Women Born In The 1960s

"... a secret inside myself was that I had to be a writer. Ever since I learned how to read when I was six or seven, I just knew: this was my thing — this was my calling. This is what I was going to do in the world."

"... For three months she hiked 1,100 miles alone along the , a continuous wilderness undulating from Mexico to Canada over nine mountain ranges – the to the . ... On her epic trek, this novice hiker faced temperatures of 100 degrees in the shade on the and record snowfalls in the high sierras, not to mention bears, rattlesnakes and failed waterholes. ..."

"We took all of the factors in the round, around what the case and what the prospects of the case would be, as well as all the other considerations and the impact indeed on the trans community. So, we’ve made that decision for all of the reasons that we have set out. [...] The point here is that Scotland's democratic institution overwhelmingly supported a piece of legislation that is within devolved competence. And because the UK Government and the secretary of state for Scotland didn't like it, he thought he could ride roughshod over the democratic wishes of this parliament."

"I think I listened to all the arguments when taking forward the Gender Recognition Reform Bill. It was clearly a polarising debate, but fundamentally at the heart of it is making the lives of trans people just that bit better."

"I would also like to take this opportunity to restate that this support for trans rights does not in any way conflict with our work and commitment to protect women from discrimination and advance women’s rights and equality."

"I have never said any of the concerns are not truly held. I met with a number of women’s organisations and heard their concerns, but I don’t think there is any evidence to show trying to make the lives of trans people that bit better was going to impact on women and girls. The safety issues come from predatory men."

"All of the evidence tells us that the cause of violence against women and girls is predatory and abusive men, not trans people. We must not conflate the two. There is no evidence that predatory and abusive men have ever had to pretend to be anything else to carry out abusive and predatory behaviour."

"The unfortunate class of homeless Lagosians"

"“‘Oga mi, wole kanle, eleyi gbomo,’” – “My boss, you need to park properly; this passenger has a child with them"

"there are only two things that 'qualify' an individual to even nurse a political ambition in our country... They are money and the strong backing of a godfather."

"When a man is looking... happy..., the woman in his life deserve commendation."

"I took a firm decision also not to share my misery with any of my mates because I knew what advice most of then would proffer. They would tell me I had no option but to succumb. They would give me a thousand and one names of students, past and present, who had succumbed; that I should be 'realistic'. And so I kept the matter to myself. I was suffering internally; I was going through agony trying to think of a way out. Nonetheless, I managed to maintain a calm exterior as I went about my other academic activities."

"“hellish” to travel to work in the morning and a “nightmare of intractable traffic and bad roads” in the evening"

"The Anambra Igbos are not just good, they are far better than the Imo Igbos.The Anambra people are the genuine and authentic Igbos. Besides, look around you, nearly every great Igbo person in this country is from Anambra - Nnamdi Azikiwe, Chinua Achebe, Odumegwu Ojukwu, Emeka Anyoku; the list is long. You have spent close to one year in Anambra and you have tasted their hospitality. What further proof do you need?"

"It was home of the legendary CMS Grammar School, the oldest secondary school in the country, as well as Methodist Boys’ High School. It was also home to some movie stars and music icons like Obesere, Olamide, 9ice and Lil Kesh. Prominent tertiary institutions such as the University of Lagos and the Federal College of Education, Technical were just down the road."

"When I arrived home... [I] met my mother sitting on the cement slab outside the kitchen door, looking agitated. She said my father had gone out with Ify because Dayo, my immediate elder brother, wanted to make trouble. She said Dayo was categorical in his rejection of Ify because he was Igbo and had threatened to ensure that the marriage never happened... My mother said there was something disturbing about the way he spoke; she said she detected a level of vehemence that was troublesome... Finally, everybody was home and all hell was let loose. Dayo's vituperations astounded me."

"Our father and our God, are ask that you cure Anjola of her Yoruba stubbornness! Our merciful father, we know that Yoruba Stubbornness is a serious disease; it is a disease that is difficult to cure but we trust in your supreme power, oh God, because you are the God of Possibilities."

"Inter-ethnic marriage [I]s a weapon of peace and harmonious co-existence among the numerous ethnic groups in Nigeria."

"What's the difference between a Yanmirin and an animal? Can the offspring of a hen be a duck?"

"Don't look at your travails as a north-west problem. It's a national problem. The country needs help."

"You are a fresh graduate with little knowledge of the dynamics of your country. The northerners are good people but you've got to be ready to identify with them, demonstrate that you are a part of them, before you can benefit from their kindness[...] You have to claim to be a northerner to get a job in the north."

"Is it true that Igbo people in Imo are better than those in Anambra? That they are more hospitable, better organised and generally more elevated?"

"[I]t has become customary in recent weeks to refer to [[Nigel Farage|Mr [Nigel] Farage]] as the most consequential politician since Margaret Thatcher. ... I knew Lady Thatcher, and to compare the two is to compare the Uffizi Gallery to a third-rate auction house."

"I was groped by my childhood hero. I watched soap operas religiously and loved one well-known soap star, but he touched me up during my first ever rep job. He stroked my bum in the canteen queue and went, "Mmm, nice arse." The next day, I saw him in the corridor and wanted to bolt. Instead, I grabbed his crotch, and said, "Mmm, nice bollocks." He never spoke to me again. Quite awkward because we were in a play together."

"[I]t shot this two-day rape scene with a young actress and then they cut it. [...] I was in favour of them never having that rape scene but the fact she had to go through that and then the director went: "Actually I have decided I will cut it", as if he was the big hero. This kind of thing has to stop. But unfortunately you look at Netflix and you see the amount of violence against women in a lot of shows and you see we still have a long way to go."

"The [Scottish] government said its proposal will not diminish the rights of women. However, its own draft equality impact assessment evidenced this by citing Bristol University research which . . . suggests that a woman catching sight of a male body in a changing room should be no more distressing than seeing another woman with a mastectomy. Does the government regret citing this research, and do they agree that the comparison is insulting to breast cancer survivors?"

"It is feminists influenced by this second wave who question transgender ideology. They speak the uncomfortable truth that men have a statistically higher propensity towards violence including sexual violence — no matter how they identify — and our laws and public institutions must recognise that brutal truth."

"The thing that finally turned me to my current position was the government’s decision to expand the definition of transgender identity to include cross-dressers who are not trans identified ... It will seem bizarre to many people that men who enjoy cross-dressing are protected from hate crime, but women are not."

"There were assertions made during that meeting that anyone who identifies as a woman could be a rape counsellor or join a group session. And when survivors asked how a woman may feel if she unknowingly disclosed details of her rape to a male counsellor on the telephone… No adequate answer was provided. It shocked me then as it still does now, that given 100 per cent of rapes in Scotland are committed by men this appeared to not be an issue for the head of Rape Crisis Scotland."

"My first TV job asked me shave my legs and I refused. The cameras all zoomed in on my leg hairs and the 40-strong male crew treated me to a rendition of "Gillette, the best a man can get". I unfortunately bumped into Jim Davidson in the corridor and he shouted "Not only has she got hairy legs, she's wearing men's shoes!” as he pointed at my Doc Martens."

"Policy capture is at the root of this fankle, as with many issues around gender identity. Officials only take advice from LGBT stakeholders. They never consider that women might have something to say about legislation which erases them as a biological sex class. In this case they didn't consult statisticians either."

"We learnt that the government decided in 2011 that the census's sex question should be answered according to self-identification, even if the respondent had no gender recognition certificate. This advice was hidden on the website and was never subject to democratic scrutiny. That's shocking when you think that for almost 200 years sex was uncomplicated, binary and biological. For most people it still is."

"What's important once again is to put our minds and passion at the service of this cause, which is the noblest of all because it means fighting for the preservation of the human race, understood as preserving life in all its stages."

"The Australian reporter John Pilger echoes the views of [[w:Eva Bartlett|[Eva] Bartlett]] and [[Vanessa Beeley|[Vanessa] Beeley]] in interviews. Pilger ... has a new platform on RT, which he uses to deny chemical weapons attacks such as the one at Khan Shaykhun. He, too, frequently attacks the White Helmets as Islamic extremists, and has cited Beeley's writing as if it were authoritative journalism."

"After eight brutal years, it is hard to find anything shocking about the Syrian civil war. But somehow, the government forces under President Bashar al-Assad always find a way. On May 15, Syrian bombs destroyed the Tarmala Maternity and Children’s Hospital in Idlib, the 19th medical facility attacked since late April. Mr. al-Assad’s campaign against hospitals is not just inhumane — it represents one of the most repellent aspects of modern warfare. Hospitals were once off limits; even in conflicts where the international laws of war were routinely flouted, medical facilities were spared."

"[M]ost mainstream journalists have been refused visas to visit regime-held areas of Syria. At the start of the war, I was initially allowed into regime territory but was followed by minders from the Ministry of Information. In 2012, after I went undercover and reported a government-sponsored mass killing in the town of Daraya, which was later verified by Human Rights Watch and "characterized by the UN appointed Independent International Commission of Inquiry as a 'massacre,'" according to Amnesty International, my government visa was revoked and I was told I would be thrown in an "Assad prison" if I tried coming back."

"It was a dark time: the RUF was abducting children from their villages, getting them high on poyo (homemade palm wine), marijuana and heroin, and training them to kill. I later heard from a Jesuit priest who tried to rehabilitate these child-soldiers that they made excellent killers because, under the age of nine, they had not yet developed a full moral conscience. The warlords exploited their innocence. The carnage they inflicted was unspeakable. In these raids on villages, according to interviews I did later, pieced together with testimonies from human rights investigators, soldiers forced parents to choose which of their children would be taken as fighters and which would be killed on the spot. Teenagers in gangsta-style baggy pants raped and plundered, taking girls as young as nine as their "bush wives.""

"[In the Abidjan cattle market during the First Ivorian Civil War in September 2002. A soldier] stood, soaked in sweat, boots too tight, pointing an AK47 at me and looking as if he had every intention of using it. There was an African man near my foot, groaning in pain, bullet wounds in his legs. A moment before, I'd squatted in the dirt and tried to drag him into my taxi. I wanted to get him to a hospital. The soldier said the man on the ground was a rebel, and I knew if I left him behind, he would kill him. The soldier raised his gun, the safety catch off, and pointed it at my heart. ... His impatience was turning to rage when Bruno [Girodon], who was on the other side of the cattle market, suddenly spotted me and pulled me roughly by the arm away. "This is Africa," he said. "Are you crazy?" He dragged me back to the car, silently fuming."

"I became a journalist partly because my mother was prevented from becoming one, and also because I inherited her insatiable curiosity. She read all of my stories, even the most brutal from war zones, although I would often lie about where I was to prevent her from worrying. Recently she read a personal essay that explained in detail how I almost lost my eyesight and spent three weeks in a hospital in Paris. This time she wept, saying: "Why didn't you tell me? I was only 95 when this happened. I could have flown to Paris and taken care of you.""

"[At the reception of the Holiday Inn, Sarajevo during the siege] "And please, madame, don't walk on this side of the building." He pointed to a wall, through which you could see the sky and buildings outside, that looked as though a truck had run into it. "And don’t go up on the seventh floor," he added cryptically. The seventh floor, I soon learned, was where the Bosnian snipers defending the city were positioned. And the forbidden side of the building faced the Serbian snipers and mortar emplacements. If you emerged from the hotel on that side and a sniper had you in his range, you got shot."

"It is hard to try and avoid your own personality when writing. One must of course put oneself into the shoes of very variable characters and try to adapt to their mindset so that they behave realistically and in accordance to their “personality”. But to do this you have to rely on your own brain and thus some of you always seeps in."

"Book people, no matter where they come from, are the best people!"

"I think the biggest part of me that seeps into my books is my appreciation of the weird, the uncanny and sometimes the horrible."

""Yes,there might be moment of feeling whereby you want to walk away from God,but the moment you make up your mind to follow him He will help you.""

""There were some things that one must have done in the past as a youth which is called youthful exuberance and which I can no longer do at this stage""

""Thank God I know he is still there for me. I take all the criticism as corrective""

"Living in Zaire from its neighbor, Congo-Brazzaville. The tower was a medley of gleaming metal tubes and concrete pillars, and its raison d’être was a bit of a mystery: It wasn't particularly beautiful, had been left unfinished for decades, and couldn't be visited. That ambiguity was fitting. The Limete Tower, as it was called, was an exercise in presidential hypocrisy, and a half-hearted one at that. Mobutu Sese Seko, Zaire's long-ruling dictator, had commissioned it to commemorate his former boss and onetime friend Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of independent Congo. Lumumba was assassinated in January 1961 with the collusion of Western powers worried about his suspected Communist sympathies and determined to keep him from power. In theory, the monument was meant to glorify a national hero, a martyr to imperialism. But the gesture's sincerity was open to question, because Mobutu himself helped ensure Lumumba's death, ordering him to be flown handcuffed to a secessionist province where he was shot by firing squad, his body then dismembered and dissolved in acid."

""I use everything God has given to me to talk to people.""

". For animation, you get to see the finished product faster. Video games sometimes take such a long time for them to finish. I’m sure it’s much more complicated. They have many more characters and scripts. In video games you’re never quite sure where the character is going to go"

"You get to see that these beautiful boys did not come from a broken home. They came from a broken neighborhood"