Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all is a form of planning.
Rich People plan for three generationsPoor people plan for Saturday night
Men should think twice before making widowhood women’s only path to power.
Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.
Her searches after knowledge were arbitrary and without context. It was as if she were shining a small flashlight of curiosity into the dark room of the world.
If you find yourself drawn to an event against all logic, go. The universe is telling you something.
Being graded for memorizing male accomplishments with the deep message that we can learn what others do but never do it ourselves.
Altogether, if I had to pick one place to hang out anywhere, from New York to Cape Town and Australia to Hong Kong, a bookstore would be it.
Like the spider spinning its web, we create much of the outer world from within ourselves. The universe is a joint product of the observer and the observed.
Artists strive to free this true and spontaneous self in their work. Creativity, meditation are ways of freeing an inner voice.
As always, self-esteem had created an ability to be generous.
Without leaps of the imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning
I think we each come out of the womb with some unique way of looking at the world and if we don’t express it, we loose faith in ourselves.
A feminist is anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity of women and men.
Women may be the one group that grows more radical with age.
Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke . . . She will need her sisterhood.
We’ll never solve the feminization of power until we solve the masculinity of wealth.
The uncomfortable truth seems to be that the amount of talk by women has been measured less against the amount of men’s talk than against the expectation of female silence.
Never having seen women play chess, they assumed this game wasn’t for them and without even a female teacher as role model, they dropped out.
Citizens who refuse to obey anything but their own conscience can transform countries, it is the basis of any real democracy.
The art of life is not controlling what happens to us, but using what happens to us
I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.
As Robin Morgan wrote so wisely, “Hate generalizes, love specifies”. Thats what makes going on the road so important. It definitely specifies.
A woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual.
Women of all groups were measurably more likely than their male counterparts to vote for equality, health, and education, and against violence as a way of solving conflict. It wasn’t about biology, but experience.
Feminism…is not ‘women as victims’ but women refusing to be victims.
There are really not many jobs that actually acquire a penis or a vagina, and all other occupations should be open to everyone.
I’m not advocating a competition for who has it toughest. The caste systems of sex and race are interdependent and can only be uprooted together. It’s time to take equal pride in breaking all the barriers.
When people ask me why I still have hope and energy after all these years, I always say: Because I travel.
Don’t write when you’re angry and under deadline, with time to test it only on friends who know what you mean, not on strangers who don’t.
My father did not have to trade dying alone for the joys of the road. My mother did not have to give up a journey of her own to have a home. Neither do I. Neither do you.
As feminism has changed academia by enlarging what is taught, academia has sometimes changed feminism.
Mrs. Greene made me understand the parallels between race and caste— and how women’s bodies were used to perpetuate both. Different prisons. Same key.
The idea that women are ‘our own worst enemies’ forces us to admit that we don’t have the power to be, even if we wanted too.
One of the saddest things I hear as I travel is “I don’t know enough to be a feminist.” Or even “I’m not smart enough to be a feminist.” It breaks my heart.
Women are always better liked if we sacrifice ourselves for something bigger – and something bigger always means including men, even though something bigger for men doesn’t usually mean including women.
In the same way that individual women are often underestimated, a movement of women is also understimated, but the truth is that, if people realize someone is willing to talk about these deep and daily concerns, they show up.
I also noticed that humor was even more of a survival tactic here than in most women’s groups. As one asked: What did Columbus call primitive? Answer: Equal women.
It’s time to leave. There is so much out there to do and say and listen to. I can go on the road, because I can come home. I come home, because I am free to leave.
You should write about take no-shit women like me. Girls need to know they can break the rules” p.79
Sometimes I think the only real division into two is between people who divide everything into two and those who don’t.
Dying seems less sad than having lived too little.
In Indian Country,” he says, “we have a different sense of time. I’m learning and you’re learning—and more will.
Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities.
I like to believe that the road is sharpening my mind and lengthening my life with surprise.
I could leave—because I could return. I could return—because I knew adventure lay just beyond an open door. Instead of either/or, I discovered a whole world of and.
Each way of being is more valued in the presence of the other. This balance between making camp and following the seasons is both very ancient and very new. We all need both.
Even migrating birds know that nature doesn’t demand a choice between nesting and flight.
Altogether, I can’t imagine technology replacing bookstores completely, any more than movies about a country replace going there.
In fact, caucus, a word derived from the Algonquin languages, better reflected the layers of talking circles and the goal of consensus that were at the heart of governance.
It’s important for someone who could play the game – and win – to say: ‘the game isn’t worth shit.
I took a part-time editing job to pay the rent. It was work I could do at home, but when suddenly I was expected to spend two days a week in the office, I quit, bought an ice cream cone, and walked the sunny streets of Manhattan.
Taking away the good is even more lethal than pointing out the bad.
For me, those weeks in Boston, with Wilma, became a lesson in her ability to be “of good mind,” in her phrase, which also meant a people’s ability to survive.
All my years campaigning have given me one clear message: Voting isn’t the most we can do, but it is the least. To have a democracy, you have to want one. Still, I realize this fully only by looking back.
Wherever I go, bookstores are still the closest thing to a town square.
I’ve noticed that great political leaders are energized by conflict. I’m energized by listening to people’s stories and trying to figure out shared solutions. That’s the work of an organizer.
Far too many people are looking for the right person, instead of trying to be the right person.
In retrospect, perhaps the biggest reason my mother was cared for but not helped for twenty years was the simplest: Her functioning was not that necessary to the world.
I sometimes wonder if I am crisscrossing my father’s ghostly paths and we are entering same towns or roadside diners or the black ribbons of highways that gleam in the night rain. As if we were images in a time-lapse photograph.
Someone asked me why women don’t gamble as much as men do and I gave the commonsensical reply that we don’t have as much money. That was a true and incomplete answer. In fact women’s total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage.
I have met brave women who are exploring the outer edge of human possibility with no history to guide them and with a courage to make themselves vulnerable that I find moving beyond words.
The first problem for all of us men and women is not to learn but to unlearn.
Self-esteem isn’t everything it’s just that there’s nothing without it.
Women may be the one group that grows more radical with age.
The act of acting morally is behaving as if everything we do matters.
We teach what we need to learn and write what we need to know.
A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.
Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.
Most American children suffer too much mother and too little father.
A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.
Because I have work to care about, it is possible that I may be less difficult to get along with than other women when the double chins start to form.
Everything about aging in my experience so far has been a plus. Except the death part!
Happy or unhappy, families are all mysterious. We have only to imagine how differently we would be described – and will be, after our deaths – by each of the family members who believe they know us.
The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn.
Monotheism makes me grouchy. I don’t trust any religion that makes God look like one of the ruling class. I guess I’m a pagan or an animist.
Childbirth is more admirable than conquest, more amazing than self-defense, and as courageous as either one.
Obviously, there is much similarity among the challenges of transgender people and all women – from health care to harassment to discrimination in the workplace.
The problem for all women is we’re identified by how we look instead of by our heads and our hearts.
I think if women are visible in the media, truly visible, in an empowered role, it empowers us to be more visible in any area of our lives.
Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It’s about making life more fair for women everywhere. It’s not about a piece of the existing pie there are too many of us for that. It’s about baking a new pie.
Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.
The Miss America Pageant reinforces a belief that women are merely how they look and how they please.
If women have young children, they are one man away from welfare.
I’ve yet to be on a campus where most women weren’t worrying about some aspect of combining marriage, children, and a career. I’ve yet to find one where many men were worrying about the same thing.
What has the women’s movement learned from Geraldine Ferraro’s candidacy for vice president? Never get married.
Most women’s magazines simply try to mold women into bigger and better consumers.
I think Hefner himself wants to go down in history as a person of sophistication and glamour. But the last person I would want to go down in history as is Hugh Hefner.
Power can be taken, but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself.
Men should think twice before making widow hood woman’s only path to power.
God may be in the details, but the goddess is in the questions. Once we begin to ask them, there’s no turning back.
Clearly no one knows what leadership has gone undiscovered in women of all races, and in black and other minority men.
We’ve begun to raise daughters more like sons… but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.
A liberated woman is one who has sex before marriage and a job after.
I was never against marriage per se. Before feminism, I didn’t think you had any choice. In fact, for a long time I always assumed I would get married. I just didn’t see any marriages I wanted to emulate, so I kept putting it off.
The first resistance to social change is to say it’s not necessary.
It is more rewarding to watch money change the world than watch it accumulate.
I’d like to be played as a child by Natalie Wood. I’d have some romantic scenes as Audrey Hepburn and have gritty black-and-white scenes as Patricia Neal.
Anger is energising. The opposite of anger is depression, which is anger turned inward.
A gender-equal society would be one where the word ‘gender’ does not exist: where everyone can be themselves.
If you say, I’m for equal pay, that’s a reform. But if you say. I’m a feminist, that’s a transformation of society.
All women, and men of color – we were owned like tables and chairs. We spent a hundred years getting a legal identity as human beings. That’s a big thing.
The future depends entirely on what each of us does every day a movement is only people moving.
Planning ahead is a measure of class. The rich and even the middle class plan for future generations, but the poor can plan ahead only a few weeks or days.