The collection / 85 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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01c. 1939 AD

Germaine Greer / quote

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02c. 1939 AD

Female castration results in concentration of her feelings upon her male companion, and her impotence in confrontations with her own kind. Because all her love is guided by the search for security, if not for her offspring then for her crippled and fearful self, she cannot expect to find it in her own kind, whom she knows to be weak and unsuitable.

Germaine Greer / quote

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03c. 1939 AD

We can only afford two children' really means, 'We only like clean, well-disciplined middle-class children who go to good schools and grow up to be professionals', for children manage to use up all the capital that is made available for the purpose, whatever proportion it may be of the family's whole income, just as housework expands to fill the time available.

Germaine Greer / quote

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04c. 1939 AD

On ladies' nights they watch frozen-faced while their men embrace and fool about commenting to each other that they are all overgrown boys. Of the love of fellows they know nothing. They cannot love each other in this easy, innocent, spontaneous way because they cannot love themselves.

Germaine Greer / quote

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05c. 1939 AD

Woman cannot be content with health and agility: she must make exorbitant efforts to appea something that never could exist without a diligent perversion of nature. Is it too much to ask that women be spared the daily struggle for superhuman beauty in order to offer it to the caresses of a subhumanly ugly mate? Women are reputed never to be disgusted. The sad fact is that they often are, but not with men; following the lead of men, they are most often disgusted with themselves.

Germaine Greer / quote

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06c. 1939 AD

We can only afford two children' is a squalid argument, but more acceptable in our society than 'we don't like children'.

Germaine Greer / quote

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07c. 1939 AD

If female liberation is to happen, if the reservoir of real female love is to be tapped, this sterile self-deception must be counteracted. The only literary form which could outsell romantic trash on the female market is hard-core pornography.

Germaine Greer / quote

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08c. 1939 AD

The Poison Maiden has conceived by him, and is plumb ready to enter the divine category of mother, only one last fiend clubs her to death. The final clinch of male romanticism is that each man kills the thing he loves; whether she be Catharine in A Farewell to Arms, or the Grecian Urn, the 'tension that she be perfect' means that she must die, leavinf the hero's status as a great lover unchallenged. The pattern is still commonplace: the hero cannot marry. The sexual exploit must be conquest, not cohabitation and mutual tolerance.

Germaine Greer / quote

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09c. 1939 AD

We can say the brotherhood of man, and pretend that we include the sisterhood of women, but we know that we don't. Folklore has it that women only congregate to bitch an absent member of their group, and continue to do so because they are to well aware of the consequences if they stay away. It's meant to be a joke, but like jokes about mothers-in-law it is founded in bitter truth.

Germaine Greer / quote

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10c. 1939 AD

If you think you are emancipated, you might consider the idea of tasting your own menstrual blood - if it makes you sick, you've got a long way to go, baby.

Germaine Greer / quote

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11c. 1939 AD

Rather than seek to be squired and dated by their rivals why should it not be possible for women to find relaxation and pleasure in the company of their 'inferiors'? They would need to shed their desperate need to admire a man, and accept the gentler role of loving him. A learned woman cannot castrate a truck-driver like she can her intellectual rival, because he has no exaggerated respect for her bookish capacities. The alternative to conventional education is not stupidity, and many a clever girl needs the corrective of a humbler soul's genuine wisdom.

Germaine Greer / quote

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12c. 1939 AD

Sorrow is not itself evidence of maladjustment but of the adjustment process itself.

Germaine Greer / quote

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13c. 1939 AD

Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate. Many a housewife staring at the back of her husband's newspaper, or listening to his breathing in bed is lonelier than any spinster in a rented room.

Germaine Greer / quote

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14c. 1939 AD

What is certain is that he [the baby] has too much attention from the one person who is entirely at his disposal. The intimacy between mother and child is not sustaining and healthy. The child learns to exploit his mother's accessibility, badgering her with questions and demands which are not of any real consequence to him, embarrassing her in public, blackmailing her into buying sweets and carrying him.

Germaine Greer / quote

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15c. 1939 AD

Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark ... In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and abso

Germaine Greer / quote

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16c. 1939 AD

Human beings love, despite their compulsions to limit it and exploit it chaotically. Their love persuades them to make vows, build houses and turn their passion ultimately to duty.

Germaine Greer / quote

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17c. 1939 AD

It was not until much later when, after a deep and satisfying orgasm, I suddenly realised the true meaning of the fairy tale and the nature of the magic kiss of which it speaks.

Germaine Greer / quote

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18c. 1939 AD

The chief means of liberating women is replacing of compulsiveness and compulsion by the pleasure principle. Cooking, clothes, beauty, and housekeeping are all compulsive activities in which the anxiety quotient has long since replaced the pleasure or achievement quotient. It is possible to use even cooking, clothes, cosmetics and housekeeping for fun. The essence of pleasure is spontaneity. In these cases spontaneity means rejecting the norm, the standard that one must live up to, and establishing a self-regulating principle.

Germaine Greer / quote

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19c. 1939 AD

A full bosom is actually a millstone around a woman's neck. ... [Breasts] are not parts of a person but lures slung around her neck to be kneaded and twisted like magic putty or mumbled and mouthed like lolly ices.

Germaine Greer / quote

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20c. 1939 AD

The only causes of regret are laziness outbursts of temper hurting others prejudice jealousy and envy.

Germaine Greer / quote

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21c. 1939 AD

Most women still need a room of their own and the only way to find it may be outside their own home.

Germaine Greer / quote

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22c. 1939 AD

Energy is the power that drives every human being. It is not lost by exertion but maintained by it for it is a faculty of the psyche.

Germaine Greer / quote

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23c. 1939 AD

Every time a man unburdens his heart to a stranger he reaffirms the love that unites humanity.

Germaine Greer / quote

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24c. 1939 AD

Until women themselves reject stigma and refuse to feel shame for the way others treat them, they have no hope of achieving full human stature.

Germaine Greer / quote

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