Marilyn French Quotes (20 Quotes)

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

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.

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

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

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.

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

Not many men have both good fortune and good sense.

'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.

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.

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

Marriage accustomed one to the good things, so one came to take them for granted, but magnified the bad things, so they came to feel as painful as a grain in one's eye. An open window, a forgotten quart of milk, a TV set left blaring, socks on the bathroom floor could become occasions for incredible rage. And something happened sexually in marriage --the swearing to forsake all others, despite its slight observance, had a profound effect. Some people felt trapped by it, impelled to assert what they called freedom. Some accepted it like a rein, and in the effort to avoid pain in the form of hopeless desire, cut off occasions of desire, avoided having long talks at parties with attractive members of the opposite sex. In time, all feeling for the opposite sex was cut off, and intercourse limited to the barest politesses. But something happened to you when you did that, a kind of death seeped up from the genitals to the rest of the body, till it showed in the eyes, the gestures, in a certain lifelessness.

All men are rapists and that's all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws, and their codes.

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.

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

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.

Everywhere in the world, men place all or most of the burden of raising children and maintaining the home on women, but pretend that this burden is not work they do not reward it as work or count it as work in global accounting, in either developing

When they kept you out it was because you were black; when they let you in, it is because you are black. That's progress?

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.

Whatever they may be in public life, whatever their relations with men, in their relations with women, all men are rapists and that's all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws, their codes.