Quotes About Awareness

Change seems recognizable only after it's happened, like putting one's foot down for a familiar stair—and it's not there.

Her hope was to preserve what she called The Way, to keep it alive, for that future moment when the current obsession with excess and hierarchy imploded. Wilma said many Native people believed that the earth as a living organism would just one day shrug off the human species that was destroying it—and start over. In a less cataclysmic vision, humans would realize that we are killing our home and each other, and seek out The Way. That's why Native people were guarding it.

Among their first questions was said to be: Where are the women?

Part of traveling over years means coming back to the same place and knowing it for the first time.

She acquired a lifetime aversion to the phrases bless your heart and poor dears.

I don't have time to explain that the women's movement named domestic violence in the first place, sought its prosecution by police and by new laws, created the first shelters, and has been working for thirty years to explain, for instance, that the moment of leaving is the time when a woman is most likely to be murdered, thus answering questions like "Why doesn't she just leave?

one writerly habit was describing everything I did, no matter how absorbing or how trivial, as if I were standing outside myself and watching.

the clearest view is always from the bottom. Kennedy

childhood memories are prisms, not panes of glass. Details may loom large in the eyes of our smaller selves, while important events lie beyond our vision or understanding.

Everytime a woman looks in a mirror and criticizes her body, a girl is watching.

Clearly, Columbus never "discovered" America, in either sense of that word. The people who knew it were already here.

Whether by dowry murders in India, honor killings in Egypt, or domestic violence in the United States, records show that women are most likely to be beaten or killed at home and by men they know. Statistically speaking, home is an even more dangerous place for woman than the road. Perhaps the most revolutionary act for a woman will be a self willed journey-and to be welcomed when she comes home.

We learn where we know the least.

This vertical history feels more intimate and sensory than written history. It's been reaching out all along, I just wasn't paying attention.

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.

Wilma said many Native people believed that the earth as a living organism would just one day shrug off the human species that was destroying it— and start over. In a less cataclysmic vision, humans would realize that we are killing our home and each other, and seek out The Way. That's why Native people were guarding it.

The older I get, the more intensely I feel about the world around me.

No wonder studies show that women's intellectual self-esteem tends to go down with every year of higher education. We've been studying our own absence.

When people of color are in the majority instead of the minority, audiences are often the best education that white listeners can have.

living in India had made me aware of how segregated my own country was. But only 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.

People who are experiencing a problem are the most likely to know its solution.

I soon learned there was a very Indian habit of asking personal questions. It

if you've experienced discrimination in one form, you're more likely to recognize it in another. Also

The personal is political. When