Marilyn French Quotes

I have opened all the doors in my head. I have opened all the pores in my body. But only the tide rolls in.

Men’s need to dominate women may be based in their own sense of marginality or emptiness; we do not know its root, and men are making no effort to discover it.

Anyone determined to find another person or group inferior can always find whole lists of grounds that demonstrate inferiority because we are all inferior to the ideals of humanness we have erected.

Nothing is ever simple. What do you do when you discover you like parts of the role you’re trying to escape?

Not many men have both good fortune and good sense.

Well, love is insanity. The ancient Greeks knew that. It is the taking over of a rational and lucid mind by delusion and self-destruction. You lose yourself, you have no power over yourself, you can’t even think straight.

Men stumble over pebbles, never over mountains.

To nourish children and raise them against odds is in any time, any place, more valuable than to fix bolts in cars or design nuclear weapons.

To nourish children and raise them against odds is in any time, any place, is more valuable than to fix bolts in cars or design nuclear weapons.

Men seem unable to feel equal to women: they must be superior or they are inferior

All the women I know feel a little like outlaws.

‘I hate discussions of feminism that end up with who does the dishes,’ she said. So do I. But at the end, there are always the damned dishes.

It’s strange how men feel they have the right to criticize a woman’s appearance to her face.

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape… it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.

Men seem unable to feel equal to women: they must be superior or they are inferior.

My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine – everybody drinks water.

Fear is a question. What are you afraid of and why? Our fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if we explore them.

Control over a woman is the only form of dominance most men possess, for most men are merely subjects of more powerful men.

All men are rapists and that’s all they are

Women are afraid in a world in which almost half the population bears the guise of the predator, in which no factor – age, dress, or color – distinguishes a man who will harm a woman from one who will not.

The same men who are blind and deaf to feminism are acutely sensitive to what threatens their dominance and privilege.

All patriarchists exalt the home and family as sacred, demanding it remain inviolate from prying eyes. Men want privacy for their violations of women… All women learn in childhood that women as a sex are men’s prey.

The view of life as a struggle for power generates a language in which life has no significance and only power matters.

loneliness is not a longing for company, it is a longing for kind. And kind means people who can see you who you are, and that means they have enough intelligence and sensitivity and patience to do that.

Oh, God, why don’t I remember that a little chaos is good for the soul?

Habit is a good thing for the human race. … You have to spend so much energy just getting through the day when you have no habits that you don’t have any left for productive labor.