Libba Bray Quotes

In our civilization, men are afraid that they will not be men enough and women are afraid that they might be considered only women.

Men put all kinds of expectations on you. They want you to scream 'You're the best' while swearing you've never done this with anyone before.

I think the desire to be with someone beautiful...I just had such a different experience growing up. To be in a position where you're lauded for things that you don't own - and don't think of yourself as - it's so bizarre.

Old women should not seek to be perfumed.

When we get married or interviewed for a job or play professional sports or run for president of the United States, we encounter a whole set of standards and expectations. We can be shamed for an outfit that's too slutty, too dowdy, too pricey--take your pick. That's the burden women carry into the fitting room.

We're all conditioned to think we have to get to the top and be the best.

When you're in your twenties, you're made of expectations, and when they're shattered, you don't know how to behave. The fact is if you react really outraged, you fear that you'll get dropped and feel even more terrible. But there's only a certain amount you can put up with before you become obnoxious in your own eyes, right?

As a woman and as a mother, as a young mother, I felt guilty about being successful.

In many, many parts of the world, being a female, you're really just wallpaper. If you take care to blend in, no one would think in a thousand years that you were doing anything suspicious.

For some reason, I was deeply ashamed of the theater early on. I think it had to do with this growing sense I was gay, although I couldn't have put a word to it back then.

There's a repression against mothers where we're expected to be full-time workers and pretend we're not mothers, and then expected to be full-time mothers who pretend we're not working. Simultaneously, within the hours of the week that exist.

People try to make women a very specific thing so that we like them.

The message was always, 'It's good to be pretty, but don't look like you're trying to be pretty!' Inherent in that is a lot of misogyny, I think, because the implication is, 'You must work hard to achieve a feminine ideal for which society has nothing but contempt.'

Since I was a little kid, everybody was paying so much attention to what I looked like, not what I was feeling. You start feeling tired. It's like eating soup every day. You eat the same soup, and you get bored, so I developed my inner self.

The story of trying to live up to the myth is more interesting than the myth itself.

Girls and boys also face the societal pressure to get married which I find wrong.

I wanted to be a trophy wife, and I was fine with that. I thought I had my life written out - what it was going to be, what kind of woman I was going to be - and none of it happened.

I graduated college valedictorian, got an M.A. from Columbia University in Spanish literature at the age of twenty-two, and still couldn't answer the question 'What do you want to do with your life?'

The problem is that right from the beginning, there was this whole pressure that I've had to make it big. I don't know if it's my fault or if someone else created this atmosphere around me, but it's been there.

Nothing to me is more distasteful than that entire complacency and satisfaction which beam in the countenances of a new married couple; in that of the lady particularly; it tells you that her lot is disposed of in this world; that you can have no hopes for her.

If you don't wear lipstick, I can't talk to you. You need to have lips - they are important for getting men.

Cold-hearted Elinor! Oh! Worse than cold-hearted! Ashamed of being otherwise.--Marianne Dashwood

Women are told that we can have the most exciting, glamorous, demanding, rewarding careers ever but we also have to be constantly sexy and sexually interested, and when we have children we have to spend more time with our kids. Of course you can't really do all three of those things at once, so we feel this tremendous stress.

Never expect women to be sincere, so long as they are educated to think that their first aim in life is to please.