Women Authors

"I write to entertain but I like it when readers feel something, even if it’s anger or annoyance"

"I don’t write with the aim of teaching a lesson,but if people take something meaningful from it, then I’m happy"

"The duality of cultures shows up in my characters. I love capturing their internal battles. They often grapple with balancing their cultural heritage against the pressures of modern life"

"More lovers out there are dribbling or being dribbled, it’s the order of love these days"

"These stories are fiction, yes, but they’re also a mirror. They are a reflection of the emotional reality many people live in silence"

"I want readers to feel something, anything, even if it’s messy"

"A lot of religious people are like that. They have zero empathy and a lot more judgement."

"I am tired of this portrayal of African women as being timid, oppressed creatures"

"life has light moments and dark moments. It’s not just a canvas painted with one brush, and so I just wanted to bring all that together to show the different layers, the happy and sad moments"

"For me, writing is like being an actress, in a way, because I get into the role, to make it believable. Otherwise you won’t be able to connect and relate to it"

"Sometimes when readers get mad at my characters, I think maybe it’s not the fictional girl they’re angry at, maybe it’s their younger self. Or their sister. Or their best friend. That reflection, that truth, that’s what I’m chasing."

"Every story deserves to be told, and every writer deserves a platform"

"writing is a space where I can be bold and brazen, uncensored even"

"Most of the books I read reinforce the way I think and view things"

"That’s the power of fiction. You never know who’s going to see themselves in it"

"Not every woman marries for love and come on, a wedding ring won’t magically heal a cheater"

"I’m intentional about provoking empathy and creating a conversation around those kind of topics"

"I believe books should transport you to places, whether real or imagined"

"I like to show that as much as we like to divide ourselves with borders, we’re more related than we think"

"I'm looking at the natural world all the time and trying to remind myself of how precious it is, it's still there, and these cycles are still going on. Because I think in ten or twenty years they won't be, things will be very different[.]"

"I was born in a place I am not from and raised in a place I am not from and now I choose to live in a different place I am not from, and so in my writing I keep circling around this idea of how to be at home in a landscape as opposed to a community or, for that matter, a society or a nation."

"I have always known I’ll never have kids, and I’m lucky to be with a man who feels the same. And I don’t mind talking about it. I know that you sacrifice a great deal of joy as well if you have kids. Obviously having kids would bring happiness too. So it’s a balancing act between all those things."

"The Celtic Tiger definitely hurt Ireland from an ecological point of view – and on a societal level it brought out a nasty side of people’s nature, which impacted on the environment in turn – an obsession with property, and with ownership and one upmanship, with wealth and appearances."

"in order to save your language it must become a necessity for anyone living in your country/community to speak it in order to thrive and survive. Instilling a pride in it can only do so much"

"We lived mostly on the dole then, with a handful of crappy part-time jobs in-between, for five years, and it was during those years that both my novels were written. It was a hard, bleak period but it was also very simple and joyful at times, and I’m so grateful for that now. It sounds perhaps strange to say but if it wasn’t for the recession and all the opportunities that it removed from my life I doubt if I’d have felt the freedom, and perhaps also the despair, to pursue my writing."

"Ultimately, I hope a new dimension is added to the debate on language “preservation” — that we do not focus on feel-good campaigns that do nothing but shame our children for not seeing the point of learning their parents’ languages but rather shift our mind-set to the question of growth and practicality"

"Agonising over which property to purchase as your first house is tough — I’ll give you that: but that’s a far easier choice to make than say, deciding who to share your entire life with. And that’s when materialism becomes convenient. Now, everything in your eyes becomes commoditised. It can be listed now"

"Because, it is far easier to want a nicer, more expensive outfit than it is to ask ourselves why we can never conceive that we are enough as we are"

"You can list the traits you want in a life partner like you list your groceries. In bite-sized desires: acquirable and uncomplicated. As if “honest” is a category in a shopping isle, you can walk down it, pop a partner in your cart, and tick “honest” off the list"

"We fear the pain of failure, and that’s why it’s easier to want things. We don’t want to examine our parenting techniques; thinking back to painful moments in our childhoods when we vowed never to become our parents"

"That’s why we drape our souls in shallow aspirations. That’s why some of us escape the hum-drum of desiring life partners for child-rearing. It is all far too daunting. Un-manageable. So we shorten the list and chase men with money and power or women with good looks and sexual prowess, and we ask from each other only tangible things"

"Growth is better than preservation"

"If we wanted our languages to grow we would have entire institutions dedicated to bringing our languages up to date with technology and everyday sayings. This is the essence of practicality"

"I had an image of all language standing to attention, eager to serve this writer."

"This book is a stunning and wonderful achievement by a writer touched by greatness."

"I am studying mathematics because I wanted to study something as difficult as it is useless"

"A robin had claimed ownership of the fuchsia hedge that ran half the length of the east side of the driveway. It scaled the apical branch each dawn, and no matter the severity of the wind, it gripped on with its claws and trilled a melodious warning song — a beautiful, convoluted ballad about the murderous vengeance that would be exacted upon any bird who dared to trespass. The robin of the driveway had murdered in the past. It was prepared for murder."

"The clever rabbits understood that stillness was the simplest form of subterfuge. The stupid rabbits took off. On the undersides of their tails, white handkerchiefs of surrender had been pinned in order to betray them."

"The panorama from the tip of the peninsula included a rock island a mile offshore. It was no more than a knoll but lofty and jagged, marked by a beam of light in the bottom centre — a gap that the dropping sun, on cloudless days, gleamed clear through — and on the through-gleaming days, they marvelled at the visible presence of the archway, at the brilliance of the absence at the rock knoll’s heart. If it wasn’t for the island, Sigh said, you wouldn’t even know there was a hole."

"It is easier to want a better, higher paying job than to ask ourselves what happened to the idealism that had once dominated our youth and fuelled our desire to change the world"

"Everything he’s learned is from second-hand sources, as opposed to actually being around people and talking to them. He’s a strange man. And we see them all the time. There’s not necessarily anything wrong with their minds other than they’ve just been formed in a certain way."

"I find it hard to picture some scrubbed-up stranger wielding my naked, squawking self about as though I were a broiled ham. Instead I like to pretend I was born all alone without any fuss, without any gore. And right here, in my father’s house. I like to believe the house itself gave birth to me, that I slithered down the chimney, fell ignobly into the fire grate and inhaled my first breath of cold, swirling ash."

"And if your plan is to save your language so that your grandchildren can hear that the story of the tortoise and the hare sounds so much better in your language then whatever your plans are to save it are hereby doomed"

"Everything is filled with stories, an old woman neighbour told me once, the same old woman neighbour, as it happens, who taught me to sew. This is when I was extremely little, too little to understand that most things don’t mean exactly what they seem, that meaning is a flighty thing. Because of what she said, I split the seam down the back of my favourite teddy, Mr Buddy, with a serrated kitchen knife. I was searching for stories, commanding words to tumble out and configure into horizontal lines like the ones inside my story books. Instead I found Mr Buddy was all stuffed with minute clouds."

"It is easier to want a better bed than it is to lie in it and wonder what within us has driven away every partner that lay in our own bed at one point or another"

"Language is about practicality. This is a fact. The first homoerecti that invented language did not do so because it made their insides feel warm to release a series of grunts and vowels into the air between them. No, they did it because they needed to get a certain job done"

"Ultimately, 'data' has become a bloodless word; it disguises both its material origins and its ends. And if data is seen as abstract and immaterial, then it more easily falls outside of traditional understandings and responsibilities of care, consent, or risk."

"What epistemological violence is necessary to make the world readable to a machine learning system? AI seeks to systematize the unsystematizable, formalize the social, and convert an infinitely complex and changing universe into a Linnaean order of machine-readable tables. Many of AI’s achievements have depended on boiling things down to a terse set of formalisms based on proxies: identifying and naming some features while ignoring or obscuring countless others. To adapt a phrase from philosopher Babette Babich, machine learning exploits what it does know to predict what it does not know: a game of repeated approximations. Datasets are also proxies—stand-ins for what they claim to measure. Put simply, this is transmuting difference into computable sameness.”"

"“To suggest that we democratize Al to reduce asymmetries of power is a little like arguing for democratizing weapons manufacturing in the service of peace. As Audre Lorde reminds us, the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.”"

"Over and over, we see the ideology of Cartesian dualism in AI: the fantasy that Al systems are disembodied brains that absorb and produce knowledge independently from their creators, infrastructures, and the world at large. These illusions distract from the far more relevant questions: Whom do these systems serve? What are the political economies of their construction? And what are the wider planetary consequences?”."