Quotes from Naomi Alderman

However complicated you think it is, everything is always more complicated than that. There are no shortcuts. Not to understanding and not to knowledge. You can't put anyone into a box.

Often it may seem that time has taken us very far from our origin. But if we take only a few more steps, we will round the corner and see a familiar place. And sometimes it may seem that in all our traveling we have returned to the place where we began. But although the view may be similar, it will never be identical; we should remember that there is no return.

Not the past, not the lines of pain inscribed on the human body, not a thing will ever disappear.

There is no shape to anything except the shape it has. Every name we give ourselves is wrong.

That those who live narrow lives have only themselves to blame when they find themselves shocked.

We send electric currents down orderly runs of circuits and switches, but the shape that electricity wants to take is of a living thing, a fern, a bare branch. The strike point in the center, the power seeking outward.

The shape of power is always the same; it is the shape of a tree.

People make what they need for themselves.

I'm not who I was.

But that wasn't my business. Esti was a grown woman,

Vi è stato insegnato che siete immonde, che non siete sante, che il vostro corpo è impuro e non potrebbe mai essere la sede del divino. Vi hanno insegnato a disprezzare tutto ciò che siete e ad aspirare solo a essere un uomo. Ma vi hanno insegnato menzogne. Dio

Ease, luxury, and plenty are not shameful, but they are not happiness.

It's like this essential feature of human beings simply doesn't exist in the full-color magazine world.

It's enough for her to know, sitting in there in the dark, that if she really wanted to she could get out. The knowledge is as good as freedom.

He could not hope to discover, let alone understand, what thoughts moved her as she sat holding his hand to her cheek. He was alone, in the smallness of the room, in the space within him. And yet they were both together, alone. He understood, as if the knowledge had been waiting for him in this windowless chamber. That was, at bottom, what it amounted to. To be alone, together.

He realizes now that he could not stop her, whatever she wanted to do now. The thought is terrifying. The thought is electrifying.

All girls born from now on will have the power—all of them. And they'll keep it throughout life, just like the older women do if it's woken up in them. It's too late now to try to cure it; we need new ideas.

And there was a throbbing in my head, a kind of pressure from the inside, and I found that I was shouting. I can't remember everything I said. I know it wasn't all about egg sandwiches. I remember that I said, "It's no wonder that I hate you so much, because you never listen!" I remember that I said, "I wish I were dead like my mother!

It might seem as if he's been sitting around eating M& M's and scratching his ass for the past few months.

They'd separated the boys from the girls on the fifth day; it seemed obvious, when they worked out the girls were doing it. Already there are parents telling their boys not to go out alone, not to stray too far. "Once you've seen it happen," says a gray-faced woman on TV. "I saw a girl in the park doing that to a boy for no reason, he was bleeding from the eyes. The eyes. Once you've seen that happen, no mom would let her boys out of her sight.

We did not go out of each other's lives in a blaze of anger. We simply fell out of the habit of speaking. We lost our common language and so lost everything. There was nothing for us to say.

God loves all of us,' she says, 'and She wants us to know that She has changed her garment merely. She is beyond female and male, She is beyond human understanding. But She calls your attention to that which you have forgotten: Jews, look to Miriam, not Moses, for what you can learn from her. Muslims: look to Fatimah, not Muhammad. Buddhists: remember Tara, the mother of liberation. Christians: pray to Mary for your salvation.

Jews: look to Miriam, not Moses ... Muslims: look to Fatimah, not Muhammad. Buddhists: remember Tara, the mother of liberation. Christians: pray to Mary for your salvation.

The point of which is—it is technically possible to check in to, say, a transatlantic flight, check your bags, go through passport control, wave good-bye to your loved ones (or loathed ones, whichever is more applicable in your particular circumstances), and yet nonetheless somehow not leave when the plane does. You just have to be really motivated.