Women Authors From The United States

"Dian Fossey was to gorillas what Greenpeace is to whales. She was prepared to ignore the niceties of diplomatic approaches and just get in there and do the job. She did what she considered right. But she was in many ways like the gorillas. If you’re easily put off by bluff charges, screaming and shouting, you’ll probably think gorillas are monsters, and you won’t go near them. If you’re prepared to sidestep the temper and get to know the person, you’d find that Dian, like the gorillas, was a gentle, loving person."

"When I got to Rwanda, Dian was extremely warm, welcoming and encouraging. She was also a bit scary, exuding a determined, uncompromising, take-no-prisoners attitude towards poachers, cattle in the Park illegally (of which there were many at that time), and any ‘students’ who didn’t dedicate themselves 100% to the good of Karisoke. Basically, she appeared to fear nothing and was not going to take any nonsense from anyone. At the same time, she seemed like a very emotional person, almost too emotional."

"She had a perfectly colonial attitude toward the Africans. On Christmas she'd give the most extravagant presents to them; other times she'd humiliate them, spit on the ground in front of them—once I even saw her spit on one of the workers—break into their cabin and accuse them of stealing and dock their pay. Two researchers left Karisoke because of the way she treated the Africans. ... They were loyal to her, but they had to stay because there are few paid jobs in the area and there is a certain cachet to being a tracker. The men never knew when she was going to start yelling at them. When she left camp it was like a cloud had risen, and it got worse over the years."

"She would torture them [poachers]. She would whip their balls with stinging nettles, spit on them, kick them, put on masks and curse them, stuff sleeping pills down their throats. She said she hated doing it, and respected the poachers for being able to live in the forest, but she got into it and liked to do it and felt guilty that she did. She hated them so much. She reduced them to quivering, quaking packages of fear, little guys in rags rolling on the ground and foaming at the mouth."

"Buoyed by the success of the gay and lesbian liberation movement, freed from enforced isolation by changes in the medical and psychiatric establishment, and brought together by the Internet, the transgender community has emerged in the last five years as a new voice in social activism. This voice suggests that, although gender is an identity we are born with, an identity that no amount of social influence can sway, it is too great and varied a force to shoehorn into those ubiquitous boxes marked F and M. While human desires--for love, passion, work, respect, friends, family--remain constant, the way those desires are felt and expressed cannot always be categorized at the moment of birth. Anatomy, as feminists have long argued, is not destiny."

"I think the way I come at a story has always been from thinking about the past, (American Indian history, my family’s history, my tribe’s history) and how the present and future are shaped by the past. Put another way, I am certain that we humans live in past, present, and future all at the same time."

"If it seems like a contradiction, it is. But that is the basis for all stories."

"Working in all kinds of situations helps a writer make sense of the world. At least it did for me. But fewer and fewer writers haven’t worked outside of a university or college environment."

"I do think that reading aloud, or performing one’s own work is very helpful to the writing process. You can hear the voices you are creating, see the scenes you’ve created, and where the text falters."

"I think most really good teachers, or professors, prepare for their classes as any writer/performer does. You write and then learn your lines, you draw your students into the performance or lecture just as any performer does, and you write a conclusion to the day’s performance or lesson just as any performer does."

"Humor defuses pain. Humor gives the narrators in my stories agency to tilt at the ever-whirling windmills of colonization. Humor opens a window on historic pain and trauma that American Indians dealt with at the hands of the federal government. Loss of land, loss of dignity, loss of identity, and of course the loss of a brother or sister, parent—which in my great grandmother’s era was a common event."

"We are still a ‘vacant map’ as Native writers of Native literature. But, a story chooses a writer, not the other way around. So I believe we write, perform, because we must. Nothing else is of importance. Native writers will grow and develop as the stories search them out. That’s exciting and the stories will change the world."

"Writing is a form of activism. Again, let’s not separate into small boxes, ‘activism’ versus writing. Native people, I think, prefer to think in more holistic terms. A story is active and a story changes the world. A story is changing the world as I write this."

"Learning is supposed to be fun, (or funny) dramatic, and full of irony. A performance."

"We all live at that intersection of art and technology. That’s where games live, in a really easy way to see."

"Sometimes books don't find us until the right time."

"I believe in the possibility for real human connections in virtual spaces. I also believe that the virtual version of yourself might very well be the best and truest version of yourself...We don’t have to necessarily be the worst versions of ourselves behind the mask of an avatar, though it often seems as if we are. People think we have it all figured out in certain ways, but in fact we’re just babies and toddlers when it comes to all these issues. We haven’t figured out exactly the best way to be good citizens, good humans online yet, and that’s OK. Because all these things are really young."

"I think the reason I liked gaming so much as a subject was because it has all the subjects in it—it’s a grand subject."

"You know everything you need to know about a person from the answer to the question, What is your favorite book?"

"I myself am mixed race — my mother is Korean and my father is an American Jew — so I've always felt other. But I think what's a little bit amazing about books, again, is the way in which they can sort of transcend that to an extent. And I also wanted the world as I see it — and the world as I see it is a world that is increasingly [filled] with people [of] different ethnicities."

"I see gaming as having the possibility to be a profoundly empathetic experience. I think the idea of the gamer, like the capital-G Gamer, this kind of misogynist dude shouting insults at women, is antiquated and not true. If you look at it, there are so many people that have played games their entire lives, like myself, that don’t necessarily identify themselves as gamers in that sense...the idea that, again, the person who is a gamer is somebody who is less empathetic, less romantic, or less trying to seek human connection is sort of old fashioned or possibly just ignorant."

"Generally, the best art comes from people that are a bit alienated from the system. I think it’s that friction that actually leads to making good books or good games, and not just being like, I’m a company man, or something for that system."

"We aren’t the things we collect, acquire, read. We are, for as long as we are here, only love. The things we loved. The people we loved. And these, I think these really do live on"

"I like to believe, as a writer, that anybody who isn't a reader yet has just not found the right book."

"“And what is love, in the end?" Alabaster said. "Except the irrational desire to put evolutionary competitiveness aside in order to ease someone else's journey through life?”"

"“The way to turn an ex-lover into a friend is to never stop loving them, to know that when one phase of a relationship ends it can transform into something else. It is to acknowledge that love is both a constant and a variable at the same time.”"

"privacy gives you creative freedom."

"I really don’t worry about labels. Writers worry about syntax, voice, setting or landscape, plot, and the arch of the story. We worry about craft, the art of the writing."

"Embracing inclusion requires "the institution's ability to fully integrate its understanding of and appreciation for the diverse cultures and backgrounds of its employees."

"I think you've already said the wrong thing by not saying anything."

"We were all the same, and then you had the nerve to be different."

"I have always been drawn to the idea of unconscious biases and blind spots and what happens in our unconscious mind. "Our brains are highly habitual. Our brains start reaching conclusions without immediately telling us that it's doing so," she said. "It's looking for things that go together; 'what have I been habituated to understand goes together?' We're backing up and moving toward people in social situations all the time."

"Biases are the stories we make up about people before we learn who they are. They are especially apparent when things are high-risk, or you have to make quick decisions."

"What we learned after Michael Brown was shot is that police officers are deeply ingrained with erroneous ideas about who's dangerous. Looking at pictures of black kids, they're adding four years to their age, and are told that 'black people are crazy strong and have crazy [levels of] pain tolerance."

"This is quite frankly about people being in denial. The biggest barrier is that we're in denial about our unconscious bias,"This investment in our self-image as good people is preventing us from moving forward. We don't need any more good people; we need real, authentic people."

"A lot of people are stuck for their entire lives in jobs that do not agree with their souls because of college debt."

"We need to look as a society at the system that says to succeed you need a college education, but you have to sell your future to get it."

"I never saw it as a book that’s about giving up things."

"Things that should happen because of justice and environmental sustainability, but will also benefit the FIRE people in the FIRE movement."

"There’s a lot of blather about meaningful work and purpose in life. It’s dangled out as a carrot, and I don’t know how many people actually get to do that."

"Spending money is not an assertion of your freedom. It is the key to your next enslavement."

"I was selling outsmarting a system that’s trying to outsmart you."

"Nobility is one thing, but to die of frugality is another."

"I call money “national wealth” and this other “natural wealth.”"

"Absent any social or political critique. But “Your Money or Your Life” was never supposed to be just a self-help guide to saving your own financial life."

"We can’t have a conversation about that in 2021 without talking about what happened in 2020, and the tragedy of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and whole bunch of people before and after them. What I think we have – and let’s hope we can hold on to it– is the understanding that this stuff is systemic. That it is built in, that there was a social hierarchy established a long time ago that hopefully most of us don’t believe in but is nonetheless alive and well and on automatic every day selecting the same people, positioning the same folks and disadvantaging the same folks over and over again. So the awareness around systems I think has been powerful."

"I will be returning to my consulting company working across global organizations and industries, while continuing to advise Netflix."

"It’s hard to step away from the company and this role because of how much I love Netflix and the people here. I’m so excited for the talented Wade Davis who will be taking the lead of the I&D work along with our incredible Inclusion Strategy team and I can’t wait to see the continued progress we all will make together."

"Diversity is being invited to the party; inclusion is being asked to dance."

"After musicians started auditioning for orchestras from behind curtains, "the number of women in top U.S. orchestras increased five-fold."