Menstruation Quotes

“If you make some comment even obliquely alluding to menstruation or menopause and its effect on my judgment," Murphy interrupted, "I will break your arm in eleven places.”

“It's okay to talk about birth, okay - then menstruation. I first started my advocacy for women's health in the field of reproductive freedom, and the next stage would be bringing menopause out of the closet.”

“There is no relationship between brain size and intelligence. There is however a strong correlation between the size of the brain and the tendency to monthly episodes of irrational moodiness.”

“One day the girl is taking a bath and calls out. The widow comes into the tiny bathroom and the water surrounding the girl’s legs is clouded with crimson. She slaps the girl in the face and smiles and kisses her on the cheeks. She says, “May you bloom.” The girl doesn’t flinch. The widow tells her, “This is the first language of your body. It is the word ne. When you bleed each month, as when the moon comes and goes in its journey, you leave the world of men. You enter the body of all women, who are connected to all of nature.” The girl asks, “Why is it the word ne?” The widow responds, “When you bleed, this word is more powerful than any word you could ever speak. It is a blood word. It binds you to animals and trees and the moon and the sun. Where men take blood in the world in hunting and war, women give blood. It is the word ne because it closes the room of a woman’s body to men.” The widow places her hands into the water and says, “Good. You are alive. You and I are alive.”

“I have periods now, like normal girls; I too am among the knowing, I too can sit out volleyball games and go to the nurse's for aspirin and waddle along the halls with a pad like a flattened rabbit tail wadded between my legs, sopping with liver-colored blood.”

“Ladies haven't the luxury of being squeamish about blood.”

“In terms of language, there were no separate words for female genitalia for thousands of years. That was mostly because women were considered pretty much the same as men, only of course flimsier, more poorly designed, and incapable of writing in the snow.”

“Gradually my whole concept of time changed until I thought of a month as having twenty-five days of humanness and five others when I might just as well have been an animal in a steel trap.”

“Women complain about premenstrual syndrome, but I think of it as the only time of the month that I can be myself.”