Women Born In The 1950s

"As this collection of her writings shows, the reach of her journalism extended far beyond coverage of individual cataclysmic events. She frequently lifted the veil on more systematic inhumanity which did not attract as much international interest. Her tenacious investigations involved dogged correspondence and days sitting in court."

"We owed her a debt of gratitude for helping the West reach a far better understanding of the emerging landscape in post-Soviet Russia and for shining a clearer light on the true nature of the occupation of Chechnya, a brutal conflict wilfully misprepresented as Russia's private front in the war on terror. No democracy is worthy of the name if freedom of the press is curtailed or writers and journalists are crushed; yet here was a writer who – at great personal risk – defied state intimidation to speak truth to power."

"Her fearlessness in the face of grave danger made her one of the few international journalists whom human rights activists and lawyers held in awe."

"Sometimes they are Afghanis who have worked for us. Sometimes they are Afghanis of a particular minority called the Hazara, who get slaughtered as soon as the Taliban look at them."

"I have still got women sending me the most tragic, terrible text messages and phoning me at all hours, saying "please help me, I am hiding in my basement, I didn't get on your planes in 2021 because my mother was dying, I couldn't leave at the time, but now they are after me.""

"[On the situation for women in Afghanistan after the 2020–2021 U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan] They were not allowed to leave home without a male escort. They were not allowed to go to work. They were not allowed to continue with their education. Their sex became the limitation on what they could do or be. This is true for all women and girls in Afghanistan under the Taliban reign."

"This is Schindler's List time. These women were in mortal danger. They were running courts on things like domestic violence and child marriage and many of them locked up [the] Taliban. As soon as [the] Taliban came back they had to flee."

"I really wanted to smash the idea with this movie that there's a sexual sell-by-date for women and not for men, and stick it to the awful cougar stereotype. It makes me think of a woman in animal print leering over a friend of my son's, going, "Do you want a sherry, darling?" [...] It's got to stop because it's really not reflecting what's happening. For years and years we've seen Hollywood show men 40 years older than their partners, and it's not even discussed. Now movies are finally exploring a desire between younger men and older women that's reciprocal, not transactional. Bridget and Roxster both see something they want in each other — and Bridget having sex and being sexy is to be celebrated."

"The jokes in Bridget come from something quite painful, which was her perception that she was in her thirties and she'd somehow made a mistake by not getting married yet and there's this ticking clock. But also there were good reasons why she was still single."

"I never imagined it would last more than a few weeks. I didn’t tell any of my colleagues it was me who was writing Bridget. I was working alongside a lot of very clever, seasoned journalists who were writing about New Labour and Chechnya and I felt stupid writing about calories and alcohol units and why it takes three hours between waking up and leaving the house in the morning, Then we started getting letters praising the column, I started boasting, "It's by me, meeeee!" and things snowballed from there."

"Her therapy was simple for there is no greater psychologist than the one who graduates from the hard school of life."

"You must realize that little irritations become more glaring, when there is that basic difference…I can’t imagine anything more annoying than their talking to their son, and your children, in a language you cannot understand. It makes you even more of an outsider than you are already."

"I have heard rumours also; but most say it is just Western propaganda. Anyway you doctors can do miracles these days. A mere VD cannot elude a cure for too long."

"He’d better be careful; I hear there is a disease called AIDS waiting to pounce on any careless person these days"

"The women’s halls of residence, ‘the Box’ as it was known, was the hunting ground for all and sundry, and big cars were very evident especially on Saturdays when well dressed, well-to-do men descended upon the place. It was the thing to have a girl friend on campus…there were two categories of girls—the fast-moving "Mercedes" types and the "clipboards."

"Though she was very wise, one could hardly say that she had been born in the wrong era; that had she lived in a different era, she would have been a great intellectual, a pioneer and a leader of humanity. In truth, such clarity of vision and strength of person are a discomfiture to all men of all ages and she would therefore never have really fitted in that, this or any other century; for human beings prefer to be left alone to muddle along in confusion—it is more comfortable than to suffer the pain of self knowledge."

"All the fears of her childhood were coming back. There was a vice-like band around her head and she thought she would faint. In her head one thought went round and round, beating its wings like a trapped bird. “My child - not you, not you!"

"Bitterness is poison to the spirit for it breeds nothing but vipers some of which might consume your very self. Pain and sorrow all humans feel; but bitterness drops on the spirit like aloes—causing it to wither."

"You may be twice my size, but I have three times your courage"

"How can you know where you are going if you do not know where you are coming from?"

"A home without daughters is like a spring without a source"

"Stereotypes stick in the mind like parasites: it's easier to increase a country's GDP per head twelvefold – in the last 40 years Spain's has gone from $2,413 to $29,651 – than to eliminate our neighbours' prejudices about us...It's true that until relatively recently Spain was chauvinistic and backward, yet it's equally true that there have been dramatic changes in the last 40 years...The fact is that Spain is no longer notable for its machismo, when compared with its European neighbours."

"By being completely free, totally erasing the self, you can dance well, you can make love well, and you can write well."

"The art path leads you to be increasingly free. That’s what you do. Maturity happens because of being increasingly free...to be truly free, you have to break free from internal and external pressures. The things that restrict the freedom of writing are thousands, from the fear of hurting someone to the will of pleasing someone . . . a lot of things. And you actually have to erase the self completely and become a sort of medium, let the story pass through yourself and let the story dance with you."

"I will say there are two authors I consider my teachers, one on the most realistic side and the other one in the most fantastic side: one of them is American, Ursula K. Le Guin...and the other one is half American, Nabokov, although his Russian ancestry and his Russian works also influence me a lot."

"For me, fiction belongs to my inner being, is something essential which defines me—I am a fiction writer in the same way I am a woman, the same way I am dark-haired—it is something essential and structural. It’s like an exogenous skeleton that keeps me going. And I don’t know how I would manage to live without writing, working with words. But they are two extremely opposite genres; let’s say as essays are to poetry. In particular, within journalism, clearness is a value. The clearer and less misleading a work of journalism is, the better. In a novel, ambiguity is a value. The more readings a novel has, even contradictory, the better. In journalism, you talk about what you know; you have provided yourself with records, you have gathered information, you have performed interviews. In a novel, you talk about what you don’t know, because the novel comes from the unconscious. They are very different relationships with words and with the world. In journalism, you talk about trees; in the novel, you try to talk about the forest."

"The print journalism I do, reporting, is a literary genre as any other, and it can also be as sublime as any other."

"You can’t make a living out of fiction writing. You can’t and you shouldn’t. I always tell everyone that is a huge mistake, because I have seen many writers get lost because of that. Novels should be an area of total freedom. It is already difficult to fight against the market pressure, against the pressure from your friends, your family, your editors, against the pressure of your own ambitions. All of that is already a fight. If you also have to earn money to pay for the mortgage, it’s fatal."

"Kids are the ones who create; I find it really great to have my inner child still alive."

"I have the feeling . . . no, the conviction, the certainness that reality and fiction are really mixed up. The frontier between reality and fiction is tremendously porous and slippery."

"what we can control is how we respond to what happens to us, what we do with what happens to us. Even if the range of choice is minimal, there is always a choice...Even in that tiny little range of choice, you can choose. So, from that point of view, destiny is our battlefield. It’s not a tragedy; it is what we do with it."

"I believe in twinship—in my novels there’s lots of twins—and it’s exactly about that. It’s about all of the possibilities of our own being that we leave behind because one of the things that troubles me the most in life, that upsets all of us, is that we reach this world with the capability to be anything. But then life starts to confine us inside our small realities. And then, the shadow of those other possible lives stays to lurk us, which also sticks to you and you can’t shake it off, since it was so easy, it’d have been so easy to lead another life. We make twenty thousand small choices a day, and maybe one of those choices is the one that will take us to a completely different life. If you stop to think about it, it is vertiginous, hypnotizing and distressing. So, twins represent the other possible lives you could have led, which you drag behind you some way, in a ghostly way."

"The relationship between the human being and the flesh has always been a matter of huge conflict. Since the beginning of time every religion has tried to take control of our selves, usually from a repressive point of view, most often than not inhibiting the body as well. Other times, on the other hand, as in certain eastern liturgies, empowering the body and doing away with the ego. But living inside this body never ceases to be a conflict. We are cultural beings and that clashes with our animal instincts. That’s where the title [La Carne] comes from...In the first place, the flesh is what traps us, because no one has ever chosen his or her body to live in, has he? You are what you are and you didn’t get to choose it. It’s the flesh that traps us in the first place, the flesh that makes us sick, that makes us old and that eventually ends up killing us. But at the same time, it’s that glorious flesh that enables us to scratch heaven through sensuality, through sex, through passion. Paradoxically, the flesh that kills us will also make us feel eternal for a brief moment because that’s what we are in passion, eternal—we abandon ourselves, we merge, we give ourselves to the other, so much that when we are loving passionately, death doesn’t exist."

"At any given time, if you live long enough, old age catches you...the only choices we have in life are either the impairment of old age or early death."

"The truth is you do not choose the stories you tell, but stories choose you. You do not choose, therefore, characters either. Novels are like dreams you dream with your eyes open; they are books which appear in your head with the same apparent immediateness as they appear in your dreams at night. A writer always writes their obsessions and the truth is that all throughout life we end up writing the same thing in different ways. I am a tremendously existentialist writer; a contemporary novel is a novel that is very much marked by death, but mine is even more than the average one. Then all my books speak in a very obsessive way about death and the passing of time and what the time does to us or undoes to us, because our lives mean us being undone over time."

"one of the most widespread mirages is to think we are not going to be like the other old people, we will be different. But, then, age always catches you and you end up being equally shaky, unstable and drooling."

"Rufus Norris's ambitious production is not about safety and is not for the faint-hearted. He is more interested in the darker, distressing aspects of fairytale than in cheap Christmas gags. As the story unfolds, it becomes more gruesome, involving a horrifying ogre (congratulations to Nicholas Beveney's hairy monster) and a magnificent ogress (Daniel Cerqueira) who becomes, in this version, Sleeping Beauty's mother-in-law and tries to eat her own grandchildren. I suspect the younger members of the audience weren't half as troubled as I was."

"I used to joke about having a "bee in my Barnet," now I am more likely to bring news about bees in Barnet."

"Fiona Shaw, in Jonathan Miller's production, is the best shrew I have seen. She starts off in a mustard yellow dress with a mustard sharp tongue and suitably pointed features screwed up into a vexed expression. She is given to blood-curdling yells, intimidating her family, hand-cuffing her sister and chopping bits off her ginger plait when particularly aggravated. She is a pain to behold and to hear."

"If a family can walk out of the hospital having lost their child and say that they couldn't have been better supported, then I can go home and feel OK."

"Because of the toxicity of the debate, [children have] often been bypassed by local services who've been really nervous about seeing them. So rather than doing the things that they would do for other young people with depression or anxiety, or perhaps undiagnosed autistic spectrum disorder, they’ve tended to pass them straight on to the Gids service."

"We've got it locked into this focus on medical interventions. And certainly some of the young adults said to us, they wish they'd known when they were younger, that there were more ways of being trans than just a binary medical transition."

"I have been disappointed by the lack of evidence on the long-term impact of taking hormones from an early age; research has let us all down, most importantly you. The reality is we have no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress."

"Someone will bring in a baby because the baby has green poo, but grandma could have been able to say 'that's normal'."

"Half the kids in A&E outpatients need not be in hospital and, if you come to hospital, you are more likely to be admitted."

"Children are well one minute and very sick the next. So you have much less time than you have with adults."

"It is really difficult to spot a sick child."

"We gave enough representation to Muslims in this Lok Sabha election as well as in previous elections but we did not get adequate support and they couldn’t understand us well. Therefore from now onwards, we will only give them opportunity after thinking properly so that the party…"

"Former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) chief Mayawati on Thursday urged for legal measures in the Budaun double murder case, where two children were allegedly killed by a man. Additionally, the BSP leader emphasized that the “issue should not be politicised". "The incident of the brutal murder of two brothers in Badaun is very sad and highly condemnable. Strict legal action is necessary against the culprits so that the law and order environment does not deteriorate, especially during election time, nor does politics take place behind it," she said on X."

"""Only a wife can tell her husband the truth"