Women Born In The 1910s

"A striking plant from Tibet, the asafoetida has stimulant properties, and is a close relative of ) which it resembles to some extent, as it has the typical divided foliage and inflorescence of the (the family)."

"grows some 6–12in. high, spreading laterally, with a "japanses" style of growth, and has mint-blue flowers, like the type. It needs a really warm, dry and sheltered spot outside and is a risky investment, but makes a delightful cool greenhouse plant, with the flowers coming out in February and March, an encouraging harbinger of spring. Prostrate Rosemary is also suitable as a specimen for a sheltered sink garden."

"In one home, the newly-wed is learning to cook, and as her husband enjoyed straight , she is enchanted when her roast chicken with its , and stuffings, is a success. In another home, with more adventures tastes, the of steak, potatoes and onions, is (unusually for our palates) flavoured not only with marjoram but with the pungency of seeds."

"... This is a most decorative herb, with pink buds on stems covered with purplish-grey hairs that glisten in the sun. The flowers are intense blue with a black cone of s. The plant usually grows 18ins. to 2½ft. high."

"I envy my foreign counterparts—Bournonville of Copenhagen, Fokine and Petipa of Moscow, Balanchine of New York, Ashton of London—because even after their retirement, even after their death, their works are kept alive through continuous performance…But what steps are being taken to preserve choreographies created in the Philippines? Where are the dance-dramas I created and which won for me the title of National Artist? Nowhere to be seen."

"No longer is it a matter of the narrow roads where traditional beauty is offered in its clarity and obviousness to the admiration of the crowds. The crowds were taught the victory of intelligence over the world and the submission of the forces of nature to man. Now it is a question of seizing and admiring a new art which leaves humankind in its true condition, fragile and dependent, and which nevertheless, in the very spectacle of things ignored or silenced, opens unsuspected possibilities to the artist. And this is the domain of the strange, the Marvelous, and the fantastic, a domain scorned by people of certain inclinations. Here is the freed image, dazzling and beautiful, with a beauty that could not be more unexpected and overwhelming. Here are the poet, the painter, and the artist, presiding over the metamorphoses and the inversions of the world under the sign of hallucination and madness....Here at last the world of nature and things makes direct contact with the human being who is again in the fullest sense spontaneous and natural. Here at last is the true communion and the true knowledge, chance mastered and recognized, the mystery now a friend and helpful."

"Our problem now is to determine whether the Ethiopian attitude that we discovered was the very essence of our whole way of living can be the point of departure for a viable cultural style, however grandiose this may seem. It is exalting to imagine on these tropical islands, restored finally to their inner truth, a lasting and fertile harmony between humankind and the earth--under the sign of the plant. We are at last called on to know who we are. Splendors and hopes await us. Surrealism has restored to us some of our chances. Now it is up to us to find others. In its light. Understand me well: It is not at all a question of going back, to resurrect an African past which we have learned to know and respect. It is rather a question of mobilizing all the mingled living forces on this soil where race is the result of an endless mixing, of becoming conscious of the formidable mass of diverse energies that we have heretofore locked up within ourselves. We must now put them to use in all their fullness, unswervingly, and without falsification. So much for those who think we are mere dreamers! The most troubling reality is ours. We shall act. This land of ours can only become what we want it to be."

"No important figure in the history of surrealism has been so overshadowed by a spouse as Suzanne Césaire, wife of poet/playwright Aimé Césaire. In view of her undeniably crucial role in the development of surrealism as well as of Négritude, it is astonishing how rarely she is mentioned in the voluminous critical literature on these movements."

"Such is surrealist activity, a total activity: the only one capable of liberating humankind by revealing the unconscious, an activity that will help free the peoples of the world as it illuminates the blind myths that have led them up till now...far from contradicting, diluting, or diverting our revolutionary attitude toward life, surrealism strengthens it. It nourishes an impatient strength within us, endlessly reinforcing the massive army of refusals. And I am also thinking of tomorrow. Millions of black hands will hoist their terror across the furious skies of world war. Freed from a long benumbing slumber, the most disinherited of all peoples will rise up from plains of ashes. Our surrealism will supply this rising people with a punch from its very depths. Our surrealism will enable us to finally transcend the sordid antinomies of the present: whites/Blacks, Europeans/Africans, civilized/savages-at last rediscovering the magic power of the mahoulis, drawn directly from living sources. Colonial idiocy will be purified in the welder's blue flame. We shall recover our value as metal, our cutting edge of steel, our unprecedented communions... Surrealism, tightrope of our hope."

"Surrealism lives! And it is young, ardent, and revolutionary. In 1943 surrealism surely remains, as always, an activity whose aim is to explore and express systematically--and thus, neutralize--the forbidden zones of the human mind, an activity which desperately tries to give humankind the means of reducing the old antinomies, those "true alembics of suffering," and the only force enabling us to recover "this unique, original faculty, traces of which are retained by the primitive and the child, and which lifts the curse of the insurmountable barrier between inner and outer worlds." But surrealism, further proving its vitality, has evolved-or, rather, blossomed. When Breton created surrealism, the most urgent task was to free the mind from the shackles of absurd logic and of so-called reason. But in 1943, when freedom herself is threatened throughout the world, surrealism, which has never for one instant ceased to remain in the service of the largest and most thoroughgoing human emancipation, can now be summed up completely in one single, magic word: freedom."

"My wish is that the nuclear treatment for cancer be as affordable and cheap as aspirin."

"surrealists had questioned technology, "progress," and the dominant Euro-American attitude toward nature long before 1940. However, it was this young Black woman, Suzanne Césaire, and her surrealist friends on a tiny island in the Caribbean during a time of imperialist world war who, more than anyone else, made these issues paramount concerns of surrealists everywhere. In Tropiques the need for radical change in the relations between humankind and nature was presented with special urgency, as an inseparable component of poetic activity and revolutionary struggle. Interestingly, the first appearance of the word ecology in a surrealist publication turns up in this journal."

"The theorist should not let us forget the poet."

"There can be no poetry without spirit."

"The bootprints of history tramp through my children's veins. I hear my father telling me about the great road that ran above his village right along the Adriatic. Napoleonova Cesta he called it proudly. Napoleon's road. It was built by Marshal Marmont when Napoleon made him governor of the Dalmatia that the Emperor renamed Illyria, giving it back its ancient name. Was Marshal Marmont the Duc de Dalmatie who signed with a flourish the document giving the Nanto-Bordelaise Company the charter for French settlement in Akaroa ? I like to think he was.”"

"I still smell smoke and see fire"

"We were victims of a lie"

"I want this to be a forum where the best and brightest work together in an operating environment that embraces advanced knowledge and technologies to improve lives, including the life of our planet!"

"I still see Black businesses being burned. I still hear airplanes flying overhead. I hear the screams"

"Let's level the playing field by making essential knowledge available, get it to people who need it, and support them in being healthy and self-sufficient"

"You are like a child who whistles in the dark. As though the dark cared, my poor child, as though the dark cared."

"Beyond my upset I was flooded by a deep happiness, similar to the one he made me feel when forcing me to surrender to his virility. No one else before him had given me this gratification, but I realised now that the longing to be violated, body and soul, must have always been inside me."

"My mind sometimes wanders. Do unto others and so on. Very nice again, but what if others have a different taste from yours? I don't remember who said it."

"Women are like teeth. Some tremble and never fall and some fall and never tremble."

"It was though I had been in possession of one of those small shells with Japanese flowers which are sold at street corners. When plunged into a bowl of water, the tightly sealed shell opens and the flat, dry, coiled-up, insignificant shreds of paper contained within float out and unfold their variegated and unsuspected splendour; with Gordon I had found my bowl of water."

"I may not have had any biological babies but I have many children—all those I have helped to survive and grow-up and still welcome me to their villages with glad cries of Mama Daktari. In Swahili, ‘Mama’ means ‘Madam’ or better still 'Mother', and in my heart this is what it means to me."

"OK, meet me tomorrow morning at eight. Sharp. Otherwise I leave."

"I knew the barriers were going to be broken down eventually and felt the more applicants, the better the chances would be for each person"

"I want to be just another nurse accepted into the service, and I'll do a good job. That's what's expected of me. You can't keep us back any longer; the new world is coming."

"Never mind the wind and the rain, we’ll fight."

"[was] the most marvellous learning experience I have ever had -- in the whole sense of urgency, you know, of breaking down the segregation, and the whole sense of really, blasphemy, to blacks, was brought very clearly to me in that office."

"We found the children really didn't want to be black or even brown, then you began to wonder about the whole field of education, and what did it mean that all these children were in one place? You know, what kind of situation is this, that they're isolated from whites, and they can never learn that they're just as good as whites, they're just as bright as whites. They'll always think they're inferior. They'll always think that whites are superior to them."

"I'd always had an interest in children. Always, from the time I was very small. I'd always thought I wanted to work with children, and psychology seemed a good field."

"You do what you got to do,"

"I had to work with my family and make a living too. So I did it, and I'm very proud of it."

"That's why they came from everywhere to get something different.""

""It was a calling for me, something that I loved to do, making them colorful"

"I like to make them pretty"

"The story I am about to tell is the story of my life. It begins where other stories usually end; I mean, it begins with a wedding, a really strange wedding, my own. (beginning of chapter one)"

"Day by day, proud human beings that we are, we have a tendency to renounce our elemental roots, which accounts for the fact that women no longer appreciate their braids. Being rationalists nowadays, women in cutting off their braids ignore that in effect they are severing their ties with those magic currents which issue from the very heart of the earth. Because a woman's hair springs from the most profound and mysterious source, whence is born the first trembling seed of life-evolving therefrom to struggle and grow among many entangling forces, thrusting through the vegetal surface into the air and on upwards to the privileged forehead of its choice."

"Here’s a very short list of Latin women novelists I think should have been considered part of the Boom…Mexico: Elena Garro, Rosario Castellanos. Costa Rica: Carmen Naranjo. Brazil: Clarice Lispector. Uruguay: Armonía Somers. Chile: María Luisa Bombal. Argentina: Silvina Ocampo, Nora Lange, Elvira Orphée..."

"As night was beginning to fall, slowly her eyes opened. Oh, a little, just a little. It was as if, hidden behind her long lashes, she was trying to see. And in the glow of the tall candles, those who were keeping watch leaned forward to observe the clarity and transparency in that narrow fringe of pupil death had failed to dim. With wonder and reverence, they leaned forward, unaware that she could see them. For she was seeing, she was feeling."

"I am privy to much that is unknown. Of sea and earth and sky I know an infinity of small and magic secrets. This time, however, I will tell only about the sea."

"For the majority of readers, Latin American fantastic literature operates under the tutelage of the great masters: Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Julio Cortázar and Gabriel García Márquez. However, although few are acquainted with their works, many women began experimenting with this genre well before their male counterparts and were the true precursors of the form, though their names remained on the shelves of oblivion, without the recognition that they deserved. María Luisa Bombal, for example, wrote the fantastic nouvelle, House of Mist (1937) before the famous Ficciones (1944) of Borges..."

"I wish to inform the reader that even though this is a mystery, it is a mystery without murder. He will not find here any corpse, any detective; he will not even find a murder trial, for the simple reason that there will be no murderer. There will be no murderer and no murder, yet there will be....crime. And there will be fear. Those for whom fear has an attraction; those who are interested in the mysterious life people live in their dreams during sleep; those who believe that the dead are not really dead; those who are afraid of the fog and of their own hearts... they will perhaps enjoy going back to the early days of this century and entering into the strange house of mist that a young woman, very much like all other women, built for herself at the southern end of South America."

"Today, in Santiago, Chile, or Buenos Aires, in Caracas or Lima, when they name the best names, María Luisa Bombal is never missing from the list. This fact is even more notable when one considers the brevity of her work-which does not correspond to any determined "school" and which fortunately is devoid of any regionalism."

"A woman is like a tea bag. You don't know its strength until it's in hot water."

"Champion of the underprivileged"

"Cora Mae Brown was a true winner in the fight against the double-edged sword of racism and sexism."

"Working closely with the community during the Great Depression and into the war years, Brown aided and encouraged young African American women during a tumultuous time."