Women crave for being loved, not for loving. They scream out at you for sympathy all day long, they are incapable of giving any in return, for they cannot remember your affairs long enough to do so... They cannot state a fact accurately to another, nor can that other attend to it accurately enough for it to become information. Now is not all this the result of want of sympathy?... I am sick with indignation at what wives and mothers will do of the most egregious selfishness. And people call it all maternal or conjugal affection, and think it pretty to say so. No, no, let each person tell the truth from their own experience.

It upsets women to be, or not to be, stared at hungrily.

Every woman wants to be first to someone sometime in her life and that desire is the explanation for many strange things women do.

"What do women want?" As though it's really mysterious. As though it's a big deal. All that women want is what anybody wants. You know, friendship and companionship and respect and a certain amount of leadership with submission and a kind of cooperation at all times and pre-emptive empathy and you know, general telepathy. It's no big deal, is it? [...] Traditionally, women have been attracted to uniforms. So it's not difficult to know what women want. Fascists - that's really what they're all after!

And then there are the cravings.. Oh, la! A woman may crave to be near water, or be belly down, her face in the earth, smelling the wild smell. She might have to drive into the wind. She may have to plant something, pull things out of the ground or put them into the ground. She may have to knead and bake, rapt in dough up to her elbows.
She may have to trek into the hills, leaping from rock to rock trying out her voice against the mountain. She may need hours of starry nights where the stars are like face powder spilt on a black marble floor. She may feel she will die if she doesn’t dance naked in a thunderstorm, sit in perfect silence, return home ink-stained, paint-stained, tear-stained, moon-stained.

Women's eyes are rapid in detecting a heart which is ill at ease with itself, and, knowing the value of sympathy, and finding their own greatest happiness not in receiving it, but in giving it, with them to be unhappy is at once to be interesting.

Women know when men don’t desire them: ghosts and witches, deities and demons, angels of death — even virgins, even ordinary women. They always know; women can tell when you have stopped desiring them.

In one sense, I do believe I am "like a man," as Parthe [the writer's sister] says. But how? In having sympathy. … Women crave for being loved, not for loving. They scream out at you for sympathy all day long, they are incapable of giving any in return, for they cannot remember your affairs long enough to do so. … They cannot state a fact accurately to another, nor can that other attend to it accurately enough for it to become information. Now is not all this the result of want of sympathy?

For woman's chief want is to feel that she is wanted. Therefore it is that </br> With women, cruelty is more easily borne than coldness. Indeed, </br> It is astonishing how much downright cruelty a woman will stand from the man she loves or has loved.

Do women feel anything more keenly than curiosity? No, they will go to any lengths to find out, to know,to feel, what they have always dreamed of! Once their excited curiosity has been aroused, women will stoop to anything, commit any folly, take any risks. They stop at nothing. I am speaking of women who are real women, who operate on three different levels. Superficially cool and rational, they have three secret compartments: the first is constantly full of womanly fret and anxiety; the second is a sort of innocent guile, like the fearsome sophistry of the self-righteous; and the last is filled with an engaging dishonesty, a charming deviousness, a consummate duplicity, with all those perverse qualities in fact that can drive a foolish, unwary love to suicide, but which by others may be judged quite delightful.

I know the disposition of women: when you will, they won't; when you won't, they set their hearts upon you of their own inclination.

She'd like to be indispensable; that's what every woman wants...

Women want us to like them, but they don't even like each other.

Women, they always want you to feel that, y'know, they like it when men cry, they think it's so sensitive. Bullshit. That is a trap. They don't like it. You can cry once when your mother dies. Other than that, keep it to yourself. They know people that cry a lot, they're called their girlfriends, they don't need it from you.