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Feminism Quotes

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Feminism Quotes

“It may not be right,” Aalea said. “It may not be just. But this is a world of senators and consuls and Luminatii—of republics and cults and institutions built and maintained almost entirely by men. And in it, love is a weapon. Sex is a weapon. Your eyes? Your body? Your smile?” She shrugged. “Weapons. And they give you more power than a thousand swords. Open more gates than a thousand war walkers. Love has toppled kings, Mia. Ended empires. Even broken our poor, sunsburned sky.”

“Another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy, in the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, harkening to its deepest rhythms so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, or examining an idea. That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife. This is one reason why the erotic is so feared, and so often relegated to the bedroom alone, when it is recognized at all. For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.”

“You know how the story ends. He escaped and went on to become the greatest chief Suntown ever had. He never built a shrine or a temple or even a shack in the name of Tia. In the Great Book, her name is never mentioned again. He never mused about her or even asked where she was buried. Tia was a virgin. She was beautiful. She was poor. And she was a girl. It was her duty to sacrifice her life for his.”

“You feel lonely and see it as a void, a painful emptiness that must be filled by another person. When a man appears, you push him into that void to stop the horrible feeling. This is the 'clinging.' It is a frantic attempt to use another person as insulation against yourself. I felt that same void. But I learned to see it not as an absence, but as a space. An empty room. And I understood that my life's primary task was not to find someone to move into that room with me, but to furnish it myself.”

“The Garden If no one loves her Please, love you Even if she’s a wreckage Or lost, in a predetermined path Or broken, by a perfect love Or loved, by your sacrificial loneliness Please, build her Even when you have no stone Or judge her abysmal tombstone Or her nothingness collapses your passion Water her azaleas Out of frozen concrete From sublime bottles No one full, ever knew how to fill. Jenim Dibie”

“I was the victim of both social orders: of Apollo’s waxing patriarchy, & of Clytemnestra’s last spasms of outraged matriarchy. My father Priam probably would have said: that I had asked for it. That no society could be expected to tolerate an individual who insisted on telling the truth.”

“So I was hard on the Beast, win or lose, When I got upstairs, those tragic girls in my head, Turfing him out of bed; standing alone On the balcony, the night so cold I could taste the stars On the tip of my tongue. And I made a prayer – Thumbing my pearls, the tears of Mary, one by one, Like a rosary – words for the lost, the captive beautiful, The wives, those less fortunate than we. The moon was a hand-mirror breathed on by a Queen. My breath was a chiffon scarf for an elegant ghost. I turned to go back inside. Bring me the Beast for the night. Bring me the wine-cellar key. Let the less-loving one be me. - an excerpt from Mrs. Beast -”

“You may look at other beautiful Queens in your life doing their Queenly work with calm, confident efficiency and think you could never be like them… … And you won’t. Because the truth is, no one will rule your realm like you. Your crown will not be identical to the crown of other Queens. There has never been another Queen like you before and there never will be. You are uniquely qualified by the mountains you have climbed, caves you have explored, and the treasures you have discovered. But take heed, dear one, you can confidently acknowledge your strengths, talents, and gifts and be humble. You get to choose how you want to rule your realms.”

“A woman connected with her Wild Woman is one with the vibrations experienced from the energy of the earth as it slips between her toes. She spins rainbows with her mind and releases rain with her tears. She dances with the music of the wind in the trees and the rush of the water in a racing river. She howls like the she wolf under the full moon. The magic of her dreams moving forth from her and expanding like the galaxies of a trillion stars.”

“You grow up to believe that if you say, Please pass the salt, a person will reach toward the shaker, grab it in his hand, and move it in your direction. But then one day some of us might learn that it can happen that you can say, Please pass the salt, and a person will jam his hand into the mayonnaise jar and fling a fistful of it at your face. All at once, words don't mean what they're supposed to mean. I am a girl. My name is Io. I say no thanks, not me, stop please. But all at once, words do not matter. I do not matter.”

“The harpy wants to win, which means a man must lose. She wants justice, which means a man must be punished. She wants space that could be taken by a man. Are we really willing to make that sacrifice? What makes a woman's ambition predatory, we are told, is that it overflows its natural bounds. It treads on the lands that men have marked as theirs.”

“...spirit was wrenched from its organic origins, separated from the body - the mother {woman} and the goddess - the mother Earth or Earth Goddess. The new manifestation of spirit, projected in hierarchical terms, emanated from the father in whom the 'spirit of life' as sperm was ejected as minuscule baby into the womb {viewed as nutrient value only}. The father as reflected in early patriarchal mythology and later patriarchal science was believed the sole parent. The cosmic dimension of the same movement ripped spirit from its earth people origin and placed it above the people, in the sky as originating in an all-powerful Father - or male God. In patriarchal religious ritual spirit came to be owned and controlled as property in the one and same manner as women were owned. Patriarchs usurped the exclusive right to define, interpret, and evoke the spirit out of their experience and project it onto women and children, as they deemed that women and children 'should' experience it. The moving verb 'transcending' {synonymous with breath and spirit} changed to a static noun, 'transcendence,' separated from the body and woman. The hierarchical direction assumed ultimacy - 'down from up above' instead of the former direction of 'up from down under.”

“My Wild Woman welcomed me with open arms into the womb of my cave. She grasped me by the hand and, one by one, introduced me to my shadow creatures. I roamed, I raged, I roared, I explored and when I thought I was done, that I couldn’t possibly go any further, my Wild Woman drew me into her lap. She comforted me in the circle of her fierce embrace and affectionally whispered tendernesses to me. She firmly sent me back out to play until the creatures became my friends. She revealed to me the place where the soft glow of my inner hearth resided and there, we were joined by my Wise Woman, Together, they showed me how to ignite the fire with the parts of myself which no longer served the woman I was becoming and they held me while I grieved.”

“Embracing our Queen demands that we sacrifice old, outdated versions of ourselves which can be petrifying. Embracing your Queen is a choice, it is a sacred claiming of your realm and choosing the real estate of your story. It is trading in your running shoes for slippers, a bow and arrow for a crown and invisibility for sovereignty. Allowing yourself to be brave and uncertain, giving yourself divine permission to be seen, heard, celebrated, and criticised.”

“To create loving men, we must love males. Loving maleness is different from praising and rewarding males for living up to sexist-defined notions of male identity. Caring about men because of what they do for us is not the same as loving males for simply being. When we love maleness, we extend our love whether males are performing or not. Performance is different from simply being. In patriarchal culture males are not allowed simply to be who they are and to glory in their unique identity. Their value is always determined by what they do. In an anti-patriarchal culture males do not have to prove their value and worth. They know from birth that simply being gives them value, the right to be cherished and loved.”

“Other people -- and by other people, I mean men -- were afforded that freedom. Male rockers were rolling in late to awards shows and we thought it made them cooler. Male pop stars were sleeping with lots of women and that was awesome. Kevin was leaving me alone with two babies when he wanted to go smoke pot and record a rap song, "Popozão," slang for big ass in Portuguese. Then he took them away from me, and he had Details magazine calling him Dad of the Year. A paparazzo who stalked and tormented me for months sued me for $230,000 for running over his foot with my car one time when I was trying to escape from him. We settled and and I had to give him a lot of money. When Justin cheated on me and then acted sexy, it was seen as cute. But when I wore a sparkly bodysuit, I had Diane Sawyer making me cry on national television, MTV making me listen to people criticizing my costumes, and a governor's wife saying she wanted to shoot me.”

“It is not the maleness of males per SE that explains the proliferation of masculine assholes. It is not that men are assholes, as though non-asshole men have somehow overcome their inherently asshole tendencies. Rather, the influence of gender culture is just very deep. Deep gender culture, not maleness, is primarily to blame for the fact that assholes are mainly men.”

“And then the bastard smiled at me. He smiled the same smile I’d seen a thousand times. A hundred thousand. It was the smile that said, 'I know best.’ The smile that said, ‘I’m better than you.’ The smile that said, 'I'm safe here and you're not.' The smile that said, 'I have a dick, so I win.’ Rage rolled up in me like the sea and I felt it sweep over my head, threatening to drown me. And then I heard a voice, small but still. A voice I hadn’t heard in forty years. I closed my eyes and listened. ‘It isn’t your anger that will make you good at this job, it is your joy.’ The rage ebbed and in its place, only happiness. Fierce, rampant happiness. It wasn’t the prettiest fight I’d ever been in but it was the most ferocious.”