Women From France

"A cœur vaillant rien d'impossible."

"Up to now I have tried to make my life a gift for him. What is most important is that my life belongs to the Lord. He has often led me to hear him, unexpectedly, and this time he has come to me and I could not say no to what the Lord was asking me."

"Thankfully steering free of unwanted cuteness or sentimentality, which have no place in this score."

"It could very easily not be bearable; even with love, one gets the sense it barely is."

"I knew she wasn't going to make a mistake, so I had to go for it and give myself the best chances for birdies"

"I feel like you put a little bit more pressure on yourself because you want to perform and not disappoint anybody"

"Her music has a certain feminine daintiness and grace, but it is amazingly superficial and wanting in variety. But on the whole, this concert confirmed that the conviction held by many, that while women may someday vote, they will never learn to compose anything worthwhile."

"I do not believe that the few women who have achieved greatness in creative work are the exception, but I think that life has been hard on women. It has not given them opportunity, it has not made them convincing. A woman has not been considered a working force in the world, and the work that her sex and conditions impose upon her has not been so adjusted as to give her a little fuller scope for the development of her best self. She has been handicapped and only the few through force of circumstances or inherent strength have been able to get the better of that handicap. There is no sex and art. Genius is an independent quality. The woman of the future with her broader outlook, her greater opportunities will go far, I believe, in creative work of every description."

"It is not a young girl who composes, this is a composer"

"Marriage must adapt itself to one's career. With a man, it is all arranged and expected. If the woman is the artist, it upsets the standards, the conventions, the usual arrangements, and usually, it ruins the woman's art. I feel that it is difficult to reconcile the domestic life with the artistic. A woman should choose one or the other. She must have freedom, not restraint. She must receive aid, not selfish, jealous exactions and complaints. When a woman of talent marries a man who appreciates that side of her, such a marriage may be ideally happy for both."

"On a personal note it was wonderful to be able to score my first goals at a World Cup, I think I’m going to keep on the positives. We were able to score six goals."

"There are a couple of negative notes. We conceded three goals, but for me the most important thing is to hold our heads high and we’ve got a couple of days to work on our defensive set play."

"Concentration is the biggest thing I learned through my career. You can’t succeed if you are not focused. Climbing taught me that. You never let it go. Concentration in each instant, each minute, each second."

"A movement was causing me problems for 6/7 sessions, until the day we went with Mélissa (LeNeve) and Brooke (Raboutou) and we focused on “finding the method”. After that I was able to start testing. But mentally I always said to myself “if I manage to make the movement of recovery I give myself the option of not continuing, if I do not feel confident in the future.""

"When I’m free soloing, I feel O.K. I always have a big safety margin, I’m not struggling. You feel quite powerful and calm. If I ever felt afraid, I wouldn’t go. I don’t like to bet. That goes for everything. I don’t run after luck. With my publishing company, it’s exactly the same. I go step by step and build something."

"I did the American Direct (ED1 5.10+ A0, 1,100m) on the Dru when I was 17. I was just an amateur. I was climbing because I liked climbing, but I didn’t know I would be able to do what I did after. It was just pleasure. I was still a child."

"I realized I don’t like aid climbing. It was boring. But I learned a lot about myself: [It was] long, four days of bad weather, couldn’t go out of my portaledge."

"I didn’t want people to say it was the first female ascent, I wanted to be the first person to climb the Eiger onsight and solo in winter (though I don’t know for sure that I was!)."

"Heritage was the block I tried since November along with Versace. When I arrived in Ticino, I had in mind that I wanted to do this one but I didn't know if mentally I would be able to give my all in a hard high ball, because the final part of the recovery is not that easy and the fall may not be very good"

"To be Christian is to walk with Christ on His way, without dodging Golgotha in the impregnable confidence that the evils that can mark our lives and those of the world are known by Christ, taken in Him in the gift He makes of His life. And that thus they are held in the power of His Resurrection, which delivers us from fear and despair."

"[H]eavy load of his far-from-dead past, which was beginning to seem like an albatross around my neck."

"The beauty in a work of art is not in the prettiness of what is represented, but emanates from the work as a whole, it is its substrate and it derives from nature."

"Art is about man's belonging to the world and it is through art that man, through aesthetic emotion, experiences awareness of his existence. The artist grasps the world, and the world that appears to us in fractions he restores to us in unity."

"I'm always scared when I think that man who is a being endowed with abilities of reflection, is not capable of solving their personal or collective disputes without violence."

"How to create works of art when nothing connects people to the world? If the artist remains fixed from himself to himself, without any distance in which a relationship to the world and to the other can be inscribed, his work will remain sterile as in the Greek myth of Hesiod's genesis, and is in no way different from any other object."

"The God of Indian devotion - bhakti who responds to the same eternal needs of the human heart as exists anywhere else, never detaches himself wholly from the immanence of the world. He is personal and endowed with feelings only in the eyes of popular piety; to thought he reveals himself both far beyond and within at the same time; he reveals it as much as he hides it; and each man is in himself in some sort a manifestation of God."

"is it not time that our limited tongues should fall into the ocean of speech and of human thought? What will be the language of mankind delivered to the new Aurora — Anarchy!"

"The ideal alone is the truth — it is the measure of our horizon. Time was when the ideal was to live without eating an other up. Is it not so still under another form which exists in the so-called civilized countries where the exploiter eats up the exploited? Do not the people in nocks fertilize the soil by their sweat and blood?"

"In what would you that we should help those who govern—their work being only exploitation and wholesale murder—it has never been otherwise: the reason for the existence of a state is nothing but the accomplishment of some crime or other in order to assure the domination of a privileged class."

"Along with her more famous sisters, the radical women born in the decade of the Paris Commune, Madeleine Pelletier belonged to the first generation of women for whom higher education was available and participation in mass political parties open. They shared not only the heritage of the Russian nihilists-Chernyshevsky's fictional Vera, Breshkovskaia, Perovskaia-they also grew up with stories of the Paris Commune and Louise Michel, whose funeral Pelletier and Alexandra Kollontai attended."

"He had brought a volume of Baudelaire which we read a few pages of when we had the time."

"One of the future revenges for the murder of Paris will be that of revealing the customary infamous betrayals of military reaction."

"We are Anarchists because it is absolutely impossible to obtain justice for all in any other way than by destroying institutions founded on force and privilege. We cannot believe that improvement is possible, if we still keep up the same institutions, now more rotten than in the past, or if we merely replace those whose iniquities are known by new men."

"The land which belongs to all can no more be divided than the light which also belongs to all."

"That is what we want to destroy — this annihilation — this eating of man by an other man."

"I am told that I am an accomplice of the Commune. Certainly, yes, since the Commune wanted more than anything else the social revolution, and since the social revolution is the dearest of my desires. More than that, I have the honour of being one of the instigators of the Commune, which by the way had nothing–nothing, as is well known–to do with murders and arson. I who was present at all the sittings at the Town Hall, I declare that there was never any question of murder or arson...Do you want to know who are really guilty? It is the politicians. And perhaps later light will be brought on to all these events which today it is found quite natural to blame on all partisans of the social revolution…Since it seems that any heart which beats for freedom has the right only to a lump of lead, I too claim my share."

"The world carnage put an end to the golden era when a Bakunin and a Herzen, a Marx and a Kropotkin, a Malatesta and a Lenin, Vera Sazulich, Louise Michel, and all the others could come and go without hindrance. In those days who cared about passports or visas? Who worried about one particular spot on earth? The whole world was one's country."

"For the anarchists in the United States Voltairine de Cleyre became the American version of Louise Michel, the French anarchist teacher who had engaged in terrorist activity during the Paris Commune, had endured several prison sentences, and was the recognized saint of international anarchism. Louise Michel had lived in deep privation, gave all her possessions to fellow revolutionaries, and spent a life of devoted self-sacrifice in the cause of anarchism. Her one self-indulgence was a passionate devotion to her mother. Anarchists emphasized the similarities between Michel and de Cleyre. Both were teachers; both nearly had been assassinated by former followers and had refused to prosecute their attackers; both tended toward extreme generosity toward the movement"

"How many are there of the countless millions who have entered this life, passed through its changing scenes and at last have laid down to rest, of whom it can be truly said, “Here rest they who have labored for the uplifting of the oppressed, who have devoted their energies unstintingly in the interest of the ‘common people?’” We fear there are few indeed. A life devoted to the interest of the working class; a life of self-abnegation, a life full of love, kindness, gentleness, tragedy, activity, sadness and kind-ness, are some of the characteristics which went to make up the varied life of our comrade, Louise Michel. In the elderly woman, clad in simple black garments, with gray hair curling upon rounded shoulders and kindest of blue eyes glancing from the strongly marked face, none but those who knew her personally would in the last few years have recognized Louise Michel…So it is in the baffling ocean of humanity. A strong character like Louise Michel looms up like a pillar of light or a star of hope, and the weary reformer sees it and takes fresh courage to struggle on in the surging ocean of humanity, and endeavors to calm its troubled waves and point the way to the harbor of plenty."

"how I loved her. How grateful I am to her for the freedom she allowed me to act as my conscience dictated, and how much I would have liked to spare her the bad days she so often had."

"La mujer," one of the articles that Luisa Capetillo published in 1912 in Cultura obrera, was later included in the anthology, Voces de liberación (Voices of Liberation), published in 1921 by Lux Editorial from Argentina. Printed for the purpose of gathering the libertarian voices of the most progressive women in the world, the book contains short essays by Rosa Luxembourg, Clara Zetkin, Emma Goldman, Louise Michel, and various Latin American women including Margarita Ortega, a Mexican revolutionary, María López from Buenos Aires, and Rosalina Gutiérrez from Montevideo. The editorial note introducing the authors states, "These voices of liberation are a call to women by their own compañeras to think more and act together with men in the struggle for human emancipation."

"The most interesting women in modern European history appear in the ranks of radical political movements. It is difficult to find conservative or traditional counterparts equal to Louise Michel, Emma Goldman, and Rosa Luxemburg. Even Isadora Duncan, creator of modern dance, flirted with communism. More thoughtful and articulate and certainly as politically active as any of these women is the lesser known Spanish anarchist, Federica Montseny. On asking what attracted these women to radical politics, one discovers in each a commitment to feminism. No person, not even Emma Goldman, explored this necessary relationship between feminist and socialist principles more provocatively than did Federica Montseny."

"Impressionism has produced by this very method not only a new, but a very useful way of looking at things. It is as though all at once the window opens and the sun and air enter your house in torrents. Nature appears clear, enchanted, interesting. It is as though suffocating air had been let out of your attic!"

"No one has ever arrived at a power of analysis of tonal values at once so intense and so sweet...Monet may or may not have thought out these works, but with what vigor he has executed them...I cannot say at what point Monet arouses my emotions, but he produced in me such sensations as make me happy, but which I could not have discovered myself. He opens my eyes and makes me see better."

"The severity of Monsieur Ingres frightened me. I tell you, because he doubted the courage and perseverance of a woman in the field of painting. He wished to impose limits. He would assign to them only the painting of flowers, of fruits, of still lifes, portraits and genre scenes...I quickly understood that I could take no part in that school except to waste my time."

"I am endowed by shame's vast memory, more detailed and implacable than any other, a gift unique to shame."

"I love my life, I like to be cosmopolitan, I would like to visit the whole earth and love it all."

"I am beginning to reach the age when I say hello to the old women I meet in my neighborhood, anticipating the moment in life when I shall be one of them. When I was twenty I didn't notice them; they would be dead before my face had wrinkles."

"The worst thing about shame is that we imagine we are the only ones to experience it."

"Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people."