Women Authors From England

"[W]e can try and apply logic to other areas of life... [I]t's very frustrating if we try... with the expectation that that works. ...[I]t doesn't mean we shouldn't try ...[I]t's always good to try and understand everything else according to logic, but... this is the fate of many mathematicians who... get... frustrated with the actual world, because nothing behaves the way we want... Whereas in the beautiful mathematical world everything does behave..."

"The work I do is totally abstract... [T]he idea is that it will help other people understand things that they can then do in the world..."

"[A]bstract theory often comes from wanting to be lazy, or... conserving brain power, conserving energy, because if you do the same thing over and over again, wouldn't you rather not... and just do it once... [T]hat's what abstract theory is there for... [T]hat applies to all sorts of aspects of life, not just sciences and programming"

"I don't believe that one should have anything without sharing it, and that includes knowledge, money, food, love..."

"Now, if you imagine drawing a circle in the air with a , the surface you make is a over a circle. The idea is that for each point in the circle, you now have an entire vector, that is, a line given by the lightsaber at that instant."

"Mathematics... helps... construct and understand arguments... too difficult for ordinary intuition. ...It is a way of eliminating ambiguity... It cuts corners, answering many questions... by showing... they're all... the same question... by abstraction: throwing out things that cause ambiguity, and ignoring [irrelevant] details... until all you have to do is apply unambiguous logical thought..."

"I'd like to talk about abstract mathematics and my experience of making it... palatable to people who may have had very bad experiences of it..."

"[S]omething is easy if it is attainable by logical thought processes.... without having to resort to imagination, guesswork, luck, gut feeling, convoluted interpretation, leaps of faith... drugs, violence... [etc.]"

"We will never be able to encompass everything by rationality alone... [T]his is a necessary and beautiful aspect of human existence."

"Maths... as it's taught in school is often... boring, pointless, painful, beside the point, and doesn't show people the things that... are the most beautiful about abstract math, and what the point of it is..."

"... I wish we could educate people not just to be able to do things and know things, but to be nicer humans — and to get their self-esteem not from being better at something than someone else — but from how much they are able to help someone else do something."

"...The idea of math is to look for similarities between things so that you only need one "recipe" for many different situations. The key is that when you ignore some details, the situations become easier to understand and you can fill in the variables later. This is the process of abstraction."

"All our dreams can come true as long as we have the right dreams... [A]s long as we think logically, this is the world where everything behaves correctly, and... where any toy we want, we can play with, as soon as we've dreamed it up."

"The point is to help us. It's not there to cause people pain. The point of abstraction is to clear out the fluff in order... to see more clearly what's actually going on."

"I am going to show that mathematics... is precisely "that which is easy.""

"I make it my business to help everybody understand these things a bit more, because... they're very misunderstood..."

"I wrote this book because I love maths, and I love food... [S]adly most people love food more than they love maths..."

"Abstraction is about digging deep into a situation to find out what is at its core making it tick. Another way to think of it is about stripping away irrelevant details, or rather, stripping away details that are irrelevant to what we're thinking about now. These details might well be relevant to something else, but we decide we don't need to think about them for the time being. Crucially, it's a careful and controlled forgetting of details, not a slapdash ignoring of details out of laziness or a desire to skew an argument in a certain direction."

"Infinity is a Loch Ness monster, capturing the imagination with its awe-inspiring size but elusive nature. Infinity is a dream, a vast fantasy world of endless time and space. Infinity is a dark forest with unexpected creatures, tangled thickets and sudden rays of light breaking through. Infinity is a loop that springs open to reveal an endless spiral."

"In the abstract world, as soon as you've thought of... something, you can play with it. It's there... the idea and the thing are the same... so you create things just by thinking of them... I wish I could do that for my dinner, but I can't."

"Women have been artists for millennia, since the cave paintings. And yet Gombrich and Janson, their first editions didn't include a single woman artist. So it's actually down to who has been able to tell the story of art history. And of course, there are so many sexist barriers that the women had to jump over. Women artists in Europe weren't even allowed to be admitted to the life drawing studio until the 1890s. The fact that they even became professional artists despite these boundaries and everything being against them is so remarkable."

"New York is such an instrumental city for art, and it’s extraordinary the impact that America’s had in art history, especially in the 20th century."

"I walked into the art fair, and I suddenly realized that none of the works were by women. It just was this epiphany moment. I had just finished a B.A. in art history, and I had to ask myself—could I name 20 women artists? The answer was no. I challenged myself to write an article about female Baroque and Renaissance artists, and suddenly I was learning about Elisabetta Sirani and Artemisia Gentileschi and Sofonisba Anguissola. I was unearthing all these stories—but they’re all there, and we shouldn’t have to hunt for them."

"[About the Guerilla Girls] Essentially, what they unveiled was the fact that museums are celebrating the history of patriarchy, as opposed to the history of art. And if we're not seeing art by a wide range of people and subjects of a wide range of people, then we’re not seeing society as a whole."

"So much of the time, when I read a short, 150-word bio of a female artist, male artists are referenced in relation to them. To be honest, I got a bit sick of it. Dora Maar is always being referred to as Picasso's lover, and actually what I want to do is scream and say Dora Maar was an incredible street photographer and Surrealist, and she was amazing. But how often does her name come up in telling his story?"

"[T]his is the ultimate question that I want to ask my predecessors from 100 years ago: What happened to these women artists? It's almost as though they were consciously written out of art history. I don't really know. Was it ignorance or was it purposeful?"

"I don't agree that we should dismiss certain art forms and we should create a hierarchy. That's what the academies in the 18th century really did. They said painting and sculpture is at the top, and embroidery and craft like decorative arts is at the bottom. And what did women have access to? Decorative arts and craft."

"[About The Story of Art by E.H. Gombrich] It's the introductory bible to our history. And I love it because it is for everyone. The fact that he writes in such beautiful prose that anyone can understand, you want to — you have heard of a term such as the Renaissance or the Baroque, and you can look that up in Gombrich. But he doesn't include any woman artist. He only includes one in his 16th edition, which is crazy. And the fact that I loved this book growing up, I wanted to write — if he was going to leave that women, I thought I'd leave out men."

"When women talk about any kind of misogynistic abuse, three things happen. We are told that we should stop making a fuss. We are told that it could be worse. We are told that other issues are more serious. At the Hay festival this week, Germaine Greer told us all three."

"Ultimately, if Greer is saying we need to take rape less seriously, she needn't worry … society is already doing a pretty great job of that all by itself."

"[The irony defence of misogynistic material] Previously, you got people to engage because it's just jokes. Now, if it's being watched 11.4bn times, it doesn't have to be a joke any more, because the strength is in numbers."

"I don't think someone in a predatory position, behaving in an abhorrent way towards young girls, would have looked at the Sun and thought there was nothing wrong with their behaviour, but they would have looked at it and thought: "I’m going to get away with it.""

"[Misogynistic and sexist attitudes during her career as an actor] I asked other women if they'd experienced attitudes of this sort. I found myself thinking back about all the incidents I'd never really thought twice about and saying, "Oh, my God, this is huge. Why am I putting up with it?" I couldn't believe how many of these women had hundreds of stories."

"[On a couple's engagement] As for the man asking "permission" from the bride's father, one friend expressed my thoughts exactly: "If I'm going to get married, I sure as hell want to be the first to know about it.""

"[On changing surnames on marriage] We wrangled back and forth over this – he would have been happy to take my surname, but already had a friend with the identical name. Would that be weird? We dismissed double barrels. We considered the new trend for combining the two names into a hybrid – this worked for friends with the surnames Sand and Smith (giving them the magical-sounding Sandsmith). But neither Baylor nor Tates has quite the same romantic ring. Of course, the simple thing is to keep one's own name and get on with it. But for me there was something meaningful about making a shift in our official identities. Eventually, my fiance came up with a simple solution: we'd each take the other's surname as an extra middle name, leaving our surnames unchanged. Problem solved. (Until, as my mum pointed out, we might have to think about what surname to use for any children, but hey, we'll need something to talk about once we're married.)"

"[On the media's short attention span] This is no longer anything to do with me at all. It's about the 60,000 women's voices and the strength of those stories. Regardless of whether someone wants to interview me next week, it doesn't matter at all as long as people are still fighting."

"I was in a school last week and I asked the girls if there are any situations where women are not treated with respect. There was an uproar, all of them shouting: "Yes, the boys in our year call us sluts and slags more than they use our real names. Yes, we're told that we have to send them pictures of our breasts and if we don't, then we're uptight and we’re prudes." This stuff isn't, like, isolated incidents. This is stuff that's coming up again and again."

"[In the late 1990s] But the conversations we had then were whether or not it was feminist to wear fishnets. There was never any subtext of violence against women. By the late 00s, lad-mag controversies were of a completely different nature. Danny Dyer had an agony uncle column in Zoo that he used to advise a reader to cut his ex's face to stop anyone else wanting her. Other advice was to set fire to a readers's girlfriend’s pubic hair that he didn't like. These were ghostwritten and as such can only really speak to the new mood in lad-mags, but two things had changed. One was a complete normalisation of violence against women and the other was a void where the humour used to be. The norm had been flipped: the argument in the 90s, that anything was fair game so long as it was funny, had turned into: "Anything is allowable, so long as I say it is funny.""

"[M]y experience of an all-girls' school, followed by twice as long as a trustee of a prison charity, informed a lot of my politics, including why I became a transgender ally. Before I had thought seriously about trans rights, and the immeasurable preciousness of any human being with the courage to live their most meaningful and truthful life, I thought: "Wait, are you saying all-female spaces are kinder? Purer? Inherently less violent? More supportive? Are you joking? Are you out of your mind?""

"Later, they were both part of the metropolitan elite, or, as we used to call them, "Londoners"."

"It's an extremely peculiar situation, if you come at it cold: neither the Labour leader, nor any of his shadow cabinet, can get through a broadcast interview without being asked who has a penis and who has a vagina. Why, at this moment of both national and international crisis, has the media decided that the most important question for a party that hasn't been in government for 12 years, is a hypothetical one about genitals?"

"[Definition by Bates of Everyday Sexism as published om the project website in 2014] To prove how the steady drip-drip-drip of sexism and sexualisation and objectification is connected to the assumption of ownership and control over women’s bodies, and how the background noise of harassment and disrespect connects to the assertion of power that is violence and rape."

"The truly radical sub-text, however, is that a heroine can be politically motivated, a good dancer, attractive to the opposite sex, and fat all at the same time."

""The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist," said Verbal Kint (paraphrasing Charles Baudelaire) in The Usual Suspects. This might have been true back in Kint's heyday, but nowadays it's depressingly obvious that devils do indeed exist, clad in the trappings of politics, religion or super-wealth as they sow conflict, contagion, oppression and conspiracy theories throughout the world."

"She's less one of the inner echelon of elder statesmen issuing judgement, and more your incredibly well-viewed friend who particularly loves genre movies, but also beer and cats."

"[T]he trouble with Cookson is that she is not, when all is said and done, a terribly interesting writer. Her popularity is a notable phenomenon, true, but she does not have the kind of outsize literary talent that could do justice to her outsize themes."

"When Tom's school was evacuated to St Albans during the war we had a little flat opposite the library. I took a book every day: Chaucer, Emerson, John Donne. Good plain writing, no hyperbole. I would have liked to have studied philosophy. Homespun philosophy, that's what you get in my books."

"Mrs Cookson certainly has a remarkable gift for bringing a tear to the eye."

"Catherine Cookson in The Black Velvet Gown...has a story telling gift that would stop a runaway train."

"You see, until I was 16 my world was a short straight line: Jarrow, East Jarrow, Tyne Dock and East Shield, running along the river. I had everything to catch up. It wasn't until I grew up and read Lord Chesterfield that I began my education. He became my tutor and the public library my university."