Girlhood Quotes

• A husband is a plaster that cures all the ills of girlhood.

  Moliere

  Husband, Cures, Plasters

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• We love a girl for very different qualities than understanding. We love her for her beauty, her youth, her mirth, her confidingness, her character, with its faults, caprices and God knows what other inexpressible charms; but we do not love her understanding.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Girl, Character, Understanding

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• Womanhood is a whole different thing from girlhood. Girlhood is a gift...Womanhood is a choice.

  Tori Amos

  Choices, Growth, Different

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• She knew herself, how she had slowly, over years, become a cat, a wolf, a snake, anything but a girl. How she had wrung out her girlhood like death.

  Catherynne M. Valente

  Girl, Cat, Years

  Catherynne M. Valente (2011). “Deathless”, p.204, Macmillan

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• With fatal, fatal Love a girlhood goes.

  Louise Imogen Guiney

  Louise Imogen Guiney (1900). “The Martyrs' Idyl and Shorter Poems”

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• Girlhood ... is the intellectual phase of a woman's life, that time when, unencumbered by societal expectations or hormonal rages, one may pursue any curiosity from the mysteries of the yo-yo to the meaning of infinity. These two particular pursuits were where I left off in the fifth grade when I discovered a hair growing in the wrong place and all hell broke loose.

  Alice Kahn

  Hair, Two, Expectations

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• All the humiliating, tragicomic, heartbreaking things happened to me in my girlhood, and nothing makes me happier than to realize I cannot possibly relive my youth.

  Ilka Chase

  Heartbreaking, Youth, Realizing

  Ilka Chase (1945). “Past Imperfect”, Pocket Books of Canada

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• The thought that, insignificant as she was, she yet might do some good, made her very careful of her acts and words, and so anxious to keep head contented and face happy, that she forgot her clothes, and made others do the same. She did not know it, but that good old fashion of simplicity made the plain gowns pretty, and the grace of unconsciousness beautified their little wearer with the charm that makes girlhood sweetest to those who truly love and reverence it.

  Louisa May Alcott

  Fashion, Clothes, Simplicity

  Louisa May Alcott (2016). “An Old-Fashioned Girl: Top Novelist Focus”, p.32, 谷月社

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• The blushing beauties of a modest maid.

  John Dryden

  Maids, Blushing, Modest

  John Dryden, C. B., Esquire Charles BATHURST (1852). “Selections from the poetry of Dryden, including his plays and translations. [The editor's preface signed: C. B., i.e. Charles Bathurst.]”, p.191

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• Did she ever feel nostalgia for any of her girlhood dreams? But life was made up of a succession of dreams, some few to be realized, most to be set aside as time went on, one or two to persist for a lifetime. It was knowing when to abandon a dream, perhaps, that mattered and distinguished the successful people in life from the sad, embittered persons who never moved on from the first of life's great disappointments. Or from the airy dreamers who never really lived life at all.

  Mary Balogh

  Dream, Disappointment, Successful

  Mary Balogh (2008). “Simply Perfect”, p.42, Delacorte Press

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• It's not that pink is intrinsically bad, but it is such a tiny slice of the rainbow, and, though it may celebrate girlhood in one way, it also repeatedly and firmly fuses girl's identity to appearance.

  Peggy Orenstein

  Girl, Rainbow, Identity

  "The ghettoisation of pink: how it has cornered the little-girl market" by Peggy Orenstein, www.theguardian.com. June 18, 2011.

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• To all the world he was the man of violence, half animal and half demon; but to her he always remained the little wilful boy of her own girlhood, the child who had clung to her hand. Evil indeed is the man who has not one woman to mourn him.

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  Children, Animal, Boys

  Arthur Conan Doyle (1989). “Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Stories”, p.531, Wordsworth Editions

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• After spending all of her girlhood fervently wishing she could run away from home— she’d actually done it.

  Tessa Dare

  Running, Home, Wish

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• Part of the racialized sexism wants everyone to think that a 15-year old Mexican is not a girl, she’s a woman. We know she’s a girl. We can never emphasize this enough, because this is the fate of colored girls globally right now: the denial of their girlhood, the denial of their childhood, and the constant state of risk and danger they are living in.

  Bell Hooks

  Girl, Fate, Thinking

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• Girls especially are fond of exchanging confidences with those whom they think they can trust; it is one of the most charming traits of a simple, earnest-hearted girlhood, and they are the happiest women who never lose it entirely.

  Lucy Larcom

  Girl, Simple, Thinking

  Lucy Larcom (1961). “A New England girlhood”

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• When one is five-and-twenty, one has not chalk-stones at one's finger-ends that the touch of a handsome girl should be entirely indifferent.

  George Eliot

  Girl, Twenties, Stones

  George Eliot (2012). “The Mill on the Floss”, p.308, Courier Corporation

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• I do what I want to do. It was a brash statement of(her)girlhood. Now she was an adult, the boast seemed quaint. For rarely do you know what you want. Even after you've done it you can't say clearly if that was what you'd wanted or just something that happened to you, like weather.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Weather, Adults, Done

  Joyce Carol Oates (2009). “I Am No One You Know: And Other Stories”, p.152, Zondervan

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• Horror need not always be a long-fanged gentleman in evening clothes or a dismembered corpse or a doctor who keeps a brain in his gold fish bowl. It may be a warm sunny day, the innocence of girlhood and hints of unexplored sexuality that combine to produce a euphoria so intense it becomes transporting, a state beyond life or death. Such horror is unspeakable not because it is gruesome but because it remains outside the realm of things that can be easily defined or explained in conventional ways.

  Vincent Canby

  Clothes, Doctors, Long

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• One must always regret that law of growth which renders necessary that kittens should spoil into demure cats, and bright, joyous school-girls develop into the spiritless, crystallized beings denominated young ladies.

  Abba Louisa Goold Woolson

  Girl, Regret, School

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• Evil indeed is the man who has not one woman to mourn him.

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  Men, Evil, Mourn

  Arthur Conan Doyle (2012). “The Sherlock Holmes Archives (incl. The Truth About Sherlock Holmes)”, p.280, Jazzybee Verlag

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• I'm drawn to write about upstate New York in the way in which a dreamer might have recurring dreams. My childhood and girlhood were spent in upstate New York, in the country north of Buffalo and West of Rochester. So this part of New York state is very familiar to me and, with its economic difficulties, has become emblematic of much of American life.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Country, Dream, New York

  Off the Page with Carole Burns, www.washingtonpost.com. May 9, 2006.

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• How rarely boyhood loves to paint in glowing tints his future bright, a picture where no line is faint--whose very clouds are touch'd with light. And girlhood hails a world unknown and reads it in her own glad dreams, as lilies see themselves alone reflected in their azure streams. But rosy clouds that morning brings, ere noon may deepen into thunder--and life's dark stream has sterner things than silver lilies growing under.

  Cecil Frances Alexander

  Dream, Morning, Dark

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• I was a working class Jewish girl. In my girlhood, anti-Semitism was a daily fact of life in Detroit. I did not come from people who had many options in their lives or many choices open to them. I was a girl in a family in which women were, as in society at large, very much second-class citizens. I did not see why I should accept these forced limitations without a fight. Being free to make my own choices thus became very important to me at an early age.

  Marge Piercy

  Girl, Fighting, Class

  Interview with Charlotte Templin, margepiercy.com. May 2004.

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• The girl of the period sets up to be natural, and is only rude; mistakes insolence for innocence; says everything that comes first to her lips, and thinks she is gay when she is only giddy.

  Benjamin Disraeli

  Girl, Mistake, Gay

  Benjamin Disraeli (Earl of Beaconsfield) (1881). “Wit and Wisdom”

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• Her thoughts ran away to her girlhood with its passionate longing for adventure and she remembered the arms of men that had held her when adventure was a possible thing for her. Particularly she remembered one who had for a time been her lover and who in the moment of his passion had cried out to her more than a hundred times, saying the same words madly over and over: "You dear! You dear! You lovely dear!" The words, she thought, expressed something she would have liked to have achieved in life.

  Sherwood Anderson

  Passion, Adventure, Men

  Sherwood Anderson (2015). “Winesburg, Ohio”, p.181, Sheba Blake Publishing

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