Quotes from Naomi Alderman

You can't solve anyone else's life for them. But then, if you see someone struggling with a heavy load, isn't it forbidden to walk on without helping them?

Beneath every story, there is another story. There is a hand within the hand...... There is a blow behind the blow.

It's not for us to worry about the men," she says. "Let them please themselves, as they always have. If they want to war with each other and to wander, let them go. We have each other. Where you go, I will go. Your people will be my people, my sisters.

There are no shortcuts. Not to understanding and not to knowledge. You can't put anyone into a box. Listen, even a stone isn't the same as any other stone, so I don't know where you all think you get off labeling humans with simple words and thinking you know everything you need. But most people can't live that way, even some of the time.

Fox News would say whatever makes the most people tune into Fox News.

Sometimes I think that God is punishing me. For what we did together. Sometimes I think that my life is a punishment for wanting. And the wanting is a punishment, too.

Even a stone is not the same as any other stone. There is no shape to anything except the shape it has. Every name we give ourselves is wrong. Our dreams are more true than our waking.

There is a noise that is different to grief. Sadness wails and cries and lets loose a sound to the heavens like a baby calling for its mother. That kind of noisy grief is hopeful. It believes that things can be put right, or that help can come. There is a different kind of sound to that. Babies left alone too long do not even cry. They become very still and quiet. They know no one is coming.

Her anger is still pure and white and electric, but she doesn't feel the sadness of it at all. It's just a thing she heard about once.

Already there are parents telling their boys not to go out alone, not to stray too far.

you belong in three places: the place you grew up, the place where you went to college, and the place where the person you love is.

The only wave that changes anything is a tsunami. You have to tear down the houses and destroy the land if you want to be sure no one will forget you.

It's a story about the stuff that happens just exactly when you weren't expecting it; just on that night you thought nothing was going to happen, everything happens.

A year may be easy, but its days are hard indeed.

You can't be the one that hurts and the one that comforts.

It is hard now, very hard, but the difficulty is familiar.

For the earth is filled with violence, and every living thing has lost its way.

You have been taught that you are unclean, that you are not holy, that your body is impure and could never harbor the divine. You have been taught to despise everything you are and to long only to be a man. But you have been taught lies. God lies within you, God has returned to earth to teach you, in the form of this new power.

There is no safety that does not also restrict us. And many needless restrictions feel safe and comfortable. It is so hard to know, at any moment, the distinction between being safe and being caged. It is hard to know when it is better to choose freedom and fear, and when it is simply foolhardy. I have often, I think, too often erred on the side of caution.

That is how a man speaks. And that is why.

Allie says: Are you trying to tell me there's literally no right choice here? The voice says: There's never been a right choice, honeybun. The whole idea that there are two things and you have to choose is the problem.

The women will die just as much as the men will if we bomb ourselves back to the Stone Age. And then we'll be in the the Stone Age. Er. Yeah. And then there will be five thousand years of rebuilding, five thousand years where the only thing that matters is: can you hurt more, can you do more damage, can you instill fear? Yeah? And then the women will win.

He's crying a little now, from the shock and the shame and the fear and the humiliation and the pain. Tunde recognizes those feelings; he's known them since the first day Enuma touched him. He has written in the scribbled notes for his book: "At first we did not speak our hurt because it was not manly. Now we do not speak it because we are afraid and ashamed and alone without hope, each of us alone. It is hard to know when the first became the second.

But all these were not the true religion. For the true religion is love, not fear. The strong mother cradling her child: that is love and that is truth. The girls pass this news from one, to the next, to the next. God has returned, and Her message is for us, only us.