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

Singles

  • I love being single. It's almost like being rich.

  • A bachelor is a man who can take a nap on top of a bedspread.

  • ... no bachelor should invite guests to his home unless he has a full retinue of servants to care for their wants.

  • Being an old maid is like death by drowning, a really delightful sensation after you cease to struggle.

    • Edna Ferber,
    • in Robert E. Drennan, The Algonquin Wits ()
  • Somehow, a bachelor never quite gets over the idea that he is a thing of beauty and a boy forever!

  • Show me a woman with a subscription to a bridal magazine and I'll show you someone who doesn't even have a boyfriend.

  • A bachelor's children are always young: they're immortal children — always lisping, waddling, helpless, and with a chance of turning out good.

  • In the ages since Adam's marriage, it has been good for some men to be alone, and for some women also.

  • He travels fastest who travels alone, and that goes double for she.

  • Of all the benefits of spinsterhood, the greatest is carte blanche. Once a woman is called 'that crazy old maid' she can get away with anything.

  • ... there is a natural tribal hostility between the married and the unmarried. I cannot stand the shows so often quite instinctively put on by married people to insinuate that they are not only more fortunate but in some way more moral than you are.

  • Bachelors begin at thirty-six. Up till this age they are regarded as single men.

  • People always assume that bachelors are single by choice and spinsters because nobody asked them. It never enters their heads that poor bachelors might have worn the knees of their trousers out proposing to girls who rejected them or that a girl might deliberately stay unmarried ...

  • There is simply no dignified way for a woman to live alone. Oh, she can get along financially perhaps (though not nearly as well as a man), but emotionally she is never left in peace. Her friends, her family, her fellow workers never let her forget that her husbandlessness, her childlessness — her selfishness, in short — is a reproach to the American way of life.

  • A single woman with a narrow income must be a ridiculous, disagreeable old maid, the proper sport of boys and girls, but a single woman of fortune is always respectable, and may be as sensible and pleasant as anybody else.

  • Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor ...

    • Jane Austen,
    • 1816, in Sarah Chauncey Woolsey, ed., The Letters of Jane Austen ()
  • I'm single because I was born that way.

    • Mae West,
    • in Joseph Weintraub, ed., The Wit and Wisdom of Mae West ()
  • Marriage? I ain't got time for a husband or child. All my life I've looked after myself as if I was my own child.

    • Mae West,
    • in George Eells and Stanley Musgrove, Mae West ()
  • [Referring to a bridesmaid/bridal attendant:] Always a maiden, never a wife.

  • Unmarried but happy.

  • I don't much like to think that being a bachelor girl limits how you see the world. On the other hand, I know it certainly limits how the world sees you.

  • ... no matter how lonely you get or how many birth announcements you receive, the trick is not to get frightened. There's nothing wrong with being alone.

  • [When asked why she never married:] There was no need. I have three pets at home which answer the same purpose as a husband. I have a dog which growls every morning, a parrot which swears all the afternoon, and a cat that comes home late at night.

    • Marie Corelli,
    • in James Crichton-Browne, What the Doctor Thought ()
  • When my bed is empty, / Makes me feel awful mean and blue. / My springs are getting rusty, / Living single like I do.

    • Bessie Smith,
    • "Empty Bed Blues," in William Harmon, ed., The Oxford Book of American Light Verse ()
  • The civilization of cities is breeding a new race of monks who have none of the original religious drive towards chastity, but are just incapable of facing the responsibilities of marriage.

  • I think, therefore I'm single.

  • My soul has found no other soul / To which it does belong.

    • Anna H. Branch,
    • "The Watch-Tower of the Soul," The Heart of the Road ()
  • There are a lot of great things about not being married. But one of the worst things is no one believes that.

  • I wonder if living alone makes one more alive. No precious energy goes in disagreement or compromise. No need to augment others, there is just yourself, just truth — a morsel — and you.

  • Maybe staying single meant that you never had to grow up.

  • The genuine solitaries of life fear intimacy more than loneliness. The married are those who have taken the terrible risk of intimacy and, having taken it, know life without intimacy to be impossible.

  • By far and away the most common representation of the single woman in films is as the Shriveled-Up Spinster. She starts out shriveled and continues to shrivel throughout the movie, until she collapses into nothingness. As a symbol of society's contempt for nonconforming (unmarried, child-free) women, she is so widely accepted that she is the stereotype of choice for portraying women who live alone.

  • But I maintain that under other circumstances Miss Ormiston would not only have made a successful business woman, but a successful single woman as well. Why do we think no life complete without without a marriage?

  • In Mexico a bachelor is a man who can't play the guitar.

  • Whaddaya mean 'old maids,' ha? The term is 'unclaimed treasure,' buddy, 'unclaimed treasure!'

  • I've never been married, but I tell people I'm divorced so they won't think something's wrong with me.

  • I hate it at weddings when old relatives tell me, 'You'll be next, love.' I get my own back at funerals.

  • 'I hate weddings,' she says. 'They make me feel so unmarried. Actually, even brushing my teeth makes me feel unmarried.'

  • Single women making their way to individual destinies — who in the home circle understands them? If they try to share what they have found in their further reach, who wants it?

  • When people ask me why I don't get married, I tell them I can't mate in captivity.

    • Anonymous,
    • originally said by a stand-up comic named Shirley, according to Gloria Steinem, personal communication ()