Women Authors From The United States

"The story circulates like a gift; an empty gift which anybody can lay claim to by filling it to taste, yet can never truly possess. A gift built on multiplicity. One that stays inexhaustible within its own limits. Its departures and arrivals. Its quietness."

"It’s true that we are free to do whatever we want, even go to France on a whim. We can make any choice we want. We can do anything we want. We just have to not care about consequences."

"After a minute Damien looked over her cube wall. His head was right above the Mardi Gras mask hung on her wall. She didn’t particularly want to go to Mardi Gras, which seemed to be mostly about blonde girls flashing their tits; she just liked masks."

"As our elder Lao Tzu used to say, knowing ignorance is strength, ignoring knowledge is sickness; if one is sick of sickness, then one is no longer sick. For a variation, I would say knowledge for knowledge’s sake is sickness. Let her who is sick with sickness pass on the story, a gift unasked for like a huge bag of moonlight. Now stars shine white on a black on a colored sky."

"We went to Cancun, my Not-A-Honeymoon-Trip to Cancun. We stayed in a resort hotel with a pool that went halfway around the hotel and had two swim-up bars. Being in Mexico I thought everything would be more foreign, but in Cancun things felt a lot the same. There was McDonald’s and KFC, Pizza Hut, even Wal-mart. Mel said it looked just like Florida, only more people speak Spanish in Florida."

"We enter into all major relationships with no real clue of where we are going: marriage, birth, friendship. We carry maps we believe are true: our parents’ relationship, what it says in the baby books, the landscape of our own childhood. These maps are approximate at best, dangerously misleading at worst."

"That is what lives are, aren’t they? Attempts to fill our time with activity designed to prevent us from realizing that there is no meaning?"

"So he starts by asking me what I know about capitalism. “People were rich and there was a lot of corruption and a lot of crime,” I say. “And now we have socialism and people are poor and there’s a lot of corruption and a lot of crime.” He laughs. Anything I say about politics makes him laugh."

"“So what’s wrong with capitalism?” He sighs. For a minute I wonder if maybe he’s a capitalist. But then he says, “It’s not a fair system.” “That’s stupid,” I say. “Things aren’t fair. Only little kids expect things to be fair.”"

"I suppose to him it looks as if I threw everything away, but how can he understand how our choices are taken from us? He doesn’t even understand freedom and what an illusion it really is."

"Nothing prepares you for the death of a child. Nothing teaches you how to live with it."

"A story is not just a story. Once the forces have been aroused and set into motion, they can’t simply be stopped at someone’s request. Once told, the story is bound to circulate; humanized, it may have a temporary end, but its effects linger on and its end is never truly an end."

"One Christmas my dippy older sister was talking about God protecting her from some minor calamity, some domestic crisis involving getting a dent in her husband’s Ford pickup, and later, as we drove home, Allan said, grinning, “I’m so glad that God is looking after Matt’s pickup. Makes up for whatever he was doing during, you know, Cambodia, or the Black Plague.”"

"Substantial creative achievement demands not necessarily genius, but acumen, bent, persistence, time."

"When women took to their piazzas and fields in Sicily in 1892–94, they focused their anger on those who directly challenged their ability to subsist. Many considered the nation-state, large landholders, and those priests who were allied with such interests to be the most egregious off enders. After the Italian nation was formed in 1861, many members of the urban bourgeoisie and middle classes supported the national project, but most of the poor actively revolted against it. For the vast majority of Italy’s residents—the peasantry—the new state meant excessive taxation, forced conscription, dispossession from land, widespread poverty, police brutality, and government repression."

"Local economies gave shape to women’s protests, whether they were based in subsistence agriculture, market cultivation, or large wheat estates. The tactics of striking and land occupation, for example, were more common in towns dominated by large- scale agriculture and industry. Tax protests typically occurred in places that were market- oriented. Because of this, the movement differed depending on the locale, leading the fasci to function in multiple ways—as mutual aid societies, trade unions, agricultural cooperatives, and political parties. In each of these towns, however, the fasci included the majority of residents. They might have developed in a single neighborhood but very quickly branched outward."

"Some of the most inclusive and visionary ideas of human liberation have historically been formulated by those on the margins, those excluded from formal political power, the stigmatized, semiliterate, “backward,” and “illegal.”"

"Trying to find the other by defining otherness or by explaining the other through laws and generalities is, as Zen says, like beating the moon with a pole or scratching an itching foot from the outside of a shoe."

"Words empty out with age. Die and rise again, accordingly invested with new meanings, and always equipped with a secondhand memory."

"Questions are always loaded with the questioner’s prejudices."

"Myths circulate like gifts without givers, and no myth teller (cares to) knows where they come from or who invented them."

"Anonymous myths give birth to other anonymous myths, multiplying and ramifying themselves without the fear of one being absorbed by the other, and beyond any myth teller’s control. Like leaves of grass, they grow and die following the rhythm of impermanent-permanent nature."

"Language also reveals its power through an insignificant slip of the pen, for no matter how one tries to subject it to control and reduce it to “pure” instrumentality, it always succeeds in giving an inkling of its irreducible governing status."

"Sydney had never forgotten to eat in her life. One of her secret fantasies had been that, as a girl who could code, she would work in the one place where a geeky fat girl could get dates. It had not been entirely untrue. But as someone had pointed out to her in school, although the odds are good, the goods are odd."

"S/he who writes, writes. In uncertainty, in necessity. And does not ask whether s/he is given the permission to do so or not. Yet, in the context of today’s market-dependent societies, “to be a writer” can no longer mean purely to perform the act of writing. For a laywo/man to enter the priesthood—the sacred world of writers—s/he must fulfill a number of unwritten conditions. S/he must undergo a series of rituals, be baptized and ordained. S/he must submit her writings to the law laid down by the corporation of literary/literacy victims and be prepared to accept their verdict. Every woman who writes and wishes to become established as a writer has known the taste of rejection."

"The vanity of Metaphysics has the merit of marking time: it leads one straight back to the positivist dream of pure truth and pure presence. Naked, but not naked enough, I would say. The language of Buddhism sometimes speaks of the eighty-four thousand entrances to reality, and thinking reality versus non-reality may also lead to one of them as long as this chatter of the soul doesn’t take the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself. He who represents his own discourse on myths as a myth is acutely aware of the illusion of all reference to a subject as absolute center. The packaging of myths must somehow bear the form of that which it attempts to enclose, if it wishes to come closest to its object. One cannot seize without smothering, for the will to freeze (capture) brings about a frozen (emptied) object."

"Knowledge belongs to the one who succeeds in mastering a language."

"I feel like political engagement is something that people, if they’re so inclined, all people should do...It’s not something that’s just for special, branded activists. It’s in part being a citizen."

"The Jewish heritage that resonates the most with me is our history as rebels and rootless cosmopolitans. Our history as the first white Freedom Riders who were murdered. Our history as dissident intellectuals like Hannah Arendt. Our skepticism, our nonalignment, all the things that made authoritarians throughout the world hate us so much."

"Look at this vast, beautiful, crazy, fucked-up, gorgeous, horrifying world. How could you not be inspired by it?"

"I think one of the problems that Americans often have when we're thinking about the Middle East is that Americans often only see images of the Middle East that come from war. So Americans might not realize that there are actually hundreds of thousands of people living in Raqqa, just like normal people, and if you take that awareness away, then it becomes very easy "Oh, bomb them all.""

"I think that school just isn't for everyone. A lot of people don't learn well when they have to sit in a place for eight hours. A lot of people learn best lying in their own beds, teaching themselves from books. And I was a bad student, I was a brat — if I was a teacher, I would not have liked myself — but this hammering kids to fit into this system is horrific. It leads to a lot of kids being either medicalized or criminalized, and I think the message I would have to kids is just like, survive it. And then, once you're out of childhood, I mean, you're just so much freer."

"I started drawing when I was four. It fast became a way to relate to a world where classmates wrote death threats on my book bag. In grade school, I'd draw kids so they wouldn't hit me. Artists are courtiers more often than rebels. Painters survived the gulags by drawing criminals' kids. Being small and skilled, you learn to create little portals of escapism-to which the strong are as susceptible as anyone else."

"Women are looked at. But as an artist, I had permission to look back. Where the respectable avert their gaze, artists stare."

"a brilliant illustrator, writer, and filmmaker"

"Drawing is disruptive. You're producing when you're expected to consume."

"You take photos. Drawings you make. Cameras steal life force. Paintings, like The Picture of Dorian Gray, give you more."

"[On Donald Trump] It is odd to see a man who embodies so many sins – including all seven deadly ones; is there anyone who better exemplifies a noxious combination of pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth? – be so widely embraced by the religious right. This is a politician who has no home church and can't name his favourite Bible verse."

"That it is impossible to imagine Trump rocking a wailing baby to sleep may strike liberal feminists like me as a sign of several fatal character defects; for many white evangelicals, it suggests he knows the natural order of things."

"And if this drug gets approved, women will get some very useful information about the men in their lives, and particular those with whom they have romantic relationships: do those men believe that they have an equal responsibility for pregnancy prevention, and are they willing to act accordingly? And if not, are those men with whom women should want to share any part of their sexual, romantic, or reproductive lives?"

"While Republican lawmakers criminalize abortion in conservative states, and while even voters in conservative states vote for abortion rights when given the chance, the Republican hopefuls were wishy-washy on the issue – not wanting to be accountable for their party’s own extremism, but also refusing to align themselves with America’s pro-choice majority."

"But whether in the majority or the minority, young people will be growing up to find new values and activities different from their parents'. You may find that your meaning in life is so different because of your new experiences; you decide to break from your parents' demands. Each person must make his/her decision between his newly found values and his parents' established formula. Each must carefully strike a balance. Be considerate of your parents, for they nurtured you and think they know best. If you must break from them, do so as gently as you can."

"Today's critics are using their yardstick of today to judge a past they did not know."

"I believe that freedom must be accompanied by a sense of responsibility. If I can he considered famous because I have succeeded in my life goals, which were different from most other Chinese Americans, I achieved because of my unique combination : American freedom of choice, Chinese discipline in responsibility, my integrity, and willingness to work."

"So I always tried my best, but I chose a path different from my parents' Chinese expectations. My parents wanted me to marry a rich and educated man from their ancestral village. Not one of my high school girl classmates went on to college. But marriage was not the satisfying fulfillment that I desired for life. Neither was being famous part of my plan. I just wanted to follow where my passion led me. As long as I was not breaking the law, I was willing to depart from cultural norms in my drive for self-determination."

"At Mills College, I felt favorable interest in me because I represented the Chinese culture to fellow students and my teachers. I also wrote about being informed upon graduation that there would be prejudice against employing me in the business world. And it was awareness of prejudice that motivated me to write my book. I feel that prejudice springs from ignorance. So I wrote Fifth Chinese Daughter as one personal effort to create understanding."

"I did pottery well because of the disciplined work habits instilled by my parents. Pottery as it was taught to me at that time required a student to know clay compositions , glaze chemistry and proportions of mineral oxides, the ability to throw pottery on the wheel, then trim and decorate it, the ability to apply glazes, to stack and unstack a kiln, the ability to tend to firing it to maturity-all this by myself."

"For my whole life I had been bound by the tenets of Chinese culture. To be an artist was the option which would enable me ... to be free of Chinese culture’s relentless subjugation of women."

"If I only thought in the traditional way Chinese expect young people to think, I would never have dared to write my story. Because American studies developed my individual critical thinking, I gained an objective point of view. But because of my love of Chinese culture, my point of view is always sensitive to my heritage. This heritage values males absolutely above their consideration of females. I was acutely aware of this injustice every day I was in my parents' home. Only after maturity did I recognize that my parents were observing values of Imperial China, which they left a hundred years ago. They knew no other standards."

"My parents never complimented me; they never even said, "Thank you." If I reported any accomplishment to them, they would say disapprovingly, "If a flower is fragrant, people would naturally know it." Instead, I was constantly reminded to do my best to bring credit to my family and the name of "Wong". A disgraceful deed would downgrade my family, not just myself."