The lion roars, the forest falls silent. The lioness roars, the lion falls silent.

{Gumnaam}

There is water in my eyes and fire in my heart. Do you want a drink? Or a spark?

{Sharif ar Radi}

I don’t know if you’re beautiful until after we have a conversation.

{Dau Voire}

All my life my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name.

{André Breton}

The female doesn’t want a rich man or a handsome man or even a poet, she wants a man who understands her eyes if she gets sad, and points to his chest and says: 'Here is your home country.'

{Nizar Qabbani}

I am homesick for a place I am not sure even exists. One where my heart is full. My body loved. And my soul understood.

{Melissa Cox}

I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger than reason. Reality doesn’t impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.

{Anais Nin}

I want enough time to be in love with everything.

{Marina Keegan}

The way the night knows itself with the moon, be that with me.

{Rumi}

It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in a language chiefly made by men to express theirs.

{Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd}

You were once wild here. Don't let them tame you.

{Isadora Duncan}

She wanted what most women want, but she wanted it much more fiercely and passionately.

{F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned}

I did not know I was on a search for passionate aliveness. I only knew I was lonely and lost and that something was drawing me deeper beneath the surface of my life in search of meaning. There is a hunger in people to go to those deep depths; to know that our lives are sacred; that our hearts are truly capable of love. It is a yearning to be all that we can be. A longing for what is real.

{Anne Hillman}

True power does not need arrogance, a long beard and a barking voice. True power strangles you with silk ribbons, charm, and intelligence.

{Slavoj Zizek}

The secrets inside her mind are like flowers in a garden at nighttime, filling the darkness with perfume.

{Fumiko Enchi}

There are no demure women; only women that nobody has yet been able to unveil.

{Unknown}

She had always wanted words, she loved them, grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.

{Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient}

She was incomprehensible, for in her, soul and spirit were one - the beauty of her body was the essence of her soul. She was that unity sought for by philosophers through many centuries. In this outdoor waiting room of winds and stars, she had been sitting for a hundred years, at peace in the contemplation of herself.

{F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned}

Your perfume, my weakness and your secret, follows me like a snakebite. And your hair is a tent of wind autumn in color.

{Mahmoud Darwish}

I love you the way certain dark things are loved, secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

{Pablo Neruda, Sonnet XVII}

I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart; I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.

{Jorge Luis Borges}

See, we were never about butterflies. We’ve always been about burning stars. All about us is unearthly and radiant.

{Anna Akhmatova}

Men may have discovered fire, but women discovered how to play with it.

{Candance Bushnell}

I want a trouble-maker for a lover, blood spiller, blood drinker, a heart of flame, who quarrels with the sky and fights with fate, who burns like fire on the rushing sea.

{Maulana Rumi}

Is that all you want to be? Liked? Wouldn't you rather be passionately and voraciously desired?

{Margaret Atwood}

Some people underestimate how erotic it is to be understood.

{Mary Rakow}

When night comes, something speaks from that soft, fragrant wilderness. It says, the heart is not a door. But it opens. We feel in the dark for the hinge.

{Carole Glasser Langille}

I've always liked quiet people: you never know if they're dancing in a daydream or if they're carrying the weight of the world.

{John Green}

I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.

{Roland Barthes}

Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.

{Nicole Krauss}

“You," he said, "are a terribly real thing in a terribly false world, and that, I believe, is why you are in so much pain.”

{Emilie Autumn, The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls}

Some people are born with tornadoes in their lives, but constellations in their eyes. Other people are born with stars at their feet, but their souls are lost at sea.

{Nikita Gill, Perspectives}

In a way, you are poetry material; you are full of cloudy subtleties I am willing to spend a lifetime figuring out. Words burst in your essence and you carry their dust in the pores of your ethereal individuality.

{Franz Kafka}

I cannot capture your grace in words; I am profoundly enchanted by the flowing complexity in you.

{John Keats, from a letter to Fanny Brawne}

There was something about him she wanted to learn, grow into, and hide in, where she could turn away from being an adult. There was some little waltz in the way he spoke to her and the way he thought.

{Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient}

We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography - to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience.

{Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient}

A beautiful woman is a beautiful woman, but a beautiful woman with a brain is an absolutely lethal combination.

{Prabal Gurung}

I don't want to look pretty... I want to look otherworldly and vaguely threatening.

{Unknown, tumblr}

I caused men no longer to foresee their death; I planted firmly in their hearts blind hopefulness.

{Aeschylus}

She was like a piano in a country where everyone has had their hands cut off.

{Angela Carter}

My God, what would a man do with a woman like that except worship her?

{Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms}

His dark eyes took me in, and I wondered what they would look like if he fell in love.

{F. Scott Fitzgerald}

You, who wove stars into your hair as a girl, and equally let them freckle your skin, held the moon up as a looking-glass and bewitched existence for eternity.

{Nikita Gill}

I only feel close to people who arouse my energy, who make enormous demands of me, who are capable of enriching me with experience, pain, people who do not doubt my courage, or my toughness. People who do not believe me naive or innocent, but who challenge my keenest wisdom, who have the courage to treat me like a woman in spite of the fact that they are aware of my vulnerability.

{Anais Nin}

What he would say, he cannot say to this woman whose openness is like a wound, whose youth is not mortal yet. He cannot alter what he loves most in her, her lack of compromise, where the romance of the poems she loves still sits with ease in the real world. Outside these qualities he knows there is no order in the world.

{Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient}

The sheath that held her soul had assumed significance - that was all. She was a sun, radiant, growing, gathering light and storing it - then after an eternity pouring it forth in a glance, the fragment of a sentence, to that part of him that cherished all beauty and all illusion.

{F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned}

I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self respect. And it’s these things I’d believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn’t all she should be. I love her and it is the beginning of everything.

{F. Scott Fitzgerald}

To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else's heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell.

{Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 100 Years of Solitude}

She is the Life/Death/Life force, she is the incubator. She is intuition, she is far-seer, she is deep listener, she is loyal heart. She encourages humans to remain multi-lingual; fluent in the languages of dreams, passion, and poetry. She whispers from night dreams, she leaves behind on the terrain of a woman’s soul a coarse hair and muddy footprints. These fill women with longing to find her, free her, and love her.

{Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with the Wolves}