14 Empowering Quotes For Women By Women

Books are simple things in design. They are words written on paper that are bound together with a cover. As any book lover knows, there is nothing simple about a book. Open a book, and you unleash magic. The words found inside books can challenge your thinking, help you discover faraway places, reflect on your own experiences or emotions, and leave you wanting more. The best books speak to a part of our soul that touches us forever. The writers phrase their words a certain way that the saying sticks with us. This is a compilation of quotes by female authors which have touched women. The quotes address womanhood directly while others are about humanity and being female in the world.

Timeless_Books

By Lin Kristensen from New Jersey, USA (Timeless Books) via Wikimedia Commons

 

1. Jane Austen

 

“I hate to hear you talk about all women as if they were fine ladies instead of rational creatures. None of us want to be in calm waters all our lives.”

 

2. Maya Angelou

 

“I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it.”

 

3. Virginia Woolf

 

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”

 

4. Germaine Greer

 

“Yet if a woman never lets herself go, how will she ever know how far she might have got? If she never takes off her high-heeled shoes, how will she ?ever know how far she could walk, or how fast she could run?”

 

5. Gloria Steinem

 

“We have become the men who we wanted to marry.”

 

6. Cheryl Strayed

 

“The best thing you can possibly do with your life is to tackle the motherfucking shit out of it.”

7. Inga Muscio

 

“Every time you look in the mirror and your heart races because you think, ‘I’m so fucking rad,’ that’s self protection. Protect yourself.”

 

8. Bell Hooks

 

“I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else’s whim or to someone else’s ignorance.”

 

9. Anna Quindlen

 

“After all those years as a woman hearing ‘not thin enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough, not this enough, not that enough,’ ?almost overnight I woke up one morning and thought I am enough.”

 

10. Staceyann Chin

 

“I come in too many flavors for one fucking spoon.”

 

11. Erica Jong

 

“The greatest feminists have also been the greatest lovers. I’m thinking not only of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley, but of Anais Nin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and of course Sappho. You cannot divide creative juices from human juices. And as long as juicy women are equated with bad women, we will err on the side of being bad.”

 

?12. Mary Shelley

 

“I do not wish women have power over men; but over themselves.”

13. Eleanor Roosevelt

 

“A woman is like a tea bag: you cannot tell how strong she is until you put her in hot water.”

 

14. Malala Yousafzai

 

“We realize the importance of our voice when we are silenced.”

 

h/t: Huffington Post and The Health Site.