Women Born In The 1940s

"To pour more financial hardship on specific clubs, given what we are all going through both now and for the foreseeable future, is both outrageous and shameful. We should be standing together to help clubs to survive and to save jobs."

"To continue in psychology, I would have had to do educational psychology and you had to teach for a couple of years. The last thing I wanted to do was teach."

"My father was from a strong working class background and came from an age where it was believed education was wasted on women. He used to say things like: 'If she was a boy I could understand it'."

"I wanted to demonstrate to my father I was still a good working class girl who would get married and have kids like everyone else. I soon realised it wasn't a very clever thing to have done."

"I am just not cut out to run a public company and be answerable to hundreds of faceless shareholders."

"My parents always strove to try to ensure their children would have more than they had. That is really what made them tick."

"My mother had a lot to do with bringing up my daughter. I knew that when I left her with my mother she was safe and then I could get on with my career."

"I know the passion, I know how much football means but so much of what you see and hear is illogical. The team is having a bad run; it happens to more or less everybody. I just think it’s unpleasant and feel for those in the firing line because if only life was that simple. You can deal with it for so long then it begins to wear you down."

"I think there's been so much negativity and it has reached such a height that without an independent review it's not ever going to to go away."

"I’ve been criticised for spending money we didn’t have."

"I've sat on the SPFL board and I've approved a loan for another club. I know that loans can be approved."

"To be honest, being CEO and having that level of involvement in everything going on in the club – being in the thick of things – was what I loved, but the moment was right to step back from that."

"we want to make the club as successful as possible in Europe. That’s a game changer for Hearts and if we consolidate our position in the top three or four clubs in Scotland, that has to be our target."

"As time went on, I definitely bought into the whole concept and became more involved."

"No, I didn’t do that; I spent money I knew we had. Maybe we shouldn’t go into the discussion about whether I’ve always spent it wisely."

"What they were looking for was input and advice from me with my business background to strengthen where they were with their plans. It was absolutely clear to me that their hearts were in the right place. What was required was more of a business perspective."

"People read about these things in something called “history” at school, but it’s not made to relate to your real life. You hear about the slaves, and who wants to be related to the slaves? They’re not people, they’re some creature that you read about. So why would you believe it happened to your people, or anywhere near you? So even if we’re doing all these things, you are not quite sure how much of it is sticking—but it’s worth a try."

"…you can’t assimilate until you are something. Then you have something to give other people. My position is this: the universe, the universal, is beautiful, but if you imagine the world as a set of plates piled on each other, there’s this one that’s a little skewed because of a particular history in the New World: our history, that of the descendants of the slaves, is skewed, and it is at the bottom. And if you don’t settle that one, all the others will fall and crash. So that one has to be settled, has to know itself, so that it can take its place sitting firmly with all the other plates…It will continue to run away from us. People don’t know what it’s like, being snubbed for how you look, always being seen as the sniper or whatever. How can they know, unless we stick up for ourselves and say this is who we are."

"Louisiana was part of my larger interest in Africa and diaspora, and the need for blacks of the diaspora, and to a certain extent of Africa, to know each other and to understand that you have to get through it together, for political purposes if nothing else…[it] was an attempt to say, “Look, we’re the same thing.” So it’s not just the preservation, it’s also the preaching"

"…it’s not just a culture, it’s a history that needs to be preserved. There have been so many omissions in our history…that’s one of the things I set out to do: to preserve…[it] might have come from my knowledge of how people’s history gets distorted and stolen."

"Reading Dr. Erna Brodber’s novel Myal (1988) is a transformative experience that unchains both truths and memories and moves you to explore what she calls the “half that’s not been told”...A paragon of cultural memory, Brodber lives truly, completely and freely as a cultural historian, sociologist, novelist, teacher, community organizer, social activist, caregiver, mother, entrepreneur, healer and chronicler."

"I think that what Erna Brodber is doing is wonderful because she's coming from that extremely spiritual dimension which is so powerful."

"not only do I want people to know the history of the underclass, but I want them to go investigate. So, engaging with my work should send you into further investigations into knowledge. So, it’s a stimulus to knowledge search. (2015)"

"…all sorts of things that don’t even look political got mixed up with the 1970s and the new politics. So, that was how, when I came here, how I viewed Mr. Manley and Woodside. Anything that was out of the current order then was now possible. As if Mr. Manley had shattered some sort of glass globe and people could go inside and take what ideas they felt like having. It was really quite revolutionary, if unstructured. (2015)"

"My work belongs to the people who are reading it. That’s how I hold with the work going away: people have the right to put their interpretation and their meaning into it—it is in the public arena."

"I don’t know that the writers are aware enough of the rural. I mean, there’s nature, they will talk about the blue skies and they’ll talk about the roses, but—my models, which are deeply embedded in the soil, I’m not sure I see anybody else doing that. Because I’m a rural child, I understand these things, I want to understand them. So my metaphors will tend to be coming out of agriculture. (2015)"

"The business of being translated—it’s an honor if people from somewhere else, another language group, another culture, want to hear what you have to say."

"Oral tradition requires a telling and a listening that is intense, and intentional. Giving, receiving, giving-it makes a complete circle of Indigenous truth. First Nations writing utilizes the power and gift of story, like oral tradition, to convey history, lessons, culture and spirit. And perhaps the overwhelming instinct in our spirit is to love. I would say that Native writing gives the gift of love. And love is a word that is abused and made empty by the dominant culture. In fact, the letters l-o-v-e have become just that, blank cyphers used frivolously to cover up deep places of the spirit."

"Beth Brant gave us Indigenous feminism and Indigenous queer theory even before we had a name for these practices, all wrapped up in the most beautiful storywork."

"I am tired of hearing Virginia Woolf and Emily Dickinson held up as the matriarchs of feminist and/or women's literature. Woolf was a racist, Dickinson was a woman of privilege who never left her house, nor had to deal with issues beyond which white dress to wear on a given day. Race and class have yet to be addressed, or if they are discussed, it is on their terms not ours"

"Beth saw her writing as an enacting of responsibility-the responsibility to help bring us all to the knowledge of how to live with integrity, as good human beings: in balance, centered in the heart's knowledge, hopeful, not vengeful, not small, but with generosity. Whether she achieved this in her own life to her own satisfaction, I don't know, and it is not mine to say. But in my view, that is where her writing is meant to take us: to ignite the imagination, to provide it with a kind of knowledge about how to care about those who suffer, and about how to walk in one's full posture, in a sacred way, looking at the world with vision."

"I look on Native women's writing as a gift, a give-away of the truest meaning. Our spirit, our sweat, our tears, our laughter, our love, our anger, our bodies are distilled into words that we bead together to make power. Not power over anything. Power. Power that speaks to hearts as well as to minds."

"Her life was too short, like so many of our people. Colonial poverty and oppression took away some of our best sons and daughters. Beth left early, but she had accomplished so much. She inspired a generation of two-spirited authors who followed her to publication. There would be not have been a Johnny Appleseed without there first being a Beth Brant. There would have been no Connie Fife without Beth Brant. There would be no I Am Woman without Beth Brant. We were feminists when everyone objected. Feminism is a white thing, they said. Beth's response, so is patriarchy, and then she told us about the friendship between Elizabeth Cady Stanton and an Iroquoian woman that sparked the suffragettes - made sense to me."

"words are sacred"

"Mother, I am gay. I have AIDS." The telephone call that it almost killed him to make. The silence. Then, "Come home to us."

"The old women are gathered in the Longhouse. First, the ritual kissing on the cheeks, the eyes, the lips, the top of the head; that spot where the hair parts in the middle like a wild river through a canyon. (beginning of "Native Origin")"

"It has been two days since they came and took the children away. My body is greatly chilled. All our blankets have been used to bring me warmth. The women keep the fire blazing. The men sit. They talk among themselves. We are frightened by this sudden child-stealing. We signed papers, the agent said. This gave them rights to take our babies. It is good for them, the agent said. It will make them civilized, the agent said. I do not know civilized. (from "A Long Story")"

"Two-Spirit writers are merging the selves that colonialism splits apart."

"Beth Brant is a writer of great depth and brilliant talent."

"For the Native, queer, feminist, literary world: Beth is a home, reminding us that we are not alone in our movements towards liberation."

"Beth had an understanding of the road to freedom, the path to love, and the story we would have to create to get there. The pearls in her stories lie in a shell of words that need only to be opened; read Beth's work and we can all come together, transgendered, heterosexual, homosexual, lesbian, fluid gendered, disabled, and abled, white, and non-white. We do not have to be stuck where corporate colonialism consigned us. There was room for everyone in Beth's heart. We can reach out and resist. The world is ours; we just need to go get it. This was Beth's philosophy."

"Homophobia is the eldest son of racism; they work in concert with each other, whether externally or internally. Native lesbian writing names those twin evils that would cause destruction to us."

"Learn to bear the word. The truth is bitter. It is a whip to the wise, a grudge to the foolish."

"To truly create a character, one must devote their life to it, be courageous, patient, and hardworking—only then can one reach the pinnacle. Take our Jamsranjav, for example. Even when he had a broken arm, he performed in such a way that the audience never noticed. Even when his final moments were being counted, when there was a performance, he got up and went on stage. Watching that from the side was truly astonishing."

"On stage, I dedicate myself to living truthfully. Yet, people try to turn their real lives into a performance. Sometimes I think our roles have been reversed, and when I say this, directors laugh and agree, “That’s true.” It all feels so artificial."

"For me, I encourage myself by saying, “Maybe I will have a harder time than this, I need to endure it.” People have already gone through more difficult things in this world than what I am going through. Nothing happens in a person’s life. It is important to think carefully and gain insight from the pain."

"Once an idea takes hold in my mind, I push forward in that direction. If I encounter resistance, I become even more determined. But really, who would enjoy obstacles? Looking back, those very challenges have been beneficial to me. I’ve learned a lot from them and need to apply those lessons to myself. Above all, I believe a person must be true to their goals."

"We who are among the fortunate to live here must shoulder the responsibility to protect the last of this unique ecosystem, not just for us, but for the whole country, and for the future; and all this in the face of climate change."

"I am certain we all want some of this openness and wildness still here for our great grandchildren—for them, but as important, for the creatures who live here and whose existence as a species is in our hands. We are the last ones who will have this decision to make: what to protect and what to release."

"I was raised and imbued with the doctrine of “stewardship,” a concept that mandated us to pass forward our spot on this planet in as good or better condition than we received it."