from either end / and come out / even.”

    • Eve Merriam,
    • "The Eskimos Have No Word for Divorce," The Double Bed ()

  • “My good friend's gone who lived next door; / The new woman there is a yawning bore. / The only phrase she knows to say / Is where did you buy it or what did you pay. / She's not concerned with peace or war: / Her care is gloss to proof the floor. / Her house, her ways are all cliché / I grow to like her more each day.”

    • Eve Merriam,
    • "Reflection in a Picture Window," The Double Bed ()

  • “The marriage meat is cooked, it's baked overdone: / how long did you expect to go on having fun?”

    • Eve Merriam,
    • "Chorus of Baiters and Graters," The Double Bed ()

Eve Merriam, U.S. poet, writer

(1916 - 1992)

Full name: Eve Moskovitz Merriam.