Quotes by Nancy Friday

“The debt of gratitude we owe our mother and father goes forward, not backward. What we owe our parents is the bill presented to us by our children.”

“Spontaneous and honest love admits errors, hesitations, and human failings; it can be tested and repaired. Idealized love ties us because we already intuit that it is unreal and are afraid to face this truth.”

“Blaming mother is just a negative way of clinging to her still.”

“To say something nice about yourself, this is the hardest thing in the world for people to do. Theyd rather take their clothes off.”

“Inside every adult male is a denied little boy”

“Because society would rather we always wore a pretty face, women have been trained to cut off anger.”

“If a few lustful and erotic reveries make the housework go by as if in a dream, why not?”

“It was the promise of men, that around each corner there was yet another man, more wonderful than the last, that sustained me. You see, I had men confused with life. . . . You cant get what I wanted from a man, not in this life.”

Do women dress for men or women? I’ve always wondered why that eternally provocative question is put in terms of approval - as if the heart of the matter, the answer, were indeed a question of approval by either sex. But the question is never satisfactorily answered because it is incorrectly posed. It’s disapproval, the fear of it, that motivates most women, and with disapproval it doesn’t matter where it comes from.

No man can be really free in bed with a woman who is not.

To say something nice about themselves this is the hardest thing in the world for people to do.

If women really want equality, we have to wipe the slate clean. It no longer matters in the largest sense what men did to us for the last 200 or 300 years.

I think the thing I miss most in our age is our manners. It sounds so old-fashioned in a way. But even bad people had good manners in the old days, and manners hold a community together, and manners hold a family together; in a way, they hold the world together.

Because society would rather we always wore a pretty face, women have been trained to cut off anger.