“When we were only acquaintances, you let me be myself, but now you re always protecting me... I won t be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult. Can t I be trusted to face the truth but I must get it second-hand through you? A woman s place!”
“How can I tell a story we already know too well? Her name was Africa. His was France. He colonized her, exploited her, silenced her, and even decades after it was supposed to have ended, still acted with a high hand in resolving her affairs in places like Côte d Ivoire, a name she had been given because of her export products, not her own identity. Her name was Asia. His was Europe. Her name was silence. His was power. Her name was poverty. His was wealth. Her name was Her, but what was hers? His name was His, and he presumed everything was his, including her, and he thought be could take her without asking and without consequences. It was a very old story, though its outcome had been changing a little in recent decades. And this time around the consequences are shaking a lot of foundations, all of which clearly needed shaking. Who would ever write a fable as obvious, as heavy-handed as the story we ve been given? ... His name was privilege, but hers was possibility. His was the same old story, but hers was a new one about the possibility of changing a story that remains unfinished, that includes all of us, that matters so much, that we will watch but also make and tell in the weeks, months, years, decades to come.”
“all of the oceans & galaxies did not conspire together to create me just so i could reproduce for you. -Startling Fact #1”
“While falling in love is fun, it s not everything, and it s not the antidote to an unfulfilled life, despite what Reese Witherspoon movies may tell you.”
“A queen offers her hand to be kissed, & can form it into a fist while smiling the whole damn time.”
“There is no such thing as a woman who doesn’t work. There is only a woman who isn’t paid for her work.”
“...counselling man to treat her as a slave while persuading her that she is a queen.”
“We teach girls shame. Close your legs; cover yourself. We make them feel as though being born female, they re already guilty of something. And so, girls grow up to be women who silence themselves. They grow up to be women who cannot say what they truly think. And they grow up--and this is the worst thing we do to girls--they grow up to be women who have turned pretense into an art form.”
“Long before all these divisions were opened between home and the road, betweens a woman s place and a man s world, humans followed the crops, the seasons, traveling with their families, our companions, animals, our tents. We built campfires and moved from place to place. This way of traveling is still in our cellular memory. Living things have evolved as travelers, Even migrating birds know that nature doesn t demand a choice between nesting and flight.”
“I was the first woman to burn my bra - it took the fire department four days to put it out.”
“I think the girl who is able to earn her own living and pay her own way should be as happy as anybody on earth. The sense of independence and security is very sweet.”
“If women want rights more than they got, why don t they just take them, and not be talking about it.”
“He cried when I left, which I find to be standard male behavior.”
“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.”
“Only stupid men would want stupid wives!”
“When you grow up as a girl, the world tells you the things that you are supposed to be: emotional, loving, beautiful, wanted. And then when you are those things, the world tells you they are inferior: illogical, weak, vain, empty.”
“And why don t you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it. I know why you haven t written. (And why I didn t write before the age of twenty-seven.) Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it s reserved for the great-that is for great men ; and it s silly. Besides, you ve written a little, but in secret. And it wasn t good, because it was in secret, and because you punished yourself for writing, because you didn t go all the way, or because you wrote, irresistibly, as when we would masturbate in secret, not to go further, but to attenuate the tension a bit, just enough to take the edge off. And then as soon as we come, we go and make ourselves feel guilty-so as to be forgiven; or to forget, to bury it until the next time.”