Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes

In society it is etiquette for ladies to have the best chairs and get handed things. In the home the reverse is the case. This is why ladies are more sociable than gentlemen.

Men play harder than they work; women work harder than they play.

Nature makes woman to be won and men to win.

Obviously I've spent most of my working life with men and they have this way of operating which seems a bit alien to me.

I don't believe for a minute that women really want to be understood by men.

And I think maybe all women, if they just had a chance, would be romantic and believe in love and not sex. And men believe in sex and not love.

There is a sense that women are more anchored than men in our society.

I love female company. I love men, but women are different.

I was always watching the boys and how they interacted. It comes with being a feminist, just somebody who thinks a lot about gender and how it plays out in society.

The man's desire is for the woman; but the woman's desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man.

Why don't men like to stop and ask directions? This question, which I first addressed in my 1990 book 'You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation', garnered perhaps the most attention of any issue or insight in that book.

The suffering of either sex - of the male who is unable, because of the way in which he was reared, to take the strong initiating or patriarchal role that is still demanded of him, or of the female who has been given too much freedom of movement as a child to stay placidly within the house as an adult - this suffering, this discrepancy, this sense of failure in an enjoined role, is the point of leverage for social change.

Men enjoy being thought of as hunters, but are generally too lazy to hunt. Women, on the other hand, love to hunt, but would rather nobody knew it.

I've been reading The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, which is obviously very dated now but still relevant. It's so interesting to see how far we've come and how far we haven't come with all these myths that people put onto women.

a man is no example for a woman. It’s a different thing.

The role of gender in society is the most complicated thing I’ve ever spent a lot of time learning about, and I’ve spent a lot of time learning about quantum mechanics.

As far as I was concerned men were something you had around the place, not particularly interesting, but quite harmless. I had never shown the slightest feeling for them, and apart from my never wearing a skirt, saw nothing else in common between us.

This toxic striving for perfection is a female thing. How many men obsess about being perfect? For men, generally, good enough is good enough.

I don't think men try to make women be like them, but I think women try to make men be like them, a lot.

You know what the problem is? You can't put a woman into a man's role. A women's journey in life, I'm not speaking disrespectfully of women and their roles in life, but a woman's journey in life is very different from a man's. That doesn't mean a woman can't do a man's job, but it doesn't mean that a woman should do a man's job the way a man handles it. The things that men question themselves about in life are quite different from the things women question themselves about.

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

I think, men and women are different. We have different challenges.

As a woman, you accept the situation, adapt to it, and do your best, whereas men would choose violence.