Nancy Friday Quotations

I think biologically we are attracted to more than one person, but given society and our needs, monogamy works better.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Inside every adult male is a denied little boy.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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 can't get what I wanted from a man, not in this life.

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

Sexuality is the great field of battle between biology and society.

Our culture raises us to seek success but we are not taught how to live with it.

In a baby's first months, the earliest patterns of intimacy or distrust are forever grooved into his soul.

Spontaneous love admits errors, hesitations and human failings. It can be tested and repaired.

When is enough enough? In envy's eyes, enough never is. Somebody else always has something we want.

Oh, I know all about my mother and me,' you may say. 'All that business with my mother was over years ago.' You don't and it wasn't.

If you believe in the maternal instinct and fail at mother love, you fail as a woman. It is a controlling idea that holds us in an iron grip.

Fantasy isn't something you run out of.

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

After sex, men fear too much intimacy; they want to separate again. Women want to talk, to continue the merging, melting fusion into one. Postcoital conversations keep the woman's power alive. Through unconscious severance, by falling asleep, the man regains his self.

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.

All my writing has been an effort to sort out the paradoxes of my life.

Separation is not the end of love; it creates love.

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

For instance, in group therapy, I'll have people stand up, show off, give a speech about themselves as though they've just died and have to give a eulogy. Even with this explicit permission - even an order - to say something nice about themselves, this is the hardest thing in the world for people to do. They'd rather take their clothes off.

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