Nancy Friday Quotes

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

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.

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.

Because society would rather we always wore a pretty face, women have been trained to cut off anger.

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.

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

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'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 themselves, this is the hardest thing in the world for people to do.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Fantasy isn't something you run out of.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Inside every adult male is a denied little boy.

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

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.

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