Quote collection
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"My activism really is for myself, because I see places in the world where I feel I should be. If there is something really bad, really evil, happening somewhere, then that is where I should be. I need, for myself, to feel that I have stood there. It feels a lot better than just watching it on television."
"The Olinka girls do not believe girls should be educated. When I asked a mother why she thought this, she said: A girl is nothing to herself; only to her husband can she become something. What can she become? I asked. Why, she said, the mother of his children. But I am not the mother of anybody's children, I said, and I am something."
"You know a little drink now and then never hurt nobody, but when you can't git started without asking the bottle, you in trouble."
"At one point I learned transcendental meditation. This was 30-something years ago. It took me back to the way that I naturally was as a child growing up way in the country, rarely seeing people. I was in that state of oneness with creation and it was as if I didn't exist except as a part of everything."
"Criticism is painful when it's not done with love."
"I loved meditation. I love it because that's where you find what your voice is. You cannot really find it easily in this culture. This culture is the noisiest culture ever, ever. I think the damage that it has done to people is in that realm of silencing them. They are overwhelmed by gadgets. They don't know what to think because they're so heavily programmed about what it is that they should want and should think."
"Women have to summon courage to fulfill dormant dreams."
"Fiction is such a world of freedom, it's wonderful. If you want someone to fly, they can fly."
"The protection of evil must be the most self-destructive job."
"War is a dead end, literally. And, what is more, we simply can't afford it. Not morally, and not financially. How long will it take the citizens of the United States, one wonders, to recognize that the house their country bombed in Iraq is the same one they were living in until it was foreclosed?"
"Anything we love can be saved."
"The long-term accommodation that protects marriage and other such relationships is ... forgetfulness."
"Many people are aware that we are in peril and that there is no trustworthy leadership."
"Resist the temptation to think what afflicts you is peculiar to you. Have faith that what is in your consciousness can be communicated to the consciousness of all. And is, in many cases, already there."
"What hurts the most is being misunderstood. They tell me that's an Aquarian trait - that that's the thing we don't like."
"HELPED are those who laugh with a pure heart; theirs will be the company of the jolly righteous."
"Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness."
"Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for."
"Sexuality is one of the ways that we become enlightened, actually, because it leads us to self-knowledge."
"As for those who think the Arab world promises freedom, the briefest study of its routine traditional treatment of blacks (slavery) and women (purdah) will provide relief from all illusion. If Malcolm X had been a black woman his last message to the world would have been entirely different. The brotherhood of Moslem men-all colors-may exist there, but part of the glue that holds them together is the thorough suppression of women."