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I Quotes

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All I Quotes

“I still believe we wasted a golden opportunity to make significant changes in our country. I think people in America would have been ready and willing to do it, but the Bush administration took a kind of simplistic, almost moronic approach to it, all because people were so afraid.”

“I still believed I could will my body to become what my mind knew it should be: free and strong as a coil of brass wire. My chest and belly felt swollen and full, and every movement reminded me of how wrong I felt. I moved slower. A chasm had opened between me and my skin, as though I were fumbling around in a too-big pair of gloves. The only words I had back then were for what I knew I wasn't—a girl. But how to explain this feeling that my body was a tracing of something else, and not all the lines matched up?”

“I still can't believe it's really you," he murmurs, running his fingers down my cheek. "This face...it's yours, isn't it?" "The one I was born with," I admit, heat rising under my skin as I feel a surge of shyness. I look down at my hands. "Do you...like it?" "Zahra." I can't help but lift my gaze at the warmth in his tone. His eyes are shining, his lips slanted in a small smile. "You're beautiful," he says. "I mean, you were beautiful before, of course, but knowing that this is the real you...I didn't think I could love you more, but I do.”

“I still can't believe someone as hot as you has validation issues but I also know that being a very sensitive person on this planet is painful and some of us are built like sieves, or have holes where any external validation just pours right through and we never get full, and I also know it's ultimately an inside job anyway and no amount of external validation will ever be enough (though damn it can feel good in the moment, and it sort of makes me mad at god, actually, like, okay god, you built me like this so teach me how to validate myself in a way that feels as good as when a boy does it or the Internet does it, because there is always a cost when a boy does it or the Internet does it): a love story.”

“I still can’t wrap my mind around crossing that line of human behavior – civilized people punching and fighting, making violence their communication of choice. Is it because I’m a woman, I’ve never considered hitting someone who acted inappropriately? Even one of my best male friends, a gentle man, a believer in spirit and mankind, has thrown a few punches in his time. As a writer, my weapons are words. The thought of hurting someone physically to prove my point has never and will never be an option for me. Well, let me amend that: if someone hurt my child in front of me, tiger-mother’s claws would come out.”

“I still can't figure out what inspired me to do physics. But since I was nine or ten years old, I wanted to be like [Albert] Einstein. He was my hero. I knew no physicists. I knew no scientists. I had nobody around me. And I went to a convent that didn't even have higher mathematics and physics. I taught myself these subjects in order to get into university.”

“I still cannot fathom how difficult it was for the women I met to find out that they were HIV-positive. It is such a courageous undertaking in countries where there is still considerable stigma about the disease. They got tested to ensure that their unborn babies would have a chance of life by being born free of the virus.”

“I still can’t say whether I ever want children….I can only say how I feel now--grateful to be on my own. I also know that I won’t go forth and have children just in case I might regret missing it later in life; I don’t think this is a strong enough motivation to bring more babies onto the earth.”

“I still carry the weight of being a rape survivor, and of the demand that I forgive and forget to uphold the myth of the perfect black family. I carry the weight handed to me by the Black moral majority, who ignored my father's crimes and who knows how many other men's, who tried to buy off a terrified thirteen year old with a one-day trip to an amusement park. They were so desperate to project the image of the respectable, righteous, picture-perfect Black family to the world that they were willing to let women and girls in the picture suffer.”