Song of Solomon Women and Femininity Quotes

And the one person who dared to but didn’t care to was the one person in the world he hated more than his wife in spite of the fact that she was his sister. (1.1.17)

Then Pilate spoke. "Reba. She don’t mean food." (1.2.49)

Beauty shops always had curtains or shades up. Barbershops didn’t. The women didn’t want anybody on the street to be able to see them getting their hair done. They were ashamed. (1.3.62)

Milkman looked at his sisters. He had never been able to really distinguish them (or their roles) from his mother. They were in their early teens when he was born; they were thirty-five and thirty-six now. But since Ruther was only sixteen years older than Lena, all three had always looked the same age to him. Now when he met his sisters’ eyes over the table, they returned him a look of hatred so fresh, so new, it startled him. Their pale eyes no longer appeared to blur into their even paler skin. It seemed to him as though charcoal lines had been drawn around their eyes; that two drag lines had been smudged down their cheeks, and their rosy lips were swollen in hatred so full it was about to burst through. Milkman had to blink twice before their faces returned to the vaguely alarmed blandness he was accustomed to. (1.3.68)

The women in the wine house were indifferent to nothing and understood nothing. Every sentence, every word, was new to them and they listened to what he said like bright-eyed ravens, trembling in their eagerness to catch and interpret every sound in the universe. (1.3.79)

Hagar lowered her eyelids and gazed hungrily down the figure of the woman who had been only a silhouette to her. The woman who slept in the same house with him, and who could call him home and he would come, who knew the mystery of his flesh, had memory of him as long as his life. […] Jealously loomed so large in her it made her tremble. (1.5.137)

They were so different, these two women. One black, the other lemony. One corseted, the other buck naked under her dress. One well read but ill traveled. The other had read only a geography book. But had been from one end of the country to another. One wholly dependent on money for life, the other indifferent to it. But those were the meaningless things. Their similarities were profound. Both were vitally interested in Macon Dead’s son, and both had close and supportive post-humous communication with their fathers. (1.5.139)

"You don’t know a single thing about either one of us – we made roses; that’s all you knew – but now you know what’s best for the very woman who wiped the dribble from your chin because you were too young to know how to spit. Our girlhood was spent like a found nickel on you. […] And to this day, you have never asked one of us if we were tired, or sad, or wanted a cup of coffee. […] Where do you get the right to decide our lives?" (1.9.215)

He hadn’t thought much of it when she’d told him, but now it seemed to him that such sexual deprivation would affect her, hurt her in precisely the way it would affect and hurt him, hurt her in precisely the way it would affect and hurt him. If it were possible for somebody to force him to live that way, to tell him, ‘You may walk and live among women, you may even lust after them, but you will not make love for the next twenty years," how would he feel? […] His mother had been able to live through that by a long nursing of her son, some occasional visits to a graveyard. What might she have been like had her husband loved her? (2.12.300)

"You don’t hear about women like that anymore, but there used to be more – the kind of woman who couldn’t live without a particular man. And Love, I guess. But I always thought it was trying to take care of children by themselves, you know what I mean?" (2.14.323)