*if you’ve been following this blog for a lil or a lot o’bit, you know I just love me some good quotes from smart people. D.L. Sayers said in one of her mystery novels that a facility for apt quotation shows no mean intelligence, to which my beloved Peter Whimsey said the only true intelligence is the ability to recognize ones own limitations. I just love that, and am very aware of my limitations, thus – my lifelong appreciation of the brilliance of others! We are in this together, and no one knows it all, or even most of it. I love when a line or two or three stops me in my tracks, and makes me think. Thank you for being here, and knock wood sharing my love for the word…words! For beautiful, imperfect, precise, imprecise, language…
Margaret Atwood: Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it’s all a male fantasy: that you’re strong
enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it.
Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.
Anonymous person on the Interweb: One time someone told me I was
intimidating and my friend looked at them and said “Is she intimidating or are you
intimidated”? and from that moment on I refused to take responsibility for how others react to my presence.
Ursula K. Le Guin: Fake Rule: The generic pronoun in English is he. Violation: “Each one in turn reads their piece aloud.” This is wrong, say the grammar bullies, because each one, each person is a singular noun and their is a plural pronoun. But Shakespeare used their with words such as everybody, anybody, a person, and so we all do when we’re talking. (“It’s enough to drive anyone out of their senses,” said George Bernard Shaw.) The grammarians started telling us it was incorrect along in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. That was when they also declared that the pronoun he includes both sexes, as in “If a per- son needs an abortion, he should be required to tell his parents.” My use of their is socially motivated and, if you like, politically correct: a deliberate response to the socially and politically significant banning of our genderless pronoun by language legislators enforcing the notion that the male sex is the only one that counts. I consistently break a rule I consider to be not only fake but pernicious. I know what I’m doing and why.
bell hooks: Sometimes people try to destroy you, precisely because they recognize your power – not because they don’t see it but because they see it and don’t want it to exist.
Rasheeda Mustafa: I had a guy tell me to smile once. I was walking on the sidewalk and he was sitting on a park bench. I stopped, looked at him and told him to tell a joke. He said, well I can’t just tell a joke on command. And I said well I don’t just smile on command. You want to command someone? Command your dog.
Laurie Penny: Of all the female sins, hunger is the least forgivable; hunger for
anything, for food, sex, power, education, even love. If we have desires, we are expected to conceal them, to control them, to keep ourselves in check. We are
supposed to be objects of desire, not desiring beings.
A guy named Harry on X: If any of you pro lifers get tape worms you better suck it up and be a good host, because tape worms have a heartbeat and feel pain. It deserves
a choice and it chose you to be its mother.
A.R. Moxon: It wasn’t “cancel culture” when women and people of color got used
up, silenced, and dismissed before their careers even began. It only became
“cancel culture” when powerful abusers started having established careers momentarily inconvenienced by revelations of what they’d done.
Jimmy Carter: The truth is that male religious leaders have had – and still have – an option to interpret holy teachings either to exalt or subjugate women. They have, for
their own selfish ends, overwhelmingly chosen the latter. Their continuing choice provides the foundation or justification for much of the pervasive persecution and abuse of women throughout the world.
Anonymous internet person: If submission were natural to women, there wouldn’t be
thousands of sermons everyday reminding women to submit because nature doesn’t need reminders to run its course. These reminders exist because indoctrination depends on constant reinforcement to keep harmful ideologies alive.
Mohamad Safa: Overheard: Being a woman is kind of like being a cyclist in a city where all the cars represent men. You’re supposed to be able to share the road equally with cars, but that’s not how it works. The roads are built for cars and you spend a great deal of physical and mental energy being defensive and trying not to get hurt. Some of the cars want you to get hurt. They think you don’t have any place on the road at all. And if you do get hurt by a car, everyone makes excuses that it’s your fault.
Audre Lorde: For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs
for language and definition. And while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.