What a woman says to her ardent lover should be written in wind and running water.

This line is a well-known English rendering of Catullus’s warning about the unreliability of lovers’ promises, spoken in the context of his poems about “Lesbia,” the woman with whom he had an intense, turbulent affair. In the relevant poem, Catullus addresses a friend (or the reader) and advises skepticism toward what a woman says to a passionate suitor: such words are fleeting and should not be treated as binding. The sentiment fits Catullus’s broader cycle of disillusionment, jealousy, and bitterness as the relationship deteriorates, where vows of fidelity and affection are repeatedly undercut by betrayal and changing desire.

The image of writing “in wind and running water” suggests impermanence: words spoken in the heat of desire vanish as quickly as they are uttered. Catullus is not primarily making a neutral claim about women as such, but dramatizing the speaker’s wounded realism about erotic rhetoric—promises made to secure love (or sex) are often strategic, emotional, and unstable rather than durable commitments. The line captures a recurring Catullan tension between the longing for fides (trust, loyalty) and the recognition that passion can dissolve it. Its enduring force lies in the vivid metaphor for language that cannot be held, archived, or enforced.