Yet if a woman never lets herself go, how will she ever know how far she might have got? If she never takes off her high-heeled shoes, how will she ever know how far she could walk or how fast she could run?

Meaning of the quote

This quote encourages women to step outside their comfort zone and try new things. If a woman never allows herself to let go and explore her full potential, she won't know how much she can really achieve. Similarly, if she never takes off her high heels, she won't discover how far she can walk or run without them. The main message is that in order to grow and succeed, you have to be willing to take risks and try different approaches, even if they're unfamiliar or challenging at first.

About Germaine Greer

Germaine Greer is an influential Australian writer and feminist who played a key role in the second-wave feminism movement. She’s known for her groundbreaking 1970 book ‘The Female Eunuch’ and her continued advocacy for women’s liberation and self-determination.

More about the author

More quotes from Germaine Greer

The compelled mother loves her child as the caged bird sings. The song does not justify the cage nor the love the enforcement.

Germaine Greer

Australian writer and public intellectual (born 1939)

There is no such thing as security. There never has been.

Germaine Greer

Australian writer and public intellectual (born 1939)

Act quickly, think slowly.

Germaine Greer

Australian writer and public intellectual (born 1939)

Evolution is what it is. The upper classes have always died out; it’s one of the most charming things about them.

Germaine Greer

Australian writer and public intellectual (born 1939)

Security is when everything is settled. When nothing can happen to you. Security is the denial of life.

Germaine Greer

Australian writer and public intellectual (born 1939)

If a person loves only one other person, and is indifferent to his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.

Germaine Greer

Australian writer and public intellectual (born 1939)

The real theater of the sex war is the domestic hearth.

Germaine Greer

Australian writer and public intellectual (born 1939)

Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It has no mother.

Germaine Greer

Australian writer and public intellectual (born 1939)

You’re only young once, but you can be immature forever.

Germaine Greer

Australian writer and public intellectual (born 1939)

Perhaps catastrophe is the natural human environment, and even though we spend a good deal of energy trying to get away from it, we are programmed for survival amid catastrophe.

Germaine Greer

Australian writer and public intellectual (born 1939)

One may not reach the dawn save by the path of the night.

Germaine Greer

Australian writer and public intellectual (born 1939)

I think that testosterone is a rare poison.

Germaine Greer

Australian writer and public intellectual (born 1939)

English culture is basically homosexual in the sense that the men only really care about other men.

Germaine Greer

Australian writer and public intellectual (born 1939)

The house wife is an unpaid employee in her husband’s house in return for the security of being a permanent employee.

Germaine Greer

Australian writer and public intellectual (born 1939)

Man is jealous because of his amour propre; woman is jealous because of her lack of it.

Germaine Greer

Australian writer and public intellectual (born 1939)

Never advise anyone to go to war or to get married. Write down the advice of him who loves you, though you like it not at present. He that has no children brings them up well.

Germaine Greer

Australian writer and public intellectual (born 1939)

We in the West do not refrain from childbirth because we are concerned about the population explosion or because we feel we cannot afford children, but because we do not like children.

Germaine Greer

Australian writer and public intellectual (born 1939)

Perhaps women have always been in closer contact with reality than men: it would seem to be the just recompense for being deprived of idealism.

Germaine Greer

Australian writer and public intellectual (born 1939)

I didn’t fight to get women out from behind vacuum cleaners to get them onto the board of Hoover.

Germaine Greer

Australian writer and public intellectual (born 1939)

Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.

Germaine Greer

Australian writer and public intellectual (born 1939)

Psychoanalysis is the confession without absolution.

Germaine Greer

Australian writer and public intellectual (born 1939)

The surest guide to the correctness of the path that women take is joy in the struggle. Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.

Germaine Greer

Australian writer and public intellectual (born 1939)

Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate.

Germaine Greer

Australian writer and public intellectual (born 1939)

Women are reputed never to be disgusted. The sad fact is that they often are, but not with men; following the lead of men, they are most often disgusted with themselves.

Germaine Greer

Australian writer and public intellectual (born 1939)

What we ought to see in the agonies of puberty is the result of the conditioning that maims the female personality in creating the feminine.

Germaine Greer

Australian writer and public intellectual (born 1939)

Even crushed against his brother in the Tube the average Englishman pretends desperately that he is alone.

Germaine Greer

Australian writer and public intellectual (born 1939)

Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.

Germaine Greer

Australian writer and public intellectual (born 1939)

The sight of women talking together has always made men uneasy; nowadays it means rank subversion.

Germaine Greer

Australian writer and public intellectual (born 1939)

Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves; when that right is pre-empted it is called brain-washing.

Germaine Greer

Australian writer and public intellectual (born 1939)

Only one thing is certain: if pot is legalized, it won’t be for our benefit but for the authorities. To have it legalized will also be to lose control of it.

Germaine Greer

Australian writer and public intellectual (born 1939)

Developing the muscles of the soul demands no competitive spirit, no killer instinct, although it may erect pain barriers that the spiritual athlete must crash through.

Germaine Greer

Australian writer and public intellectual (born 1939)

The essence of pleasure is spontaneity.

Germaine Greer

Australian writer and public intellectual (born 1939)

Australia is a huge rest home, where no unwelcome news is ever wafted on to the pages of the worst newspapers in the world.

Germaine Greer

Australian writer and public intellectual (born 1939)

Yet if a woman never lets herself go, how will she ever know how far she might have got? If she never takes off her high-heeled shoes, how will she ever know how far she could walk or how fast she could run?

Germaine Greer

Australian writer and public intellectual (born 1939)

The management of fertility is one of the most important functions of adulthood.

Germaine Greer

Australian writer and public intellectual (born 1939)

Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.

Germaine Greer

Australian writer and public intellectual (born 1939)

I have always been principally interested in men for sex. I’ve always thought any sane woman would be a lover of women because loving men is such a mess. I have always wished I’d fall in love with a woman. Damn.

Germaine Greer

Australian writer and public intellectual (born 1939)

The tragedy of machismo is that a man is never quite man enough.

Germaine Greer

Australian writer and public intellectual (born 1939)

Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it.

Germaine Greer

Australian writer and public intellectual (born 1939)

All societies on the verge of death are masculine. A society can survive with only one man; no society will survive a shortage of women.

Germaine Greer

Australian writer and public intellectual (born 1939)

The principle of the brotherhood of man is narcissistic… for the grounds for that love have always been the assumption that we ought to realize that we are the same the whole world over.

Germaine Greer

Australian writer and public intellectual (born 1939)