Girlhood Quotes

“Peach pits are poisonous. This is not a mistake. Girlhood is growing fruit around cyanide. It will never be your for swallowing.”
― Brenna Twohy, Swallowtail

“There is so much woman in many a girl and too much boy in many a man.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“And a naïve part of me thinks that since we have made it this far, we will make it forever. If we existed for even a second, we could exist eternally.”
― Chloe Michelle Howarth, Sunburn

“Over the fence—
Strawberries— grow—
Over the fence—
I could climb— if I tried, I know—
Berries are nice!

But— if I stained my Apron—
God would certainly scold!
Oh, dear, — I guess if He were a Boy—
He'd— climb— if He could!”
― Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

“All her young life she has tried to please her father, never quite realizing that, as a girl, she never could.”
― Alice Walker

“You are not like other girls. You are not like other girls ("You are not like other girls," the boys you run with will tell you, and you will try not to let them see you preen under the glancing light of their approval). You learn their books and their language. You laugh at their jokes. You listen to their stories, sit blank-eyed on their couched while they play video games, pass them your English notes. You keep their secrets. You use the words they use about other girls in order to assure yourself that they will never use those words about you. You make yourself into nothingness, a ghost conjured into being only through the desires of boys, the rules of boys, the ideas of boys. You're not like other girls.”
― Sarah McCarry, Here We Are

“When is the proper age to shed the moniker 'girl'? Do you stop being one with your first period? Are you an adult once you grow taller than 160 centimeters? When lots of adults don't reach that height anyway? And is it not true that all of our girlhoods are different, not just in terms of physical growth, but in the growth of our hearts and minds?”
― Park Seolyeon, A Magical Girl Retires

“Girls—normal human girls—people could contend with; they were weak and small. And dogs too could be trained. But girls who became dogs, or who let the world believe they were dogs, were either powerful or mad: both monstrous possibilities.”
― Xenobe Purvis, The Hounding

“I know that I’m a woman, a woman with inner strength and a great deal of courage!”
― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition

“Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“Girls are caterpillars while they live in the world, to be finally butterflies when the summer comes; but in the meantime there are are grubs and larvae[...]”
― J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla

“There is a certain way of intimacy that only girls have with each other. Girls don't just love each other, they eat each other.”
― Johanna Goldenberg, The Sharp Edge of Seashells

“All of my favourite books were about vaguely disembodied cerebral girls and if I wrote some book it would be about a vaguely disembodied cerebral girl too”
― Harriet Armstrong, To Rest Our Minds and Bodies

“She'd never confessed to being complete,
or fittingly stitched together...
She was a storyteller with a stream of dreams,
a gleaming bird with ruffled feathers.”
― B. Elae

“Tomi isn’t just a dog. She’s the last thing keeping me tethered to a world that rarely made room for girls like me.”
― Arabella Sveinsdottir, Where The Cicada Sleeps: A Diary-Style Portrait of Girlhood, Betrayal, and the Quiet Violence of Being Misunderstood

“They helped like tourists. They smiled, took pictures, and left us in the same clothes we wore before they came.”
― Arabella Sveinsdottir, Where The Cicada Sleeps: A Diary-Style Portrait of Girlhood, Betrayal, and the Quiet Violence of Being Misunderstood

“I remember everything. I remember everything so much that I am being crushed under the weight of it all. If I weren't so horribly defined by everything I've ever loved and lost, maybe I could be the kind of person who moved through life easily.”
― Sasha Peyton Smith, The Rose Bargain

“I have discovered a miracle above the rain, thought Joana. A miracle split into chunky, serious, twinkling stars, like a stationary warning: like a lighthouse. What are they trying to say? In them I sense the secret, the twinkling is the impassive mystery I hear flowing inside me, crying in broad, desperate, romantic notes. Dear God, at least allow me to communicate with them, satisfy my desire to kiss them. To feel their light on my lips, feel it glow inside my body, leaving it sparkling and transparent, cool and moist like the minutes before dawn. Why do these strangers grip me?”
― Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart

“Here is a fantasy land purchased at the price of loneliness and relinquished youth.”
― Wang Anyi, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai

“Girlhood was as ephemeral as a drop of water on a lily pad. Soon I'd have to leave all that I loved- parents, sister, palace, garden, the healing house- to take my place in another family, which I must then call mine.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Forest of Enchantments

“There were bigger things in this world to consider than conciliatory meals, like raising a girl to hold her breath under the sea, a knife clamped between her teeth.”
― Stephanie Dupal, The Kindness of Terrible People and Other Stories

“I don't know what came over me, but I tossed Mr. Quintana my keys. 'You can take your girlfriend out for a spin if you want,' I said. There was no hesitation in his smile. I could tell Mrs. Quintana was trying to suppress the girl that was still living inside of her. But even without her husband's smile, what she was holding inside of her seemed far more profound to me. It was as if I was coming to understand Dante's mother. I knew that it mattered. I wondered why.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“The girl was still alive. She sat crumpled and half-awake in the corner of the expansive backseat like a crushed butterfly.”
― Min Jin Lee, Pachinko

“I've always wondered why people diminish girlhood as somehow cosseted or twee, when the reality of coming-of-age as a young woman is so raw, filled with emotional violence and literal blood. Do girls not suffer enough to be taken seriously?”
― Sophie Gilbert

“I once told Lou that you start the story where the story starts.”
― Stephanie Logue

“Girls don’t learn confidence by staying quiet. They learn it by using their voice.”
― Bree Sprual

“We were spindly and angsty things, trying on every version of ourselves and each other.”
― Emily Singer, Doll Baby

“Ever since I’d learned about the corruption of Buddy Willard my virginity weighed like a millstone around my neck. It had been of such enormous importance to me for so long that my habit was to defend it at all costs. I had been defending it for five years and I was sick of it.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

“I walk up the street with beer taste in my mouth, warm and bitter and wonderful, and what do you know, there's that girl again, the belly button girl, leaning back to show that marvelous hole to the world. She has no fucking idea.
When I walk past her, I want to grab her wrist and drag her down into the pothole, which is just a block or two back. She looks at me and smiles because she knows she has nothing to fear from me, she thinks I'm her ally, but I'm not.”
― Aimee Bender, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt

“I longed for a feeling again, a particular one: the one of approaching a room but of not yet having entered it. Being engaged to marry, it should have been what I felt. But instead I associated the feeling with another part of my life: that anteroom of girlhood, with its laughter as yet only affianced to the world, anticipation playing in the heart like an orchestra tuning and warming, the notes unwed and fabulous and crazed—I wanted it back!—those beginning sounds, so much more interesting than the piece itself.”
― Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?