Quotes About Struggle

In my case, this meant identifying with male protagonists, with the Jim of the almost womanless Lord Jim and Jim Carroll's self-anointing stud junkie in The Basketball Diaries and with Pip rather than Estella in Great Expectations, and all the grail seekers and ring beaters and western explorers and chasers and conquerors and haters of women and inhabitants of worlds where women were absent.

the backlash against feminism remains savage, strong, and omnipresent, but it is not winning.

Every woman knows what I'm talking about. It's the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world.

There are other things I'd rather write about, but this affects everything else. The lives of half of humanity are still dogged by, drained by, and sometimes ended by this pervasive variety of violence. Think of how much more time and energy we would have to focus on other things that matter if we weren't so busy surviving.

In the myths, women keep turning into other things because being a woman is too difficult, too dangerous.

the task of finding one's own way must be immeasurably harder when all the heroes, all the protagonists, are not only another gender but another race, or another sexual orientation, and when you find that you yourself are described as savages or the servants or the people who don't matter. There are so many forms of annihilation.

There are those who see despair as solidarity with the oppressed, though the oppressed may not particularly desire that version of themselves, since they may have had a life before being victims and might hope to have one after.

At the heart of the struggle of feminism to give rape, date rape, marital rape, domestic violence, and workplace sexual harassment legal standing as crimes has been the necessity of making women credible and audible. I tend to believe that women acquired the status of human beings when these kinds of acts started to be taken seriously, when the big things that stop us and kill us were addressed legally from the mid-1970s on; well after, that is, my birth.

breaking through the barriers which life's routine had concreted around the deeper strata of the will, and gradually bringing its unused energies into action." And he spoke of the "stores of bottled up energy and endurance" that people in the earthquake had discovered within themselves.

The battle with Men Who Explain Things has trampled down many women—of my generation, of the up-and-coming generation we need so badly, here and in Pakistan and Bolivia and Java, not to speak of the countless women who came before me and were not allowed into the laboratory, or the library, or the conversation, or the revolution, or even the category called human.

It was a kind of collective gaslighting. To live in a war that no one around me would acknowledge as a war.

Conservatives are now largely fighting rearguard actions. They are trying to reassemble a world that never really existed quite as they imagine it (and to the extent that it did, it existed at the expense of all the people—the vast majority of us—forced to disappear, into the closet, the kitchen, segregated space, invisibility and silence). Thanks

That made clear to me the continuum that stretches from minor social misery to violent silencing and violent death

We are still in an era of battles over who will be granted the right to speak and the right to be believed

cause London is drowning and I— I live by the river.

Crazy is often a euphemism for unbearable suffering.

Had I visited at an earlier hour she would have found fault with something I'd done when I was with her. And had I not given her a copy, another failure could be charted. There was no winning, just some decisions about how to lose and how not to play.

Her name was Africa. His name was IMF. He set her up to be pillaged, to go without health care, to starve.

we should resist on principle, even though it might be futile.

The rights of man" was one of the great phrases of the French Revolution, but it's always been questionable whether it included the rights of women.

Women are an eternal subject, which is a lot like being subjected, or subjugated, or a subject nation, even.

It was as though she traveled by a map of the wrong place, hitting walls, driving into ditches, missing her destination, but never stopping or throwing out the map. And she never stopped being Cinderella, and told her own story largely as a series of things that happened to her rather than things she did.

As for that incident in my city, similar things happen all the time. Many versions of it happened to me when I was younger, sometimes involving death threats and often involving torrents of obscenities: a man approaches a woman with both desire and the furious expectation that the desire will likely be rebuffed.  The fury and desire come in a package, all twisted together into something that always threatens to turn eros into thanatos, love into death, sometimes literally.

reimposed or a new one, perhaps more oppressive or perhaps more just and free, like the disaster utopia, will arise.