Quotes by American Authors - Page 229

As for Jenny, she felt only that women - just like men - should at least be able to make conscious decisions about the course of their lives; if that made her a feminist, she said, then she guessed she was one.
John Irving
When someone falls,” Mark said, “you don’t throw her back down in the dirt. You offer her a hand up. It’s the Christian thing to do.
Courtney Milan
All feminists are suffragists, but not all suffragists are feminists," as one feminist explained.
Jill Lepore
This was her body. She had learned to take pleasure in it, even if no man had ever done the same. It was curved and generous and womanly and strong, and it was formed to do more than decorate a drawing room, or transfer wealth from one gentleman to another.She was made to tempt, labor, inspire, create, sustain.Despite the way Rafe held her bound in his grasp, a sense of power moved through her. For once, she could revel in her femininity and feel it as something other than a disadvantage to be overcome. A quality to be respected, worshiped. Even feared.
Tessa Dare
I adhere to the law of chastity because I don’t believe in pushing women. That’s what it means to be a man. I don’t hurt others simply to make myself feel superior. Gossip can ruin a woman as surely as unchaste behavior. True men don’t indulge in either. We don’t need to.
Courtney Milan
At some point, while you were roaming the globe, making treaties and dividing the spoils of war, I quietly declared my own independence. I am the sovereign nation of Clio now. And there will be no terms of surrender.
Tessa Dare
We are strong and proud and beautiful and there are not enough stars in the night sky to measure our worth. I will honor my mother and take care of my family.Yes, I think. I am just a woman.
Kristen Simmons
While men had the right to obey their biological urges, women had to suppress theirs until the perfect moment. From television, movies, books, magazines, my peers, and even some of my relatives, I was taught that if a woman allowed a man to penetrate her too soon, she was too easy of a conquest for him. He would move on to pursue greater challenges after he was finished using her body to relieve his sexual urges. If the woman waited too long to let the man enter her body, she was a prude and the man would eventually give up on her. Women needed to time this process perfectly so that she could “keep” a man in her life at all times.It was the man’s goal to catch the woman and the woman’s goal to keep the man.
Maggie Georgiana Young
The gentlemanly Number 23 would have never made such a crude statement to a lady. But I was not a lady. Sure, I was intelligent and strong, but I dared to be wide open. I was Maggie Young, chaser of boys, writer of scandal, dropper of f-bombs, tits on a stick.
Maggie Georgiana Young
I have a suspicion - and hear me out, 'cause this is a rough one - I have a suspicion that the definition of "crazy" in show business is a woman who keeps talking even after no one wants to fuck her anymore. The only person I can think of that has escaped the "crazy" moniker is Betty White, which, obviously, is because people still want to have sex with her.
Tina Fey
He doesn't need to tend her, because she hunts her own prey. He doesn't need to shield her, because she kills her own enemies. He doesn't need to look for her, because she's always at his side.
Kate Quinn
When men start affording more rights to women, maybe we'll be nicer to the ones we don't like. But for now, I know that I myself am too busy trying to preserve my rights and faculties to take care of a man's fragile ego.
Leanna Renee Hieber
And yet the idea that women are human beings remains news, a message that requires constant, clear, and artful reinforcement in a world that continues to undermine the confidence and abilities of girls and women. On the day that the intelligence and talents of women are fully honored and employed, the human community and planet itself will benefit in ways we can only begin to imagine.
Anita Diamant
I rarely meet men in real life as extraordinary as ones on film, and rarely see women on film as extraordinary as ones I know in real life
Jen Richards
I've spent a lifetime in challenge. There's no way in which you can create any meaningful change unless you do that.
Bella Abzug
I used to try to be cool. I said things that I didn't believe about other people, and celebrities, and myself; I wrote mean jokes for cheap, "edgy" laughs; I neglected good friendships for shallow one; I insisted I wasn't a feminist; I nodded along with casual misogyny in hopes that shitty dudes would like me.
Lindy West
We should be able to say, "This is my truth," and have that truth stand without a hundred clamoring voices shouting, giving the impression that multiple truths cannot co-exist. Because at some point, doesn't privilege become beside the point?
Roxanne Gay
Occasionally I’ll be sitting somewhere and I’ll be listening to someone perhaps not saying the kindest things about me. And I’ll look down at my hand and I’ll sort of pinch my skin to make sure it still has the requisite thickness I know Eleanor Roosevelt expects me to have.
Hilary Clinton
I thought all men were the enemy," he said as a tease. I narrowed my eyes. "Well who exactly do you think teaches little girls to see other little girls as the enemy, when in fact it's all just a lie to make sure we never consolidate our talents and rise to power?" I watched Lock's expression brighten and I changed the subject before he said something annoying, like how lovely I looked when I ranted about the patriarchy.
Heather Petty
She tried to ignore that, this close to the man, he had the overpowering chemical scent of a manly shower gel. That sort that normally came in a black bottle and was called something like SHOCK or EXCITE or BLUNT TRAUMA.
Maggie Stiefvater
No, no, my good knight, do not fear for me. The fire is mine. I am Daenerys Stormborn, daughter of dragons, bride of dragons, mother of dragons, don't you see? Don't you SEE?
George R.R. Martin
…if divinity, which is the goddess, is intrinsic to her being, something she caries around with her all the time, something she is, then her status in general shifts. Then one would need to be vigilant, constantly maintaining an attitude of listening to her, as ordinary woman, which affords a shift in the normative discourse between the genders and that allows for a recognition of her as a subject, as a person to whom one should listen.
Loriliai Biernacki
I would suggest that especially in the differential of images that arise, in the inflections that we find within the representations of women we may also recover a subjectivity for women. For this reason also I am specifically interested in bringing to light other models for women’s roles, models that upset business as usual and offer a greater diversity of possibilities for the ways we can imagine women.
Loriliai Biernacki
So what is transgressive in the practice of this secret Tantra is the gesture not to elide the difference that women present. What does this mean? That women represent not merely objects, property, or the possibility of sexual gratification, but an opening point to the possibility of difference as the subjectivity of the other. . .Rather, a recognition of the difference women present offers the possibility of a choice not to objectify women. This recognition recodes gendered relations inscribing woman discursively in the place of the subject.
Loriliai Biernacki
Let us remind our poor men folk in deed and song:There are two types of men in this womanly world:Those who know they are weak.Those who think they are strong.
Philip Strax
Her remark laid bare not only the reality - not enough comic opportunities for women in Hollywood - but also the ideology that created and perpetuated that reality. It was right there in the sentence structure, easily parsed: 'All the scripts are for men and you play 'the girl'' suggests that the scripts were handed down by the clean, white hand of God. It banished 'the girl' to the sidelines to perform her girly insignificance on command. It was right there in the dismissive way her comment was received as clickbait all over the Internet. 'Borat's Babe Plans a Hollywood Sex Revolution,' one headline announced, not only missing the point but mocking and dismissing it. Women's experience in its entirety seemed contained in that remark, not to mention several of the stages of feminist grief: the shock of waking up to the fact that the world does not also belong to you; the shame at having been so naive as to have thought it did; the indignation, depression, and despair that follow this realization; and, finally, the marshaling of the handy coping mechanisms, compartmentalization, pragmatism, and diminished expectations.
Carina Chocano
The Girl Scouts allow homosexuals and atheists to join their ranks, and they have become a pro-abortion feminist training corps. If the Girl Scouts of America can't get back to teaching real character, perhaps it will be time to look for our cookies elsewhere.
Hans Zeiger
A writer will write with or without a movement; but at the same time, for Chicano, lesbian, gay and feminist writers-anybody writing against the grain of Anglo misogynist culture-political movements are what have allowed our writing to surface from the secret places in our notebooks into the public sphere.
Cherríe L. Moraga
Horseman. I know you were born back when women were thought of as little more than brood mares and slaves, but it's the twenty-first century, and we can do anything a man does.
Larissa Ione
What can we learn from women like Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday that we may not be able to learn from Ida B. Wells, Anna Julia Cooper, and Mary Church Terrell? If we were beginning to appreciate the blasphemies of fictionalized blues women - especially their outrageous politics of sexuality - and the knowledge that might be gleaned from their lives about the possibilities of transforming gender relations within black communities, perhaps we also could benefit from a look at the artistic contributions of the original blues women.
Angela Y. Davis
Fundamentally, I started writing to save my life. Yes, my own life first. I see the same impulse in my students-the dark, the queer, the mixed-blood, the violated-turning to the written page with a relentless passion, a drive to avenge their own silence, invisibility, and erasure as living, innately expressive human beings.
Cherríe L. Moraga
This book is written in blood.Is it written entirely in blood?No, some of it is written in tears. Are the blood and tears all mine?Yes, they have been in the past, but the future is a different ma
Joanna Russ
It can be really painful to have to face how fucked up shit is and how scared people are…of being alive. Scared of things that are amazing. Scared of things that aren’t like television or aren’t dead. A lot of people can’t deal with three-dimensional human beings, they only know how to deal with other products — they see themselves as other products. When the world only treats you like a dot on a marketing scheme, you can learn to treat yourself and other people like that.
Kathleen Hanna
...women, brave as stars at dawn
Edwidge Danticat
We must raise both the ceiling and the floor.
Sheryl Sandberg
Mama always said barefoot and pregnant was not my style. She knew.
Barbara Kingsolver
I have a brain and a uterus, and I use both.
Patricia Schroeder
Femininity is depicted as weakness, the sapping of strength, yet masculinity is so fragile that apparently even the slightest brush with the feminine destroys it.
Gwen Sharp
Hey, look at me! Look at me! Look at me! And...look at me. Will he think I'm sexy enough? Will he find me wholesome enough? Am I fuckable? Is he allergic to feathers?!
Emilie Autumn
I am confident, I am capable, and I will not wait to be rescued by a woodsman or a hunter.
Jackson Pearce
Maybe the princess could save herself.""That sounds like a pretty good story too.
Marissa Meyer
We are becoming the men we wanted to marry
Gloria Steinem
These times are unfriendly toward Worlds alternative to this one
Thomas Pynchon
One hundred eighty days, Aislinn. Seth's been gone for one hundred eighty days, and I've watched you try to pretend it doesn't hurt for every one of them. Can't I try to make you happy?
Melissa Marr
The truth is that we live in a world that diminishes possibilities.
Lionel Suggs
It could have been different," I say, almost under my breath. If I'd kissed Indie again after she kissed me. If I hadn't known Cassia before I met Indie."But it's not," Indie says, and she's right.
Ally Condie
In their faces--plenty of them were handsome, but ruined--I've seen the remnants of who they almost succeeded in being but failed to be, before becoming themselves.
Richard Ford
Chase every rung of possibility, and you still get absolutely nowhere.
Jodi Picoult
Don’t let psychological warfare from an advertisement campaign blind you from the truth of your beauty, possibility, worthiness, and purpose.
Steve Maraboli
As pathetic as it was, she'd rather hold on to the possibility of something perfect than be hit with the reality of nothing much.
Francine Pascal
Write there. In the weak spot of impossibility.
Lysa TerKeurst
There's also a possibility that the landlord is in there right now, wearing women's undergarments. Or a drug addict is inside stealing jewelry.Or a boatload of recent Chinese immigrants without a television watching Russia play Finland in hockey and placing bets over beer. You have no idea what's behind that door. You can't just pick the options within your field of vision. Reality comes from everywhere. At best, you can narrow down the likelihoods. But in the end, it's not a matter of deduction. It's a matter of fact. One bullet will kill you if you're stupid or unlucky. So at least don't be stupid
Derek B. Miller
The morning felt like a mixing bowl just waiting for its ingredients; there was a sense of possibility to it, a promise of something more to come.
Jennifer E. Smith
What happens slowly carries in each part the possibility of returning to what came before. In an accident everything is simultaneous, sudden, irreversible. It means this: no going back.
Rachel Kushner
We're so young. We can't, we MUST not loose this sense of possibility because in the end, it's all we have.
Marina Keegan
Every meaningful success I have accomplished was made possible by love.
Bryant McGill
What was a shadow, after all, but a shape in the moving world reduced to a projection of possibilities?
Yoon Ha Lee
Is it possible not to ever know your type--not to even know you have a type--until quite suddenly you do?
Jennifer E. Smith
A man cannot despair if he can imagine a better life, and if he can enact something of its possibility. It is only when I am ensnarled in the meaningless ordeals and the ordeals of meaninglessness, of which our public and political life is now so productive, that I lose the awareness of something better, and feel the despair of having come to the dead end of possibility.
Wendell Berry
If you shatter the fish bowl so that everything is possible you don't have freedom you have paralysis. Everybody needs a fishbowl.
Barry Schwartz