Women Born In The 1930s

"The word of God comes through the prophet to denounce the unjust practices of the rich and powerful who grind the faces of the poor and oppress the widow and the orphan. The prophet also denounces the corruption of biblical religion itself into a religious establishment that has become purely cultic and has turned away from the social meaning of faith, which is justice and mercy."

"Established religion sees religious faith as the sacred ideology of the dominant social order. Religion is the 'handmaiden' of the ruling class. It defines this established social order as one that has been created by God and is the reflection of the divine will. Its words for God reflect the titles of the rulers. God and the rulers are called by the same names and are imaged as looking alike. The rulers thus appear to be like God, to have a special closeness to God and to represent God on earth."

"The prophets in Hebrew Scripture and Jesus in the Gospels are figures in conflict with the religious establishment. They denounce the use of religion to sacralize unjust privilege and to ignore the needs of the people. Prophetic faith announces a God who is active in history, to overturn an unjust social order and to transform the world into a new social order where there will be no more war, no more injustice, where justice between people and harmony with nature has been restored and all creation will be in communion with God."

"[On her marriage to (Sir) Terence Conran in 1955] It was just criticise, criticise, criticise, from morning to night. It was very wearing. I said at one point, "What I don’t understand is why you want me to stay." He had a good think and then said, "Because you are a very valuable business asset, because you make me laugh and because I got used to you, like my old school rug." What I wanted him to say, of course, was, "I love you." So I walked out."

"Canongate have been wonderful. They've allowed me to write the word 'masturbation' back into the copy. When Lace was first published, Michael Korda [the publishing giant who was Conran's editor] said the world wasn't ready for it. We had to use a polite euphemism. But now we have the verb."

"Fifty Shades of Grey is so infantile [...] More like baby porn. You have to wait until page 200 for any sex at all. She doesn’t get her bottom spanked until page 400. The writing is jerky: it needed a good edit."

"[On her divorce from (Sir) Terence Conran in 1962] I was 30. My mother said, "Well, perhaps it's as well your father's dead because otherwise you couldn't have got divorced." I gave her an astounded look, but that's how it was then."

"Life’s too short to stuff a mushroom."

"I came back from a visit to my mother in Canada to find a note on the mantelpiece from Kevin [O'Sullivan]. It said: "By the time you read this I will be in Moscow. My wedding ring is in the waste-paper basket where it belongs." Kevin didn't divorce me, he deserted me. We divorced by mutual consent."

"[On being motivated to leave the marriage] I went to St Paul's [the independent school in west London]. That was very important. The mistresses were all unmarried – their fiancees had all died on the Somme – and they were quietly subversive. Paulinas are known for having their own views. It would be very difficult for a Paulina not to expect equality in marriage. So when you get married, and find it's not so, it's a shock."

"[On her dislike of Christmas cards: M]y self-esteem isn't based on how many shepherds and robins I've got perched on the sideboard."

"[The anonymous (male) interviewer recently read Lace with pleasure] Oh really? My ex-husband paid his lawyer to read it, to check whether there was anything to sue me about. A lovely job for £250 an hour. ["Did he find anything?"] Well Terence didn’t sue me [...] But I don’t think his lawyer did a very good job."

"[On turning down a fourth marriage at the age of 80] He might want to watch football on a Saturday afternoon. I might not be able to eat baked beans in bed at 3am if I want to."

"Mysteriously police link arms to form a barrier to prevent demonstrators (demonstra tors of what?) from mounting the pavement. 'Pigs' is now the word. 'Pigs, Pigs, Fascist Pigs', while civilian arms fink to confront the unified, uniformed police challenge. The lines are long and the confrontation spectacular, but suddenly comes a moment of bewildered embarrassment. 'Peace', says the civilians shyly, 'Peace, Peace, Peace.' A policeman blushes. Perhaps because he has lost his helmet."

"[From a Derek Jacobi interview] At school, Leyton County High, he was a swot and went on to win a state scholarship to Cambridge. He told his dad that if he was still eating baked beans after five years of acting, he would be happy to become a history teacher, but by the time he was 21 he had joined Birmingham Rep, and was gainfully employed in an old NF Simpson extravaganza about a man who taught a weighing machine to sing the Alleluia Chorus."

"Their physical appearance [...] inspires frenzy. They look beat-up and depraved in the nicest possible way."

"She cycled off to Oxford railway station with all her kit — beige full-skirted lace over taffeta dress, beige kid court shoes and gloves — in her bicycle basket [...] She was back that night, very offhand about the whole thing."

"With a PR man at his side, the quote would never have got into my notebook, let alone the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, where it ended up. As it was, the Evening Standard didn't even put it in the headline. We were used to him sounding off like that and knew it was ironically meant. But the Americans have little sense of irony, and when the article appeared in a magazine called Dateline, all hell broke loose. It was the last time the Beatles ever toured."

"Many people work hard to get their names into the newspapers. For Tariq Ali it is enough to fill in an application form to join the Labour Party, enclosing a cheque for £5, and he makes the front page of The Times."

"The lines on his forehead arrange themselves in an odd chequered pattern, like a puzzle waiting to be filled in — or are, perhaps, a reflection of his past."

"When you realize the value of all life, you learn to dwell less on what is past and concentrate more on the preservation of the future."

"It’s as if Mother Teresa had just died. But the Mother Teresas of the world don’t get bludgeoned to death in their bedrooms. Dian had some real enemies, and at least one mortal enemy. But you won’t hear this from the [Rwandan] government now."

"It is only a matter for the President to give the order—KILL—the prisons are already overcrowded and this is the only way we are going to be able to protect the remaining gorillas."

"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."

"It was their individuality combined with the shyness of their behavior that remained the most captivating impression of this first encounter with the greatest of the great apes. I left Kabara with reluctance, but with never a doubt that I would, somehow, return to learn more about the gorillas of the misted mountains."

"I have no friends. The more you learn about the dignity of the gorilla, the more you want to avoid people."

"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."

"We stripped him [a poacher] and spread eagled him outside my cabin and lashed the holy blue sweat out of him with nettle stalks and leaves, concentrating on the places where it might hurt a mite. Wow, I never knew such little fellows had such big things. ... I then went through the ordinary 'sumu,' black magic routine of Mace, ether, needles and masks, and ended with sleeping pills. ... That is called 'conservation'—not talk."

"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 was caught up in circumstances beyond her control, disasters that upset her mind in the early stages and soured her later years. Others would have quit. She was never physically strong, but she had guts and willpower and an urgent desire to study the gorillas, and that was what kept her up there."

"I only knew the person I had to deal with for eight years, and this was a sad person. She was riding on some kind of dedication she had once had. Why did she hardly ever go out to the gorillas if they were her life-motivating force? She criticized others of 'me-itis,' yet she kept threatening to burn the station down and all the long-term records. She was willing to take down everything with her—Karisoke, the gorillas. When I did a census that indicated the gorilla population was growing quite nicely, she tried to cut off my funding; she wanted them to be dying. Dian could have had all the accolades in the world for what she did during the first six years. It would have been natural for others to build on her work, but she didn't have the self-confidence or the character for that to happen. So many people came over here inspired by Dian Fossey, prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt. No one wanted to fight her. No one wanted to take over the place. She invented so many plots and enemies. She kept talking about how nobody could take it up there, how they all got 'bushy,' but in the end she was the only one who went bonkers. She didn't get killed because she was saving the gorillas. She got killed because she was behaving like Dian Fossey."

"I warned her. Everybody who was fond of her did. But she didn't want to listen to things like that. She was a law unto herself."

"Under Dian's direction of the research center, she would not allow a Rwandan to be in sight of the gorillas - claiming it would make the gorillas more vulnerable to poaching. Given that a gunshot or a trap could be effective without being seen, this didn't make complete sense, and now that Rwandans are fully engaged in their conservation poaching is far, far reduced and the gorilla population is thriving."

"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."

"I think by the end she was doing more harm than good. Dian went out to the gorillas because she loved them and she loved the bush and being on her own, but she ended up with more than she bargained for. She wasn't planning on having to organize and work with and fight with people. She was no good as a scientific mentor, but she couldn't hand over control. She couldn't take the backseat. Her alternative—to leave and die somewhere an invalid—was never something she would have considered. She always fantasized about a final confrontation. She viewed herself as a warrior fighting this enemy who was out to get her. It was a perfect ending. She got what she wanted. It was exactly how she would have ended the script."

"Poachers, cattle herders, park officials, Western conservationists, members of her staff, a couple dozen researchers — the parade of possible suspects extended far back into the past. In pursuit of her singular goal, the protection of the endangered mountain gorilla, Fossey had shot at her enemies, kidnapped their children, whipped them about the genitals, smeared them with ape dung, killed their cattle, burned their property, discredited their work, and sent them to jail."

"It's probably true that Dian chose wrongly when she decided to take the law into her own hands, to try to fight the poachers by herself. And yet she felt this way was the only way to try to put right the terrible wrongs that she saw being done. But who are we to blame her? I don't know how I would react if there were poachers threatening the chimps at Gombe."

"Despite the fame of Fossey and the other Trimates, women, and particularly African women, are still underrepresented in science. We are taking numerous initiatives to strengthen our programs for women in science, including establishing a scholarship fund, as well as aiming to have equal representation of women in our livelihoods and food security work that takes place in the communities living near the gorillas. It is wonderful to be able to extend Dian’s legacy in this special way, perhaps not one that she would have expected."

"Mrs Asmah was a great woman that the people of this country (Ghana) will forever remember."

"As a disciplinarian, she (Gladys) never encouraged women to dishonour men, their husbands and brothers."

"Gladys was a tough-willed woman with an unwavering spirit to succeed. Even when all doors seemed to be shut, she would keep pushing, for as long as she saw a ray of light.I came to appreciate her toughness and industriousness the more during the run-up to the elections of year 2000 when l toured all parts of the Western Region with her."

"A woman who was a shining example for other women to emulate."

"Mrs. Asmah fought for the empowerment of women and was a role model for the women in Takoradi and Ghana as a whole."

"As black, they themselves suffered as victims of a white patriarchal culture, as women, they also face racial, sexual harassment, and class discrimination by white men. Within the framework, most of the black women writers...deal mainly with the black woman as a victim of black patriarchy"

"Womanism is black-centred; it is accommodationist. It believes in the freedom and independence of women like feminism; unlike radical feminism, it wants meaningful union between black women and black men and black children and will see to it that men begin to change from their sexist stand. It is also interested in communal well-being."

"Make u no worry. That be how life be. Sometimes it go up, up, up, and sometimes it come down, down, down. When it go up, you get many friends. But when it come down, your friends run away."

"It is clear that she (Ulasi) has produced five mysteries. The novels are indeed mysteries ... set in what Hortense Spillers, in another context, refers to as the "terrain of witchcraft" (1987, 189). In Ulasi, seeing is not always believing or deceptive. Her intriguing genre, the juju novel, appears to be Nigeria's answer to the gothic and magic realism ... Ulasi's terrain covers the occult, dark, impenetrable tropical forests; in short, vestiges of the supernatural world, which proliferate the Nigerian imagination."

"Decades ago I read Adaora Lily Ulasi's Many Thing You No Understand. When I read the work, who would have thought about the strange happenings in my nation, Nigeria?Adaora, who passed on in 2016, also wrote Many Thing Begin for Change, and The Man from Sagamu Let me say that as we keep mute or play mute, as we pay lip service things are changing, and the resultant effect is one that we may not be able to cope with...."

"The voice was the main thing; you must have a clear diction that people can understand. If you have a speech defect, it will be very difficult to say you want to go into broadcasting."

"Chief Julie Coker was not only a beauty while in service, she stood for perfection in production and for her to have risen to become the Head of Presentation on the Nigerian network television when elocution walk with her."