Feminists

"Ah, the bitter, hopeless heart-hunger of godlessness none but an atheist can understand! Nothing to live for in life--no hope beyond the grave."

"Provided a woman is beautiful allowance will be made for all her shortcomings. She can be unchaste, vapid, untruthful, flippant, heartless, and even clever; so long as she is fair to see men will stand by her, and as men, in this world, are "the dog on top", they are the power to truckle to. A plain woman will have nothing forgiven her. Her fate is such that the parents of uncomely female infants should be compelled to put them to death at their birth."

"Summer is fiendish, and life is a curse, I said in my heart. What a great dull hard rock the world was! On it were a few barren narrow ledges, and on these, by exerting ourselves so that the force wears off our finger-nails, it allows us to hang for a year or two, and then hurls us off into outer darkness and oblivion, perhaps to endure worse torture than this."

"Hope, sweet, cruel, delusive Hope, whispered in my ear that life was long with much by and by, and in that by and by my dream-life would be real. So on I went with that gleaming lake in the distance beckoning me to come and sail on its silver waters, and Inexperience, conceited, blind Inexperience, failing to show the impassable pit between it and me."

"We (999 out of every 1000) can see nought in sunsets save as signs and tokens whether we may expect rain on the morrow or the contrary, so we will leave such vain and foolish imagining to those poets and painters- poor fools!"

"I make no apologies for being egotistical."

"Science fiction encourages us to explore... all the futures, good and bad, that the human mind can envision."

"I can remember depending on people like Eric Frank Russell and J. T. Macintosh to give me a good, comfortable read, to tell me a story. Whether they told me anything I didn't know or hadn't thought about or read someplace else was another matter. Later I read all of Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover books."

""Only men laugh, only men dance, only men weep" - Saying on Darkover, quoted by Lew Alton"

"My love for you is a prayer, she thought. Love is the only prayer I know. She thought she had never loved him so much as at this moment, when she heard the convent door close, hard and final, and felt the wall shutting her in. (Gwenhwyfar)."

"Lancelet said, “And I must believe that man has the power to know the right, to choose between good and evil and know that his choice has made a difference…”"

"It was a long season of mourning and there were times when I wondered if I should mourn all my life and never again be free of it; but at last I could remember without weeping, and recall the days of love without unending sorrow welling up like tears from the very depths of my being. There is no sorrow like the memory of love and the knowledge that it is gone forever; even in dreams, I never saw again his face, and though I longed for it, I came at last to see that it was just as well, lest I live all the rest of my life in dreams…but at last there came a day when I could look back and know that the time for mourning was ended. (Morgaine)"

"“To know you are ignorant is the beginning of wisdom,” Viviane said. “Then, when you begin to learn, you will not have to forget all the things you think you know.”"

"“Good Lord, what’s that unholy racket!” “I forgot you weren’t a Scot, darling, don’t you like the bagpipes?”"

"Hold on to what you know, Camilla. That’s all you can do; it’s known as intellectual integrity. If a thing is impossible, it’s impossible."

"There has to be something wrong with a system that means you can take guilt on and off like an overcoat."

"Every human being needs to believe in the goodness of some power that created him, no matter what he calls it, and some religious or ethical structure. But I don’t think we need sacraments or priesthoods from a world that’s only a memory, and won’t even be that to our children and our children’s children. Ethics, yes. Art, yes. Music, crafts, knowledge, humanity—yes. But not rituals which will quickly dwindle down into superstitions. And certainly not a social code or a set of purely arbitrary behavioral attitudes which have nothing to do with the society we are in now."

"The trouble is, we’ve all gotten out of the habit of connecting pregnancy and sex, we all have a civilized attitude about it now."

"Spoiled brat, he thought, she’s had everything her own way all her life, and now at the first hint she might have to give way to some consideration other than her own convenience, she starts making a fuss! Damn her!"

"Anyone who intrigues for power, deserves to get it!"

"He said harshly, “You are suggesting that we abandon the effort—and relapse into barbarism?”… “I hope not, captain. It is man’s mind that makes him a barbarian, not his technology. We may have to do without top-level technology, at least for a few generations, but that doesn’t mean we can’t establish a good world here for ourselves and our children, a civilized world. There have been civilizations which have existed for centuries almost without technology. The illusion that man’s culture is only the history of his techno structures is propaganda from the engineers, sir. It has no basis in sociology—or in philosophy.”"

"“From space there was no sign of life.” Moray, the heavy swarthy man who was the official representative of Earth Expeditionary, and in charge of the Colonists, said quietly, “Don’t you mean no signs of a technological civilization, officer? Remember, until a scant four centuries ago, a starship approaching Earth could not have seen any signs of intelligent life there, either.”"

"Our world is rotten, but I’ve no confidence that the new world will be better!"

"If you can’t be inconspicuous, be so damned conspicuous that nobody can miss you. And that in itself is a fair concealment. How many people can accurately describe a street riot?"

"A trail without beginning has no end."

"You have the Barbarian viewpoint, I see. Radio, for instance. We use it for emergency needs. The Barbarians used to listen to keep from doing things—I know, they even had radio with pictures, and used to sit and listen and look at other people doing things instead of doing them themselves."

"Often, in writing, granting the basic skill of writing a literate English sentence—which can no longer be taken for granted even in college graduates—all it takes is determination."

"A story with no moral isn't worth writing; a story with no plot isn't worth reading. And if people get your point before they get your story, you are to hire a soapbox instead."

"The horror genre—which I define as “perfectly horrible things happen to perfectly nice people for no reason at all.”"

"If family violence teaches children that might makes right at home, how will we hope to cure the futile impulse to solve worldly conflicts with force?"

"Jewish women in second-wave feminism helped to provide the theoretical underpinnings and models for radical action that were seized on and imitated throughout the United States and abroad. Their articles and books became classics of the movement and led the way into new arenas of cultural and political understanding in academe, politics, and grassroots organizing. Even a partial honor roll of Jewish women's liberation pioneers must include such figures as Shulamith Firestone, Ellen Willis, Robin Morgan, Alix Kates Shulman, Naomi Weisstein, Heather Booth, Susan Brownmiller, Marilyn Webb, Meredith Tax, Andrea Dworkin, Linda Gordon, Ellen DuBois, Ann Snitow, Marge Piercy, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, and Vivian Gornick. Despite historians' acknowledgment of the salience of Jewish women in earlier social movements, their prominence within radical feminism failed to attract much attention."

"The politics of the family are the politics of a nation. Just as the authoritarian family is the authoritarian state in microcosm, the democratic family is the best training ground for life in a democracy."

"America is a nation fundamentally ambivalent about its children, often afraid of its children, and frequently punitive toward its children."

"Although Freud said happiness is composed of love and work, reality often forces us to choose love or work."

"Work-family conflicts—the trade-offs of your money or your life, your job or your child—would not be forced upon women with such sanguine disregard if men experienced the same career stalls caused by the-buck-stops-here responsibility for children."

"I'm not going to throw my imagination away. I refuse to lie down to expectation. If I can just hold out till I'm thirty, I'll be incredible."

"People who love science fiction really do love sex."

"Sometimes I wonder if MacKinnon has simply been driven mad by all the sick things people do to one another. I, too, recoil in pain and incomprehension whenever I hear about the latest psychopath who has shot his mother, machine-gunned his coworkers, raped his daughter, or slashed a prostitute. I notice that such men are more likely to have read the Bible than pornography, but I do not hold either script responsible for their actions."

"Sexual speech, not MacKinnon's speech, is the most repressed and disdained kind of expression in our world, and MacKinnon is no rebel or radical to attack it."

""Natural" is a very dangerous word to use about sexuality ... Our society's notions of normality are completely fake and meta-trendy, since they rely on the changing standards of superstition, religion, Christianity and gender bias to define themselves. Americans, in particular, exhibit very childish reactions to sexual practices that are new to them, much like little kids who are offered a vegetable they haven't seen before: "That's disgusting!" "But darling, you haven't even tried it!" "I don't care, I hate it, I hate it!"

"Take the National Organization for Women — please! They've embarrassed me enough over the years, and now I'm going to give them a taste of their own medicine. They were always so holier-than-thou, systematically getting rid of everyone who wasn't just like them: white, upper-middle class, straight (or closeted), sex-phobic Democratic party apologists. As you can imagine, that's not a huge group anymore — but they still manage to hang onto a name that insists that they represent half the population! Well, it's all over, sweethearts. I'm taking away your library card, I'm stripping badges and I'm not returning phone calls. Calling NOW feminists is like calling the People's Republic of China communist: Marx and Emma Goldman are both rolling in their graves."

"Andrea presented herself as a street fighter intellectual, a bohemian freedom fighter, and someone who wanted to get to the bottom of things. That quote about Malcolm X is apt. Malcolm pointed out “The problem is WHITE PEOPLE.” Dworkin said, “The problem is MEN.” And for all the holes that can be poked in that cloth, there is something about that grain that is absolutely true, when you are the short end of the bolt."

"I’m sorry Andrea Dworkin started a sexual revolution that she ended up repudiating. She never got to see people like me, Carol, and the rest of us little protégées who took her inspiration and flew to a new dimension. She got stuck, and then she got sick, and when you’re famous for one thing, no one wants to see you change unless you reject it all, like a pathetic sinner seeking redemption. She was too stubborn and too old-fashioned for that. Andrea Dworkin never would have admitted that she was a SuperStar. She was the animator of the ultimate porno horror loop, where the Final Girl never gets a chance to slay the monster, she only dies, dies, dies, with the cries of the angry mourners to remember her."

"At that time, there was general agreement among everyone involved in women’s liberation that women should have a defined sexual self-interest."

"Keeping people neurotic and depressed and ignorant and self-doubting is oppressive."

"When AIDS was at its most brutal, frightening, my-God-what-are-we-going-to-do era, that was when vampire stories and stories about blood and trust swept the literary world."

"Familiarity with your lover is what initially makes sex really good."

"Human beings like variety, and they also like partnership... these are scientific values we can point to."

"I had no idea that mothering my own child would be so healing to my own sadness from my childhood."

"I think women need to realize that they would be much better moms if they were well-rested, sexually satisfied, and had some interests going outside their childrearing."