Quotes About Spinsters

#1. Not so very long ago, certainly well into the Thirties, a lady companion was a normal feature of life for widows or lone spinsters.

Laurie Graham

#2. Sex ages us. Priests are boyish, spinsters stay black-haired until after fifty. We others, the demon rots us out.

John Updike

#3. Husbands and wives talk of the cares of matrimony, and bachelors and spinsters bear them.

Wilkie Collins

#4. People always assume that bachelors are single by choice and spinsters because nobody asked them. It never enters their heads that poor bachelors might have worn the knees of their trousers out proposing to girls who rejected them or that a girl might deliberately stay unmarried ...

Jilly Cooper

#5. The only thing the women were after was just the chance to help the world on. But some men were so dreadfully afraid of them that they refused to understand, and talked about 'shrieking sisterhoods' and 'disappointed spinsters' and rubbish of that sort.

Nancy Astor

#6. I'm not going to accept your challenge. There will be no duel."
"Why not? Because I'm a woman?"
"No, because I've seen the way you spinsters handle a pistol. You'd shoot me dead where I stood.

Tessa Dare

#7. The way she told it, the English counties are littered with aging spinsters who accidentally displayed a spark of intelligence at a debutante dance and were banished forever from civilized society

Michelle Cooper

#8. Perhaps I won't marry then. Instead, you and I shall live as spinsters in a cottage by the sea. We'll burn our corsets, eat chocolate morning, noon and night and grow fat as hedgehogs.

Alyxandra Harvey

#9. And there's nothing wrong with spinsters, anyway. They have nice cats and little bowls full of candy. Mrs. Bailey and Mrs. Newitz are the kindest ladies you'll ever meet, and they have nips of whiskey in their tea like cowboys.

Catherynne M Valente

#10. Perhaps, however, it is the same with spinsters as with ghosts; and one has to be of their ranks in order to see them at all.

Sarah Waters

#11. America ... where laws and customs alike are based on the dreams of spinsters.

Bertrand Russell

#12. And by the same token she is hated by the twisted and lascivious sisterhood of married spinsters whose husbands respect the home but don't like it very much. Dora

John Steinbeck

#13. Oh, well, naturally I've read a few novels. And then, too," she went on, "there are broad plays and musical shows and moving pictures for giving information to inexperienced but curious spinsters like me.

Olive Higgins Prouty

#14. Up and down the lanes, the last unevacuated townspeople wake, groan, sigh. Spinsters, prostitutes, men over sixty. Procrastinators, collaborators, disbelievers, drunks. Nuns of every order. The poor. The stubborn. The blind.

Anthony Doerr

#15. Could one count such dilettantes and old spinsters as that mawkish apostle of virginity, Mainlander, as a genuine German? In the last analysis he probably was a Jew (all Jews become mawkish when they moralize).

Friedrich Nietzsche

#16. It seems to me that women are freed from their responsibilities only when they are merry widows or eccentric old spinsters.

Tobsha Learner

#17. Monks, nuns, long-term spinsters and bachelors and permanent homosexuals are all, in a reproductive sense, aberrant. Society has bred them, but they have failed to return the compliment.

Desmond Morris

#18. I am not in love with you," she said. "It is an infatuation. I have heard of such derangements happening to elderly spinsters.

Loretta Chase

#19. Married women that I noticed, their solid smugness at not having to worry about the course of their future. Married women were set like jelly in a mold, whereas spinsters like me were formless and unpredictable. I patted my basket. I have my own fossils,

Tracy Chevalier

#20. When posing for a photograph, spinsters should avoid looking desperate or deprived. A serene smile will show that your circumstances are by choice and not for lack of beauty or character. -Miss Gertrude Hasslebrink, 1878

Margaret Brownley

#21. The nineteenth-century wave of feminism was started by older women who had been through the radicalizing experience of getting married and becoming the legal chattel of their husbands (or the equally radicalizing experience of not getting married and being treated as spinsters).

Gloria Steinem

#22. The pigment must be mixed with the tears of spinsters of good family, who must live long lives of impeccable virtue and die without ever having had a day of true happiness.

Susanna Clarke

#23. I hate math. It's hard, it's stupid, and it's nature's way of separating spinsters from women who end up breeding.

Douglas Coupland

#24. As for critics, one mediocre writer is more valuable than ten good critics. They are like haughty, barren spinsters lodged in a maternity ward.

Peter Greenaway

#25. At least as a single woman, I had time to pursue my own interests, read voraciously, and travel when opportunity presented.

Tasha Alexander

#26. The cat required far less attendance than a human child, which is one of the reasons why spinster ladies prefer felines to babies.

Elizabeth Peters

#27. He is a young man with a future of power and opportunity and we are young women destined to be either wives and mothers at the very best, or spinster parasites at the worst.

Philippa Gregory

#28. Being a woman, in this world, ultimately makes you crazy.

Holly Bourne

#29. Mamey said that in her day a woman who had not married by the age of thirty was called a thornback, named after a flat, spiny, prehistoric-looking fish.

Christina Baker Kline

#30. If I follow the inclination of my nature, it is this: beggar-woman and single, far rather than queen and married.

Elizabeth I