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Quote by R.F. Kuang

“She was, after all, a woman scholar in a country whose word for madness derived from the word for a womb.”

Quote by R.F. Kuang

Book:Babel

Work

Babel

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R.F. Kuang

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“It's not your business what I do with my body, or what Alim does with his. You have no 'right' to me, we weren't together, we weren't even exclusive. You're not entitled to fuck me just because you were a decent human being and went along when I wasn't ready to be intimate with you, or be mad because I ended up fucking someone else. You don't get points for waiting for me. I didn't use you, I didn't lead you on. I went as far as I felt comfortable, and I stopped there.”

“I want to scream when I hear him use the word 'tradition' by way of explanation. How many crimes are committed against women in the name of tradition the world over? Why, as humankind grows better informed, globalised and apparently more knowledgeable, does the reverence for outdated and inexplicable tradition persist, flouting reason and even the law? How convenient for the aura of tradition to obscure misogyny and even legitimise criminal behaviour.”

“I have never felt myself to be ageing: on the contrary, I have always had the strange sensation as time passes that I am getting not older but younger. My body feels as though it has innocence as its destination. This is not, of course, a physical reality – I view the proof in the mirror with increasing puzzlement – but it is perhaps a psychological one that conscripts the body into its workings. It is as though I was born imprisoned in a block of stone from which it has been both a necessity and an obligation to free myself. The feeling of incarceration in what was pre-existing and inflexible works well enough, I suppose, as a paradigm for the contemporary woman’s struggle towards personal liberty. She might feel it politically, socially, linguistically, emotionally; I happen to have felt it physically. I am not free yet, by any means. It is laborious and slow, chipping away at that block. There would be a temptation to give up, were the feelings of claustrophobia and confinement less intense.”