Women Authors From The United States

"“Will it always stay like this?” “Nothing,” said Hostetter, “ever stays always like anything.”"

"He could hear Pa’s voice saying, “A man’s religion, his sect, is his own affair. But those people have no religion or sect. They’re a mob, with a mob’s fear and cruelty, and with half-crazy, cunning men stirring them up against others.”"

"“Hell, how do you think the human race ever learned anything, except by trial and error?” “But it all takes such a long, long time,” said Len.” “Everything takes a long time. Birthing takes nine months, and dying takes you all the rest of your life, and what are you complaining about, anyway?”"

"Invisibility is a condition of godhead. If folk could see them, they would know the truth, and the Lords Protector would cease to be divine."

"The mind of a traveler has only one spotlight, and it is always trained on the present scene."

"Nobody said not to go."

"With my usual sublime self-confidence, I rode roughshod over the objections."

"I have deliberately chosen the uncertain path whenever I had the chance."

"Free choice is a very precious thing."

"All of us have been wounded in some way, whether by violence, disease or other personal tragedy. But though we can never pretend we have not been touched by adversity, we can refuse to be held by it."

"Every day you have a choice. Make it count."

"I was asked by thousands of people if I was going to write a book. A lot of them had shared in my story, and in ways I don't quite understand, they had found it helpful."

"It’s not about how strong you were back then, it is about how strong you are right here right now."

"It’s my reality, I put a Band-Aid on it and I move on."

"For years I've been privileged to receive words of thanks and encouragement from people all over the world, often simply asking how I'm doing. I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to share my story in the hope it will continue to resonate with people facing challenges in their own lives."

"Lauren Manning has been very much front and center in my mind… Lauren writes that we may all in fact, we all will be touched by adversity as we go on our life’s journey, but we can refuse to be trapped by it."

"In just these last few years as President, I have watched the American people bounce back from... events [that] were heartbreaking... I think of Lauren Manning, the 9/11 survivor who had severe burns over 80 percent of her body, who said, ‘That’s my reality. I put a Band-Aid on it, literally, and I move on."

"When we are meat eaters living among meat eaters, our world is reflected back to us, confirming our choices. When we become vegetarians, we stop being reflections; we may even be accused of breaking the mirror. … Just when we think our work is done, we discover that it has only begun: the challenge isn't becoming a vegetarian; it is being a vegetarian."

"I coined the term feminized protein for eggs and dairy products: plant protein produced through the abuse of the reproductive cycle of female animals. Feminized protein is taken from living female animals, whose reproductive capacity is manipulated for human needs. The unique situation of domesticated female animals required its own term: a sexual slavery with chickens in battery cages and dairy cows hooked up to milking machines. … The radical truth is that people can be perfectly happy as vegans, but the dominant culture can’t or won’t acknowledge this. … Being vegan is an exciting, wonderful culinary experience and we probably don’t even know what’s possible because it’s still so new. … The process of objectification/fragmentation/consumption can be interrupted by the process of attention/nowness/compassion."

"Through butchering, animals become absent referents. Animals in name and body are made absent as animals for meat to exist. Animals' lives precede and enable the existence of meat. If animals are alive they cannot be meat. Thus a dead body replaces the live animal. Without animals there would be no meat eating, yet they are absent from the act of eating meat because they have been transformed into food."

"Through symbolism based on killing animals, we encounter politically laden images of absorption, control, domain, and the necessity of violence. This message of male dominance is conveyed through meat eating—both in its symbolism and reality."

"Meat is a cultural construct made to seem natural and inevitable. By the time the argument from analogy with carnivorous animals is made, the individual making such an argument has probably consumed animals since before the time she or he could talk. Rationalizations for consuming animals were probably offered when this individual at age four or five was discomforted upon discovering that meat came from dead animals. The taste of dead flesh preceded the rationalizations, and offered a strong foundation for believing the rationalizations to be true."

"In ontologizing women and animals as objects, our language simultaneously eliminates the fact that someone else is acting as a subject/agent/perpetrator of violence."

"Joanna Macy writes that until we can grieve for our planet we cannot love it—grieving is a sign of spiritual health. But it is not enough to weep for our lost landscapes; we have to put our hands in the earth to make ourselves whole again. Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair."

"Gessen is American, too. They (Gessen is transgender and non-binary and prefers the pronouns "they/them") were born in Russia, grew up in the US, and then lived in Russia again as a journalist, before returning to the US. This allows for a deep comparison between Trump and Vladimir Putin, on whom they have written a well-known book The Man Without a Face. The parallels are evident: Trump admires Putin. Indeed, he would like to be America's Putin."

"Only a few of us had been able to face directly the obscene conditions we inflicted on animals in our farm factories and modern slaughter houses; but most of us knew on some level that they entailed a suffering that was too much to “stomach.” We can appreciate now what it did to us to eat animals kept long in pain and terror. Because the mass methods employed to raise and kill animals for our tables were relatively new, we did not fully realize the deprivation and torture they entailed. Only a few of us guessed that the glandular responses of the cattle and pigs and chickens pumped adrenalin into their bodies and that we ate with their flesh the rage of the chickens, the terror of the pigs and cattle… Acting now with more respect for other beings, we find we have more respect for ourselves."

"[Referring to Trump's speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, in Orlando at the end of February 2021] Trump recited a litany of lies about his own record and Biden's policies on immigration, and he ranted about the covid-19 pandemic: it sounded like he was against masking and against not masking, against social distancing and against not social distancing—or, simply, against everything Biden."

"[The Russian media] Coverage is repetitive not just from day to day, television channel to television channel; nearly identical stories appear in print and online media, too. According to a number of current and former employees at Russian news outlets, there is a simple explanation for this: at weekly meetings with Kremlin officials, editors of state-controlled media, including broadcasters and publishers, coördinate topics and talking points. Five days a week, a state-controlled consultancy issues a more detailed list of topics."

"[In answer to the question: "You were born in Russia, spent your teenage years in America then moved back to Moscow as an adult. Do you feel more Russian or American?"] It doesn't really work that way. But when you have emigrated as often as I have, you learn the benefits of being an outsider. I am very comfortable not belonging. I find it extremely beneficial to my work as a journalist to be highly attuned to this culture yet at the same time hovering outside of it."

"In the United States, when we talk about mass violence and we are not talking about ideology, we usually talk about the easy availability of guns. Of course, access to guns matters. The easier it is, technically, to kill people, the more people will be killed."

"[On Putin] He just keeps talking. And throwing numbers out there. Most of them wrong. It's meant to create the impression that he knows what he's talking about. But it's also just meant to drown you in meaningless stuff."

"[On Trump] He talks and you don’t even know where the punctuation marks fall. And the more you try to engage with those words, the less they mean."

"Yet, although no one pursues the politics of hating or othering children and arguing that they should be dead, school shootings proliferate, because one can imagine no terror greater than the terror inflicted on children and on their families. The essential precondition for mass violence, it seems, is not guns or hate but a culture of terror, a common imaginary that includes the possibility of a mass shooting."

"No powerful political actor had set out to destroy the American political system itself — until, that is, Trump won the Republican nomination. He was probably the first major party nominee who ran not for president but for autocrat. And he won."

"[Following conciliatory messages from, among others, Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama after the result of the 2016 presidential election became known] However well-intentioned, this talk assumes that Trump is prepared to find common ground with his many opponents, respect the institutions of government, and repudiate almost everything he has stood for during the campaign. In short, it is treating him as a "normal" politician. There has until now been little evidence that he can be one."

"Putin's madman-on-the-world-stage shtick forced saner world leaders to devise strategies for minimizing the damage Russia can do. But now that Donald Trump has demonstrated that he will not only speak without thinking but also fire missiles without interrupting dessert, he has one-upped Putin."

"Like the Soviet regime before it, the Putin government spreads fear by destroying the illusion that one can protect oneself... People who work at two Moscow restaurants have warned me, separately, about the precise locations of listening devices at the eateries. The warnings came unbidden. The food at both places was, incidentally, not only very good but also apparently safe. That, along with the springtime sun, helps maintain the bizarre sense of normalcy that has a way of going hand in hand with the mortal danger that has become a fact of everyday life."

"So Trump dropped the "mother of all bombs"—the largest non-nuclear bomb in the US arsenal—on Afghanistan, because, surely, the reason ISIS has not yet been defeated is that America has not used a big enough bomb."

"Trump has struck more countries with more fire power in a week than Putin often does in a year. Where Putin's unpredictable persona is a carefully cultivated one, Trump has given no evidence that his madman act is an act."

"[On the actions of Israel in the Gaza Strip during the 2023 Israel-Hamas war] I'm not convinced that genocide is the right term. I think ethnic cleansing is the right term. But in any case, I think it's likely that crimes against humanity are being committed there. This is something I want to mention: This whole idea of crimes against humanity — like the idea of genocide — these are concepts that came out of World War II and the Holocaust. When we're thinking about whether a crime against humanity has been committed, or if a genocide has been committed, we're performing the act of comparing the Holocaust to current events. That's a foundational stone of our contemporary international legal system. So to ban that kind of comparison is to try to [throw] a wrench in the entire works of international humanitarian law, and I think Israel does that quite advisedly."

"Attacks by poisoning are possibly even more common in Russia than assassinations by gunfire. Most famously, Alexander Litvinenko, a secret-police whistle-blower, was killed by polonium in London, in 2006. Last week, British newspapers reported that a Russian businessman who dropped dead while jogging in a London suburb in 2012 had been killed by a rare plant poison. He had been a key witness in a money-laundering case that had originally been exposed by the Moscow accountant Sergei Magnitsky, who was tortured to death, in 2009, in a Russian jail."

"It’s a no-brainer that we should have the right to marry, but I also think equally that it’s a no-brainer that the institution of marriage should not exist. Fighting for gay marriage generally involves lying about what we are going to do with marriage when we get there — because we lie that the institution of marriage is not going to change, and that is a lie."

"Lying is not a side effect of what RT does; it is the channel's heart."

"After nearly fifteen years of systematic destruction of public space, engineered by Putin, the normal ways by which regular people absorb information about the state of their country are gone. Only a person who had lost his livelihood or half his savings would have been able to report that the economy was failing."

"Public space frightens the Putin regime, which has worked hard, and effectively, to destroy it."

"Russian activists and journalists who get enough death threats and take them sufficiently seriously to hire bodyguards are also usually careful about what they ingest. Soon after the chess champion Garry Kasparov quit the sport to go into politics full time, in 2004, he hired a team of eight bodyguards, who not only accompanied him everywhere but also carried drinking water and food for Kasparov to eat at meals shared in public. Three years ago, Kasparov told me that what he liked most about foreign travel was being able to shed his bodyguards for a while. A year after that, threats drove him to leave Russia permanently."

"Several years ago, I was told by a leading professor of "South Asian Studies" at a major University that I "should never report anything positive about the BJP" (Sangh Parivar combine) or I "would never find a job in American academia". A colleague of mine submitted a manuscript for publication to Oxford University Press, Delhi and the then editor of OUP informed her that it was a good manuscript but since it had passages that reflected positively on the Sangh Parivar they could not publish it. He said if she would remove the passages that were not critical of the Hindu Mahasabha and the BJP then OUP would consider publishing her book – otherwise it was against their policy. Amazing isn't it?"

"Of all the students I have taught at The University of Texas at Austin, which were thousands, Yvette Rosser understood India the best."

"I interviewed numerous Hindus in Dhaka and Mymensingh who told me stories of how their lives were continually in danger. Controversial as it may be, they also told me that their daughters are often kidnapped, "forcibly converted and married to Muslim boys". They explained that, once converted, even by force", there is nothing they can do, because if the girls want to come home" and return to their ancestral religion they are then "accused of apostasy and run the risk of being murdered by the decree of a fatwa. Because of these pressures, the Hindu population of Bangladesh continues to shrink annually."

"The manner in which the textbooks were gradually rewritten in Bangladesh is very different than the method of the BJP in India, where changes in the orientation of historiography have been implemented with media fanfare an broad consultation—a very public debate. In the very different political atmosphere of BNP/Islamist government controlled Bangladesh, changes were clandestinely implemented, with little public review."