Women Academics From The United States

"Every day there are new estimates coming out for the incubation period (of COVID-19)."

"One thing about this (COVID-19) that's somewhat unprecedented is the speed at which new data is coming out and becoming available for mass consumption. In that article, there's not a lot of detail about when the initial patient returning to China became symptomatic. It's really hard to tell. People don't always accurately report. That's not on purpose or anything, but people aren't so self-aware that they're going to notice a single sneeze, or every little cough, or clearing their throat, or their nose is running and they think it's allergies. There are a lot of reasons why people might not necessarily recognize that they are symptomatic when they actually are."

"Situations that require a mask are when you are in a crowd ... or if you are caring for a sick person. If it makes you feel better, wear a surgical mask."

"Democratic presidential candidates are struggling to distinguish themselves from their party rivals and competing for endorsements. Their horizontal vision in these disagreements diverts their gaze from the peril we face as Donald Trump dismantles the norms that have guided our political life since 1776. Whatever their differences, Democratic candidates must agree to broad principles related to key issues, for example, immigration, health care, and the growing wealth gap. A general consensus would leave plenty of room for healthy debates about implementation, but failure to emphasize shared ideals in relationship to two or three major questions will blunt Democrats’ offensive against a candidate whose campaign is based on slander and fear."

"Although we like to think our nation is exceptional, the choices made by defenders of democracy in 1922 Italy and 1933 Germany are worth revisiting. The parallels are not perfect. Our two-party tradition sets us apart from Germany and Italy, each of which had five major parties. But legislative gridlock and voter cynicism today are reminiscent of conditions that marked the last months of democracy in Italy and Germany. The threat to our democracy does not command s, but incite violence. Our economy is stable but many Americans feel left behind. Most worrying, Republicans march in lockstep behind Donald Trump, while Democrats fragment – like opponents of authoritarianism in interwar Europe. Of course, we can’t know whether different strategies in Italy and Germany would have preserved democracy, but since hindsight is 20-20, let’s use it."

"Mussolini and Hitler promised to restore national glory and depicted themselves as the last defense against radical socialism. Neither appealed to racism at first. Not even Hitler, who muted his virulent anti-Semitism in public to attract voters during the late 1920s. New followers told themselves he had mellowed, but his base and his Jewish targets never doubted his true intentions."

"President Trump has violated many of the norms and laws on which our democracy depends. He circumvents Congress by declaring the “crisis” at the border a national emergency. He orders his staff to ignore s. He uses his presidential status to enhance his family’s wealth. He demands absolute loyalty from his appointees. He treats truth like a despot and jokes with Vladimir Putin about his “fake news” problem. He boasts about his misogyny and spews racist insults. Trump is not a despot. But neither were Mussolini and Hitler early on. No black or march in our streets. President Trump’s enablers wear white shirts and black robes. They are unified. Democrats are not."

"Ideologies of US settler colonialism directly informed Australian settler colonialism. South African apartheid townships, the kill-zones in what became the Philippine colony, then nation-state, the checkerboarding of Palestinian land with checkpoints, were modeled after U.S. seizures of land and containments of Indian bodies to reservations. The racial science developed in the U.S. (a settler colonial racial science) informed Hitler’s designs on racial purity (“This book is my bible” he said of Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race)."

"The pursuit of critical consciousness, the pursuit of social justice through a critical enlightenment, can also be settler moves to innocence - diversions, distractions, which relieve the settler of feelings of guilt or responsibility, and conceal the need to give up land or power or privilege."

"Settlers are not immigrants. Immigrants are beholden to the Indigenous laws and epistemologies of the lands they migrate to. Settlers become the law, supplanting Indigenous laws and epistemologies. Therefore, settler nations are not immigrant nations."

"The easy adoption of decolonization as a metaphor (and nothing else) ... is a premature attempt at reconciliation. The absorption of decolonization by settler social justice frameworks is one way the settler, disturbed by her own settler status, tries to escape or contain the unbearable searchlight of complicity, of having harmed others just by being one’s self. The desire to reconcile is just as relentless as the desire to disappear the Native; it is a desire to not have to deal with this (Indian) problem anymore."

"Settler moves to innocence are those strategies or positionings that attempt to relieve the settler of feelings of guilt or responsibility without giving up land or power or privilege, without having to change much at all. In fact, settler scholars may gain professional kudos or a boost in their reputations for being so sensitive or self-aware. Yet settler moves to innocence are hollow, they only serve the settler."

"That is the corrosive paradox of gender feminism's misandrist stance: no group of women can wage war on men without at the same time denigrating the women who respect those men."

"As our schools become more feelings centered, risk averse, competition-free, and sedentary, they move further and further from the characteristic sensibilities of boys."

"More recent writers who have knocked me dead include Roberto Bolaño, Ruth Ozeki, Sabrina Vourvoulias, Isabel Quintero and N. K. Jemisin."

"I lived most of my life feeling like an outsider. I remember in second grade being bullied, taunted and beaten up. I am bicultural, biracial – my mother is Japanese and my father is caucasian. I grew up in Connecticut; it was a fairly white culture and I grew up thinking I was Japanese. Then when I went to Japan I realised that I was American. That was shocking but also a wonderful completion, realising that I was neither here nor there but occupied some liminal space, neither in one culture or the other. That's a great vantage point."

"We’re afraid of saying the word “suicide” and talking about it. Certainly the word suicide has a kind of energy that is frightening, and people can be afraid of talking about it. Why is it that we forget we were adolescents once? I don’t forget that. Writers need to keep that part alive in order to write. What’s important (for adolescents) is that you have a lifeline; it can be your friends, it can be your family, church, writing practice, a teacher, your cat, your gerbil. And little by little, the hormones subside and you develop coping skills and you develop passions and things that are really worth living for, and you get through that difficult period."

"All through my childhood, I wanted to be a novelist. I stopped writing at various points because I would get frustrated because there were things I didn’t know how to do. I didn’t know how to move a story through time. Pacing. My character would enter a room and need to get across the room to the action, and I would walk her ploddingly across the room. I didn’t know how to move the plot along quickly and efficiently through time…"

"As a writer you wait around for inspiration; this book is about what happens when a character taps a writer on the shoulder and calls her into being; it's about the character creating a novelist."

"These women, they don't just have deep emotional lives, but they are, you know, thinking about the world. They're thinking about art. They're thinking about things that are bigger than just reactions to circumstances."

"There is a reason for African Americans to feel a lot of pride. Detroiters faced a lot of obstacles related to home ownership, which was a cornerstone of the American dream, but they achieved it nonetheless."

"It’s important for African Americans to find sources of pride as society turns away from valuing us."

"You've got to navigate what might feel just completely opaque by yourself in a lot of ways. There are the sort of fellow travelers, but you have to decide what is it going to feel like? What is going to feel satisfactory to you? And that is what I think about when I think about the title, is these women are navigating the wilderness."

"I wanted to think about the beginnings and what it feels like to have a kind of rupture with someone you love, or you grew up loving, and for it to kind of just bloom into this insurmountable distance between the two of you."

"There's something universal about the experience of navigating middle life or into middle life, which is that there are just a lot fewer guideposts."

"There were safety issues, the City let the lights remain off in certain areas, and there were no services. I wondered, how did this happen? I was exploring what it feels like to know things are changing and shifting."

"No outside pressure could live up to the pressure I’ve always put on myself as a writer…"

"Any realistic depiction of Detroit should include the blight and frustration that come with living there, but it should also show regular people experiencing joy."

"I don’t think I need to succeed so that the race can succeed. We’ve seen that. We’ve been succeeding since we were sneaking to learn how to read. We’ve been showing ourselves to be exceptional, and it doesn’t change anything. I understand that burden; I do not feel that burden. I feel the burden on the page when writing a story to do justice to the black people I am rendering, but I don’t necessarily believe that my successes or failure will have some greater impact on the way that people view black people…"

"She become one of Latin America's most powerful writers. Still controversial, her works critique Puerto Rican society with detachment and precision: a cultural sexism that makes middle- and upper-class wives and daughters into dolls; the moral bankruptcy of a corrupt aristocracy; class conflicts that erupt into random violence; the desperation of women and men who are marginalized by poverty and racism."

"It's not that I want to victimize men, but I think that women have been the victims throughout the centuries, a fact which has been incorporated into mythology and which I thought it was high time to change."

"I certainly don't think that the discovery and colonization of America by Spain is anything that should be glorified. The first Indians who came into contact with the Spaniards were the Taínos, the native Puerto Rican Indians, who were a very peaceful people. The relationship which developed at first was very interesting because the Indians had no idea what the Spaniards would eventually do, and they trusted them and befriended them. The Indian leader Agüeybana even offered his daughter in marriage to Juan Ponce de León. But then they realized that what the Spaniards were doing was taking them as slaves, and this is when they began to rebel, without any success. When one thinks of what happened, it is truly an extermination of a people, comparable only to what happened with the Jews in World War II."

"Write about whatever random-ass black thing you want to write about. Or not. The only way that our literature will continue to grow is if we accept and acknowledge that nothing we write will change the hearts and minds of people who don’t want their hearts and minds changed…"

"What a delight to discover that Ferré is as good a storyteller in English as in her native Spanish!"

"The word is extremely important. As a writer, it is my means for self-definition, the tool to express my idiosyncracies, my personality. It is also like a painter's brush which I use to depict the reality of my people."

"I very much believe in the influence of magic and the subconscious on the literary process...I think that magic has to do with the subconscious, much as the ancient sorcerers believed. The identification of man with his material surroundings and his active participation in that world are detailed in the books of Carlos Castañeda, for example, as well as, on a different level, with the books of sociologists like Lévy-Bruhl and Ernest Cassirer, or Lévi-Strauss. The magical identification has a lot to do with literature, this alternate way of viewing the world."

"Whether it's 'cause you move away or because your lives are just sort of diverging, you have to keep choosing to be a part of this friendship."

"("What is your reaction when you have finished a work?") I almost always like it immediately after finishing it. I continue to think that I wrote something quite good for a period of maybe six months or a year. But after a year and a half I begin to see some flaws in it, after two years it begins to look pretty bad, after three years it is horrendous, and by the fourth year I want to burn the book."

"I have always wanted to understand certain things about myself and my life, but in order to know what I think, I have to write it down first."

"Puerto Rico, like all the countries of the Caribbean, is a nation where fantastic reality, the world of magic, is ever present. There are various sects of white magic, such as Santeria. It is a reality that is very palpable in our environment, and this is why there are no great differences between fantasy and reality...All Caribbean writers have this in common."

"(Q: In "When Women Love Men" every woman who is sexually repressed would like to break those taboos and simply be sexually free.) If you read Freud or a little psychoanalysis, you know that society has to control that or there would be total anarchy. But everybody has the same desires. The important thing was that when this story came out no Puerto Rican woman had ever written about sex. My story is just a little story, and it's not Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, but I think I was trying to go in that direction."

"I have the idea that people who are very repressed tend to be inner-oriented; they talk to themselves more than other people. People who have difficulties making themselves heard have usually been brought up in stifling environments. Maybe that's why I felt as I did-because I was very timid. Maybe that's why my writing is so violent, in a way."

"Literature is made of many pieces, of a reinterpretation of similar themes, of a recycling of materials. Only the mask exists, and the writer wears it to interpret the manifold possibilities of humanity that exist around him. He learns to be a writer when he can take someone else's mask and make it a part of himself and talk from that mask."

"(Many of your stories use dolls as symbols of women's restricted lives. Were you sort of a doll in your marriage?) Yes, I was. Definitely. But in Puerto Rico most of the women of my generation were in the same situation. I was no exception. Women who wanted to change that or go against that stereotype would be considered odd or slightly crazy. The only reason they couldn't say the same about me was because I made it in the world of literature."

"Writing is a lot like sewing: You bring pieces together and make a quilt."

"A story is like building a chapel; a novel is a cathedral: That's the difference."

"If the writer is trying to interpret the meaning of life, all of what he writes is autobiographical…When you write fiction, you are wearing a mask, you are dealing with magic. The novelist is like the shaman; he reinterprets the life of the tribe in terms of his fictitious characters, in order to bring out the devils. And that's what literature does."

"There's still a fraternity of men. They admire themselves, and they admire each other's works. I think they are a little bit scared of women, too."

"We live in much more flexible societies, but we have to keep testing them, pushing against the lid of the system so it doesn't crush us again. And one of the best ways to do this is to be frank about one's own experiences."

"I don't translate my work; I write versions of it. I couldn't let anybody do it for me. We're a different self in each language, since language makes you think in different ways. I feel if I let someone else translate my work, the translator would stamp his personality on it. The translator speaks with your voice, but the soul behind the voice is someone else's."