Scorn (25 page)

I've never found brawn appealing. If I went out with Macho Man I think I'd have a permanent headache. Kind of ‘You Tarzan – Mi-graine'.
Overheard on a bus

Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.
Charlotte Whitton

The five worst infirmities that afflict the female are indocility, discontent, slander, jealously, and silliness.
Confucian Marriage Manual

Women want mediocre men, and men are working to be as mediocre as possible.
Margaret Mead

Men are stupid, and they like big tits.
Marilyn Monroe's advice to Joan Rivers

Some people think having large breasts makes a woman stupid. Actually, it's the opposite. A woman having large breasts makes a man stupid.
Rita Rudner

If there is anything more boring to me than the problems of big-busted women, it is the problems of beautiful women.
Nora Ephron

Twenty million young women rose to their feet with the cry ‘we will not be dictated to' – and promptly became stenographers.
G.K. Chesterton

Why are women … so much more interesting to men than men are to women?
Virginia Woolf,
A Room of One's Own

Some pale, hueless flicker of sensitivity is in me. God, must I lose it in cooking scrambled eggs for a man?
Sylvia Plath

Once you know what women are like, men get kind of boring. I'm not trying to put them down, I mean I like some of them sometimes as people, but sexually they're dull.
Rita Mae Brown

Why did God create men? Because vibrators can't mow the lawn.
Madonna

The male is a biological accident: the Y (male) chromosome is an incomplete X (female) chromosome, that is, has an incomplete set of genes. In other words, the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the chromosome stage.
Valerie Solanas, in
S.C.U.M. Manifesto

Man … is an afterthought of creation; he is simply a modification of the female.
Deborah Moggach

If they can put one man on the Moon, why not all of them?
Feminist T-shirt

Militant feminists. I take my hat off to them. They don't like that.
Milton Jones

Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes. There's too much fraternising with the enemy.
Henry Kissinger

I will rather trust a Fleming with my butter, Parson Hugh the Welshman with my cheese, an Irishman with my aqua-vitae bottle, or a thief to walk my ambling gelding, than my wife with herself.
William Shakespeare,
The Merry Wives of Windsor

Bachelors begin at thirty-six. Up till this time they are regarded as single men. Most of them are very tidy, smell of mothballs, and have an obsessional old maid's fix about one of their ashtrays being moved an inch to the right.
Jilly Cooper,
Men and Super Men

Because women can do nothing except love, they've given it a ridiculous importance.
W. Somerset Maugham,
The Moon and Sixpence

Just the exchange of two momentary desires and the contact of two skins.
Nicolas Chamfort on love, 1805

By the time you swear you're his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is Infinite, undying –
Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying.
Dorothy Parker,
Enough Rope,
‘Unfortunate Coincidence'

How alike are the groans of love to those of the dying.
Malcolm Lowry,
Under the Volcano

Love may arise from a generous sentiment – namely, the liking for prostitution; but it soon becomes corrupted by the liking for ownership.
Charles Baudelaire

Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.
George Bernard Shaw

The cure for love is to be loved back.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Girls bored me – they still do. I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I've ever known.
Walt Disney

Madame: I was told that you took the trouble to come here to see me three times last evening. I was not in. And, fearing lest
persistence expose you to humiliation, I am bound by the rules of politeness to warn you that I shall never be in.
Gustave Flaubert in a letter to Louise Colet, his former mistress. Colet scribbled on the note ‘lâche, couard et canaille' (‘poltroon, coward and cur').

There is no such thing as an ugly woman, but there is such a thing as too little vodka.
Russian saying

Ugliness is superior to beauty because it lasts longer.
Serge Gainsbourg

Now I know the meaning of grotesque.
Sydney Smith on seeing the wife of Dr Grote, Regius Professor of Greek, wearing a turban

You know that look that women get when they want to have sex? Me neither.
Steve Martin

No longer from head to foot than from hip to hip, she is spherical like a globe; I could find out countries in her.
In what part of her body stands for Ireland?

Marry, sir, in her buttocks; I found it out by the bogs.
Where Scotland?

I found it by the barrenness, hard in the palm of the hand.
Where France?

In her forehead, armed and reverted, making war against her heir.
Where England?

I looked for the chalky cliffs, but I could find no whiteness in them. But I guess it stood in her chin, by the salt rheum that ran between France and it.
Where Spain?

Faith, I saw it not; but I felt it hot in her breath.
Where America, the Indies?

O, sir, upon her nose, all o'er embellished with rubies, carbuncles, sapphires, declining their rich aspect to the hot breath of Spain, who sent whole armadas of carracks to be ballast at her nose.
Where stood Belgia, the Netherlands?

O, sir, I did not look so low.
William Shakespeare,
The Comedy of Errors

Fuck-me shoes and a bird's-nest hairdo.
Germaine Greer on her fellow
Guardian
writer Suzanne Moore's dress and appearance

When I first saw Moore I at last understood why Yanks call a woman a broad.
Paul Johnson on
Guardian
columnist Suzanne Moore

A woman with a heavily-lived face poised unceremoniously on top of a torso like a dressmaker's dummy.
Paul Johnson on Lynn Barber, in the
Spectator

A red-haired, red-faced man of 65 seemingly in transit between Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
Peter McKay on Paul Johnson in the
Sunday Times

The flashers, grabbers, bottom-pinchers, purse-snatchers, kerb-crawlers, verbal abusers, peeping Toms and the ultimate cowards, the ones who roam in packs, have left an indelible impression on women's minds and – more in anger than in fear – women are determined to evade, forestall and undermine these invaders of our freedom.
Valerie Grove in the
Evening Standard

The Queen is most anxious to enlist every one who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of ‘Woman's Rights', with all its attendant horrors, on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and propriety.
Queen Victoria

No man, not even a doctor, ever gives any other definition of what a nurse should be than this – ‘devoted and obedient'. This definition would do just as well for a porter. It might even do for a horse. It would not do for a policeman.
Florence Nightingale

The legend of the jungle heritage and the evolution of man as a hunting carnivore has taken root in man's mind … He may
even believe that equal pay will do something terrible to his gonads.
Elaine Morgan,
The Descent of Woman

An open invitation to any feminist, any harridan or any rattle-headed female with a chip on her bra strap to take action against her employers.
Tony Marlow MP on equal-pay law

How do you know that an advance was unwanted until you've made it?
Alan Clark MP, responding to accusations of sexual harrassment

Homosexuality is a sickness, just as are baby-rape or wanting to become the head of General Motors.
Eldridge Cleaver, black Muslim,
Soul on Ice,
‘Notes on a Native Son'

He is the summit of sex, the pinnacle of masculine, feminine and neuter. Everything that he, she and it can ever want. I spoke to sad but kindly men on this newspaper who have met every celebrity coming from America for the past thirty years. They say that this deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing, ice-covered, heap of mother love has had the biggest reception and impact on London since Charlie Chaplin arrived at the same station, Waterloo, on September 12th 1921. This appalling man, and I use the word appalling in no other than its true sense of terrifying, has hit this country in a way that is as violent as
Churchill receiving the cheers on VE Day. He reeks of emetic language that can only make grown men long for a quiet corner, an aspidistra, a handkerchief and the old heave-ho. Without doubt he is the biggest sentimental vomit of all time. Slobbering over his Mother, winking at his brother, and counting the cash at every second, this superb piece of calculating candyfloss has an answer for every situation.
William Connor (‘Cassandra') on Liberace, in the
Daily Mirror
. The column became the subject of a famous libel case won by the entertainer.

I became one of the stately homos of England.
Quentin Crisp,
The Naked Civil Servant

A bull who would copulate only with other bulls would be sent to the knackers.
Piers Paul Read, in
The Times,
1994

This sort of thing may be tolerated by the French, but we are British – thank God.
Viscount Montgomery of Alamein on the proposed relaxation of laws against homosexuality in 1965

I was too polite to ask.
Gore Vidal, asked whether his first sexual experience was homosexual or heterosexual

If Michelangelo had been a heterosexual, the Sistine Chapel would have been painted basic white and with a roller.
Rita Mae Brown

The middle age of a bugger is not to be contemplated without horror.
Virginia Woolf

She looked like Lady Chatterley above the waist and the gamekeeper below.
Cyril Connolly on Vita Sackville-West

The trouble with Ian is that he gets off with women because he can't get on with them.
Rosamond Lehmann on Ian Fleming

Online dating: the odds are good, but the goods are odd.
Anonymous online dater

Girlfriend said last night ‘You treat our relationship like some kind of game!' Which unfortunately cost her 12 points and a bonus chance.
Twitter user
@Pundamentalism

They are comforted by our means, they are nourished by the meats we dress; their bodies freed from diseases by our cleanliness, which otherwise would surfeit unreasonably through their own noisomeness. Without our care they lie in their beds as dogs in litter and go like lousy mackerel swimming in the heat of summer.
Jane Anger,
Her Protection for Women,
1589

The fastest way to a man's heart is through his chest.
Roseanne Barr

It makes me feel masculine to tell you that I do not answer questions like this without being paid for answering them.
Lillian Hellman, when asked by
Harper's Magazine
when she felt most masculine

Many a man has been a wonder to the world, whose wife and valet have seen nothing in him that was even remarkable. Few men have been admired by their servants.
Michel de Montaigne,
Essais,
III

No man is a hero to his valet.
Anne-Marie Bigot de Cornuel

But that is not because the hero is no hero, but because the valet is a valet.
Friedrich Nietzsche

A fly, Sir, may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but one is but an insect, and the other is still a horse.
Samuel Johnson

Brigands demand your money or your life; women require both.
Samuel Butler. Attrib.

A woman will always sacrifice herself if you give her the opportunity. It is her favourite form of self-indulgence.
W. Somerset Maugham,
The Circle

Laughter is the best medicine, though it tends not to work in the case of impotence.
Jo Brand

 

Marriage and Family

A sort of friendship recognized by the police.
Robert Louis Stevenson on matrimony

Marriage is a long, dull meal with pudding as the first course.
J.B. Priestley

Nothing is to me more distasteful than that entire complacency and satisfaction which beam in the countenances of a new-married couple.
Charles Lamb,
Essays of Elia,
‘A Bachelor's Complaint of Married People'

My first wife drove me to drink. It is the only thing I'm indebted to her for.
W.C. Fields

I call her ‘my first wife' to keep her on her toes.
Clement Freud

If you want to sacrifice the admiration of many men for the criticism of one, go ahead, get married.
Katharine Hepburn

After a certain age marriage is mostly, its bitter and tender moments both, a mental game of thrust and parry played on the edge of the grave.
John Updike

It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs Carlyle marry one another and so make two people miserable instead of four.
Samuel Butler on the Carlyles

To marry a man out of pity is folly; and, if you think you are going to influence the kind of fellow who has ‘never had a chance, poor devil,' you are profoundly mistaken. One can only influence the strong characters in life, not the weak; and it is the height of vanity to suppose that you can make an honest man of anyone.
Margot Asquith

Whenever I date a guy, I think, is this the man I want my children to spend their weekends with?
Rita Rudner

I'm on a search for my future ex-wife.
Richie Sambora

Marriage is like a cage: one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside equally desperate to get out.
Michel de Montaigne,
Essais,
III

Marriage is the only adventure open to the cowardly.
Voltaire

I am unwell. Bring me a glass of brandy.
George, Prince of Wales, in 1795, on having kissed for the first time his bride-to-be Princess Caroline of Brunswick

She's been married so many times she has rice marks on her face.
Henry Youngman on Zsa Zsa Gabor

There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it.
George Bernard Shaw

Marriage is the assassin of love.
Aristotle Onassis

Marriages are like tornadoes. There's all this blowing and sucking at the beginning; and at the end you lose your house.
James Caan

A man in love is incomplete until he has married. Then he's finished.
Zsa Zsa Gabor

All tragedies are finish'd by death, All comedies are ended by a marriage.
Lord Byron,
Don Juan,
III

Before marriage a man yearns for the woman he loves. After marriage, the Y becomes silent.
Anonymous

A women's silly, never staid,
By many longings stirred and swayed.
If husband can't her needs supply,
Adultery's the way she'll try …
Her lustful loins are never stilled:
By just one man she's unfulfilled.
She'll spread her legs to all the men
But, ever hungry, won't say ‘When'.
Thus married women love to stray
And wish their husbands' lives away.
Since none a woman's lust can sate
I don't commend the marriage state.
‘De Coniuge non Ducenda', anonymous poem on marriage, c. 1225–50. One of the most popular anti-matrimonial satires of the late Middle Ages, surviving in over fifty manuscripts.

As I roll back from you,
From your flabby breasts and breath,
A faint froth is our only link.
How many beaches are you?
Must I comb them all?
I'm not a wave to roll again forever,
And unlike the sea, I don't come
Every fifteen seconds.
Jim Lindsey, ‘Blank Verse for a Fat Demanding Wife'

Mrs Hall of Sherbourne was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she expected, owing to a fright. I suppose she happened to look unawares at her husband.
Jane Austen, letter

Going to marry her! Going to marry her! Impossible! You mean, a part of her; he could not marry her all himself. It would be a case, not of bigamy, but of trigamy; the neighbourhood or the magistrates should interfere. There is enough of her to furnish wives for a whole parish. One man marry her! – it is monstrous. You might people a colony with her; or give an assembly with her; or perhaps take your morning walks around her, always providing there were frequent resting places, and you are in rude health. I once was rash enough to try walking round her before breakfast, but only got half-way and gave it up exhausted. Or you might read the Riot Act and disperse her; in short, you might do anything with her but marry her.
Sydney Smith on hearing that a young man planned to marry a fat widow

What a hideous, odd-looking man Sydney Smith is. With a mouth like an oyster and three double chins.
Mrs Brookfield on Sydney Smith

To lose a lover or even a husband or two during the course of one's life can be vexing. But to lose one's teeth is a catastrophe.
Hugh Wheeler

Here lies my wife; here let her lie!
Now she's at rest, and so am I.
John Dryden, ‘Epitaph Intended for Dryden's Wife'

Men should think twice before making widowhood women's only path to power.
Gloria Steinem

Bigamy is having one husband too many. Monogamy is the same.
Anonymous, quoted in Erica Jong,
Fear of Flying

Mine, or other people's?
Peggy Guggenheim on being asked on how many husbands she had had

With all my heart. Whose wife shall it be?
John Horne Tooke, replying to the suggestion that he take a wife

I give to Elizabeth Parker the sum of £50, whom, through my foolish fondness, I made my wife; and who in return has not spared, most unjustly, to accuse me of every crime regarding human nature, save highway-robbery.
Charles Parker, excerpt from will, 1785

I bequeath all my property to my wife on the condition that she remarry immediately. Then there will be at least one man to regret my death.
Heinrich Heine

Now at least I know where he is.
Queen Alexandra, to Lord Esher, shortly after the death of her husband Edward VII, noted for his string of mistresses

It should be a very happy marriage – they are both so much in love with him.
Irene Thomas

I have very little of Mr Blake's company. He is always in paradise.
Mrs Blake on her husband William

You have sent me a Flanders mare.
Henry VIII when he saw Anne of Cleves, his fourth wife, for the first time. Quoted by Tobias Smollett.

I like him and his wife. He is so ladylike, and she is such a perfect gentleman.
Sydney Smith

She is an excellent creature, but never can remember which came first, the Greeks or the Romans.
Benjamin Disraeli on his wife. Attrib.

… fools are like husbands as pilchards are to herrings; the husband's the bigger.
William Shakespeare,
Twelfth Night

Twenty years of romance makes a woman look like a ruin; but twenty years of marriage makes her something like a public building.
Oscar Wilde

A wedding is just a funeral where you can smell your own flowers.
Victor Lewis-Smith

I married beneath me – all women do.
Nancy Astor

I wouldn't be caught dead marrying a woman old enough to be my wife.
Tony Curtis

There are only about 20 murders a year in London and not all are serious – some are just husbands killing their wives.
Commander G.H. Hatherhill of Scotland Yard, 1954

It's going to be very, very expensive, but it will be worth every penny.
John Cleese referring to his divorce

The three great lies of modern divorce: it was pressure of work, it's an amicable break, and there's no one else involved.
Julie Burchill

If you are afraid of loneliness, don't marry.
Anton Chekhov

Why shouldn't gay people marry? Why shouldn't they suffer like us heterosexuals do?
Dolly Parton

A man doesn't know what happiness is until he's married. By then it's too late.
Frank Sinatra

Eighty per cent of married men cheat in America. The rest cheat in Europe.
Jackie Mason

The only time my wife and I had a simultaneous orgasm was when the judge signed the divorce papers.
Woody Allen

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
Philip Larkin,
This Be The Verse

As a child I thought I hated everybody, but when I grew up I realised it was just children that I didn't like.
Philip Larkin

[A] sheep on LSD.
Philip Larkin, describing his appearance

Wherever my dad is now, he's looking down on me … Not because he is dead, but because he is very condescending.
Jack Whitehall

The problem with the gene pool is that there's no lifeguard.
Sam Levenson

She got her looks from her father. He's a plastic surgeon.
Groucho Marx

A loud noise at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.
Ronald Knox on babies

Do not leave your mother alone with your dog. The unruliness of mothers is great.
Dabi'Ibn al-harith al-Burjumi on some people who had refused to return a borrowed dog. For this piece of hija, or Arabic invective poetry, he was imprisoned.

I haven't spoken to my mother-in-law for eighteen months. I don't like to interrupt her.
Ken Dodd

Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.
George Burns

Santa Claus has the right idea. Visit people only once a year.
Victor Borge

Friends are God's apology for relations.
Hugh Kingsmill

His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork.
Mae West

The first half of our lives is ruined by our parents, and the second half by our children.
Clarence Darrow, US lawyer

The reason grandparents and grandchildren get along so well is that they have a common enemy.
Sam Levenson

Guilt is to motherhood as grapes are to wine.
Fay Weldon

Who has not watched a mother stroke her child's cheek or kiss
in a certain way and felt a nervous shudder at the possessive outrage done to a free solitary human soul?
John Cowper Powys,
The Meaning of Culture

They make pederasty an incomprehensible vice.
Brian Sewell, asked by the head of St Paul's Boys school what he thought of the pupils

Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way round.
David Lodge

I wonder who thought of the innocence of children. It must have been a person of great originality.
Ivy Compton-Burnett

Money – the one thing that keeps us in touch with our children.
Gyles Brandreth

Men are generally more careful of the breed of their horses and dogs than of their children.
William Penn

It is no wonder that people are so horrible when they start their life as children.
Kingsley Amis

A two-year-old is kind of like having a blender, but you don't have a top for it.
Jerry Seinfeld

It is no use telling me that there are bad aunts and good aunts. At the core they are all alike. Sooner or later, out pops the cloven hoof.
P.G. Wodehouse,
The Code of the Woosters