Quotes About Empowerment

In books, no one helped a girl who didn't help herself and every fairy tale ended with the same lessons. Trick your energy, do what you must, believe in enchantments, save yourself.

Some people grow weak when they are victimized, others grow stronger, and still others combine those two attributes to become dangerous, even if the person in question is a girl who has recently turned twelve.

The aim of therapy is not to correct the past, but to enable the patient to confront his own history, and to grieve over it.

Child abuse in all its forms has always been with us and it is still widespread today. But only recently have the victims started realizing what has been done to them and talking to other people about it. Subjects rarely touched on before are moving into the foreground of discussion, a discussion which opens up new perspectives of greater fulfillment in life for very many people.

I want to live my own life, to be at peace and not to think all the time about how they hit me and humiliated me and almost tortured me.

Even as an older child, she was not allowed to say, or even to think: "I can be sad or happy whenever anything makes me sad or happy; I don't have to look cheerful for someone else, and I don't have to suppress my distress or anxiety to fit other people's needs. I can be angry and no one will die or get a headache because of it. I can rage when you hurt me, without losing you.

Experience has taught me that my own body is the source of all the vital information that has enabled me to achieve greater autonomy and self-confidence. Only when I allowed myself to feel the emotions pent up for so long inside me did I start extricating myself from my own past.

But I hope you will -- use your brains. Use your brains. Don't be distracted. Once you make that mistake, of being -- distracted, over a man, your life will never be your own. You will get the burden, a woman always does.

I felt that it was not so different from all the other advice handed out to women, to girls, advice that assumed being female made you damageable, that a certain amount of carefulness and solemn fuss and self-protection were called for, whereas men were supposed to be able to go out and take on all kinds of experiences and shuck off what they didn't want and come back proud. Without even thinking about it, I had decided to do the same

Shakespeare should have prepared her.

There is a change coming I think in the lives of girls and women. Yes, but it is up to us to make it come.

particular kind of proud when they walk into a bar if they think about Bullock and all he knew about altering perception to improve reality.

What did it mean if I helped one, if I helped twelve, twelve hundred, or closer to twelve thousand Black girls feel their own beauty, their own worthiness, exactly as they are—when one hundred thousand Black girls stared and listened mesmerized when every billboard and television show screamed they were not beautiful, they were not worthy?

Since then I've always thought that under rape in the dictionary it should tell the truth. It is not just forcible intercourse; rape means to inhabit and destroy everything.

Those who say they would rather fight to the death than be raped are fools. I would rather be raped a thousand times. You do what you have to.

Tess was my first experience of a woman who had inhabited her weirdness, moved into the areas of herself that made her distinct from those around her, and learned how to display them proudly.

You save yourself or you remain unsaved

Ruth did not believe in makeup. She thought it demeaned women.

Try to breathe, he said, and for the first time the only thought in my head after an instruction like that wasn't Fuck you. I breathed.

Women would be better off when they no longer needed men more than they needed their own independent identities...How long a time it took me after my divorce to understand that being alone is not the same as being lonely.

Freedom has its dangers as well as its joys. And the sooner we learn to get up after a fall, the better off we'll be.

In many ways I was an independent woman. For years I'd made my own choices, paid my own bills, shoveled my own snow.

At first the lives of women frightened me. They seemed so fragile, so dependent on fathers and husbands and brothers and lovers. Gradually, though, I noticed how supple their lives were beneath the surface. I saw, too, that sooner or later, by choice or by chance most women faced the task of adapting to a future on their own. When at my most optimistic, I thought of it as independence, in darker moods, as survival. Either way, women had to do it.

we are the ones we have been waiting for