Every woman must live by some sense of victory over disappointments, and Olympias was not the sort of woman to find compensation in her own powers of self-control and endurance.

Losing is a learning experience. It teaches you humility. It teaches you to work harder. It’s also a powerful motivator.

El arte de vencer se aprende en las derrotas

You become a winner because you’re good at losing.

You can lose a woman when you have won her.

A woman who gives any advantage to a man may expect a lover — but will sooner or later find a tyrant.

The measure of a woman's power is the degree of suffering with which she can punish her lover.

(With feminine vengeance)

To excel in the art of domestic argument, one must master the art of losing.

Imagine that for hundreds of years your most formative traumas, your daily suffering and pain, the abuse you live through, the terror you live with, are unspeakable — not the basis of literature. You grow up with your father holding you down and covering your mouth so another man can make a horrible searing pain between your legs.… You learn how to leave your body and create someone else who takes over when you cannot stand it any more. You develop a self who is ingratiating and obsequious and imitative and aggressively passive and silent — you learn, in a word, femininity.

Femininity to me is about the opposition to power and order in the sadistic fashion.

She knew that there were all kinds of ways to make a conquest and that one of the surest roads to a woman's genitals was through her sadness.

You won’t win until you learn how to lose. I don’t like to do it, to lose, but I can stand it. Along with everything else, you have to acquire the ability to accept defeat. No one makes it without stumbling.

As I looked more carefully at the listening matrix I saw that during the past twenty years we had taken a magnifying glass to the first of these four quadrants, the female experience of powerlessness. I saw I was subconsciously making a false assumption: The more deeply I understood women's experience of powerlessness, the more I assumed men had the power women did not have. In fact, what I was understanding was the female experience of male power.