Nancy Friday

“I'm sure it's why I'm such an odd duck in my feminist generation, because I've always been equally fair to men.”

“To say something nice about yourself, this is the hardest thing in the world for people to do. They'd 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 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 biologically we are attracted to more than one person, but given society and our needs, monogamy works better.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“I like the company of men. I've never been welcome in those groups, but then I would no more go to a consciousness-raising group and talk about my intimate life with my husband than fly to the moon. I never understood all that.”

“When I stopped seeing my mother through the eyes of a child, I saw the woman who helped me give birth to myself.”

“Fantasy isn't something you run out of.”

“Women's behavior in handling beauty, even before feminism, was to deny they had any. Don't hate me because I'm beautiful.”

“The older I get the more of my mother I see in myself.”

“Dreams are the expression of the unconscious while we are asleep.”