Wild Words for Wild Women: An Unbridled Collection of Candid Observations and Extremely Opinionated Bon Mots (Girls run the world, Nasty women, Affirmation quotes)

By Autumn Stephens

Words of Wisdom from Wild Women

In Wild Words from Wild Women, author and feminist August Stephens compiles words of wisdom from much loved famous feminists. Hilarious, inspiring, and empowering, this pocket book of affirmation quotes is the perfect gift for all nasty women with something to say.

Some tongues just can’t be tamed. What can be better than words of wisdom from wild gals? Wild Words from Wild Women is a ribald compilation of powerful women quotes; everything from bras to babies, menopause to men, and politics to parties. Featuring historically nasty women like Jane Austen and Billie Jean King, these famous feminists knew how to read between the lines─and now you can too.

Girls run the world. These words of wisdom─from strippers, CEOs, poets, senators, and every woman in between─make delectable reading for sassy, untamable, and fabulous ladies everywhere. In the time of “Girl Boss” learn why and how girls run the world with Wild Words from Wild Women.

Inside, find powerful women quotes from famous feminists like:

• Billie Holiday
• Virginia Wolfe
• Coco Chanel
• And many more!

If you enjoyed books like Badass Affirmations, Daily Affirmations for Women, or I Really Needed This Right Now, then you’ll love Wild Words from Wild Women.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Conari Press
• Release date: Oct 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9781684810048

Autumn Stephens

Autumn Stephens is the editor of Roar Softly and Carry a Great Lipstick and the Wild Women series of biography and humor. Her work has appeared in the New York Times and various newspapers and magazines. A former book reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle, Autumn leads book group discussions and conducts writing workshops for women with cancer. She lives in Berkeley with her husband and two children.

Book preview

Cover.jpg

Wild Words

for

Wild Women

An Unbridled Collection of

Candid Observations and Extremely

Opinionated Bon Mots

Collected by

Autumn Stephens

Coral Gables, FL

Copyright © 1996, 2014, 2021, 2022 by Autumn Stephens.

Published by Conari Press, a division of Mango Publishing Group, Inc.

Cover Design: Morgane Leoni

Layout Design: Kathryn Sky-Peck

Illustrations: AdobeStock/Yevhen

Mango is an active supporter of authors’ rights to free speech and artistic expression in their books. The purpose of copyright is to encourage authors to produce exceptional works that enrich our culture and our open society.

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Wild Words for Wild Women: An Unbridled Collection of Candid Observations and Extremely Opinionated Bon Mots

LCCN: 2022940960.

ISBN: (print): 978-1-68481-003-1, (ebook) 978-1-68481-004-8

BISAC: HIS058000, HISTORY / Women

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Can We Talk?

Garrulous Goddesses

Raving Beauties

Political Animals & Public Enemies

Libidinous Lingo & Tart Retorts

Out & About

Vocal Oracles

Conjugal Confessions & Solitary Digressions

Prolix Professionals

Men, Schmen

Domestic Dissidents

Peeved Eves

Racy Remarks

Aged Sages

Phallus-Free Philosophy

Can We Talk?

Once we loved Barbie, the dishy doll with the missile-shaped bosoms and the pouty, slightly parted plastic lips. Unfortunately, little Miss Plastic didn’t have much to say for herself: she was too busy trying on all those cunning size ½ costumes (though I think she did occasionally emit a coy giggle when Ken tried to ge t cuddly).

Then came Chatty Cathy, corporeally quite charmless—but oh, how that baby could babble! We pulled and pulled her string, until one sad day her motor-mouth simply sputtered and died, never again to blurt out those startling, solipsistic demands for juice or a journey to the zoo.

Finally, we fell for Madonna, a self-proclaimed boy-toy (though obviously she liked girls just fine too) who proved that you could have mammary glands and a jaw that opens all the way. Listen, she said, everyone is entitled to my opinion. And just in case we didn’t think her smile was smug enough already, she wrapped it around a Coke bottle to prove her point.

This book is for Andrea’s daughter, and Margaret’s, and all the other little Madonna-ettes who will, I hope, grow up knowing how to do more with their breasts than beat them, and more with their mouths than paint them stop-sign red.

Garrulous Goddesses

I’m tough, ambitious, and I know exactly what I want. If that makes me a bitch, okay.

I can throw a fit, I’m a master at it.

—Madonna, chameleonesque queen of chutzpah.

The opposite of talking isn’t listening. The opposite of talking is waiting.

The telephone is a good way to talk to people without having to offer them a drink.

Success didn’t spoil me; I’ve always been insufferable.

—Satirist Fran Lebowitz, an inspiration to every sarcastic smart-ass who ever got herself booted out of high school.

Besides Shakespeare and me, who do you think there is?

It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.

The Jews have produced only three originative geniuses: Christ, Spinoza, and myself.

—Writer Gertrude Stein, who loomed large in the avant-garde circles of her day, and larger still in the privacy of her own mind.

Just being in a room with myself is almost more stimulation than I can bear.

—Kate Braverman, agitated author of the cult classic Lithium for Medea.

I would live in a communist country providing I was the Queen.

—Stella Adler, methodic mentor to big screen kings Marlon Brando, Warren Beatty, and Robert De Niro. (If she were a character in a Greek play, one interviewer concluded, her flaw would be hubris.)

I have a horror of death; the dead are so soon forgotten. But when I die, they’ll have to remember me.

—Emily Dickinson, a poet far too singular to slip anybody’s mind.

I now know all the people worth knowing in America and I find no intellect comparable to my own.

—Margaret Fuller, the brilliant Bostonian who wrote Woman in the Nineteenth Century and was a shocking exhibitionist

Reviews for Wild Words for Wild Women

[kraysaulis · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Not a book you read just once. It's a book you pick up and skim through when trying to find the right words to describe something all the time.

[rampaginglibrarian · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a fun little quote book from the wild women series--i'm not sure about the authority index though because some of it smacks of apocropha/urban legend and i like to know whereof i speak although sometimes truth and fact can ruin a good story.