Quotes About Empowerment

Women lose their lives not knowing they can do something different. Men eat themselves up believing they have to be the thing they have been made. Children go crazy. Really, even children go crazy, believing the shape of the life they must live is as small and mean and broken as they are told.

Class, race, sexuality, gender and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside.

I am the woman who lost herself but now is found, the lesbian, outside the law of the church and man, the one who has to love herself or die. If you are not as strong as I am, what will be make together? I am all muscle and wounded desire, and I need to know how strong we both can be.

I could not stand it, neither the words on the page nor what they told me about myself. My neck and teeth began to ache, and I was not at all sure I really wanted to live with that stuff inside me. But holding onto them, reading them over again, became a part of the process of survival, of deciding once more to live--and clinging to that decision.

Never give anyone the satisfaction of denying you something you need, and for that, what you have to do is to learn to need nothing. Starve the wanting part of you. Dorothy Allison, "Mama" Trash

I am not here to make anyone happy. What I am here for is to claim my life, my mama's death, our losses and our triumphs, to name them for myself.

I did not imagine anyone reading my rambling, ranting stories. I was writing for myself, trying to shape my life outside my terrors and helplessness, to make it visible and real in a tangible way, in the way other people's seemed real -- the lives I had read about in books.

My family of friends has kept me alive through lovers who have left, enterprises that have failed, and all too many stories that never got finished. That family has been part of remaking the world for me.

Stories open the door to the darkened room. Language can carry us past the horror to the sense of purpose in a life that refuses to surrender to that darkness.

Anything." I loved the way she said that. Granny's "Christian women" came out like new spit on a dusty morning, pure and precious and deeply satisfying.

In the worst moments of my life, I have told myself that story, the story about a girl who stood up to a monster.

We wanted a feminist revolution. I wanted it like a lover. I wanted it like justice.

When the men at the counter weren't slipping quarters in her pocket they were bringing her things, souvenirs or friendship cards, once or twice a ring. Mama smiled, joked, slapped ass, and firmly passed back anything that looked like a down payment on something she didn't want to sell.

I do not want to claim a safe and comfortable life for myself that is purchased at the cost of some other woman's needs or desires.

Sex then, no matter how dangerous. Sex then, no matter what the cost. Never again, I promised, would I let anyone persuade me to rob myself.

Shulamith Firestone

What I have tried to do in my own life is refuse the language and categories that would reduce me to less than my whole complicated experience

Yes, somewhere inside me there is a child always eleven years old, a girlchild who holds the world responsible for all the things that terrify and call to me. But inside me too is the teenager who armed herself and fought back, the dyke who did what she had to, the woman who learned to love without giving in to fear.

I found in myself the heroine of every heartbreak song I had ever laughed at but played again.

I had to say to her that it isn't just men, and it isn't just men "like that." I had to talk to her about the women I had found after I left home, women who breathed out hatred as steadily as the worst man we had ever known. I had to say that the world is a bigger, meaner, more complicated place than anyone ever told us, and the tools for dealing with it are real, but we have to invent them for ourselves, make them up as we go along.

Think for yourselves for a change. You've been pedlars: go and be merchants. You've been mercenaries: go and find something of your own to defend. You've finished teething and there's the world: crack it open if you can.

You've got one hero too many already. Stand on your own feet, Brother. It's good for the soul.

There breaks a crutch Scotland never knew it possessed.

It was of no importance. Birth did not matter; heredity was merely a hurdle; one was what one made of oneself; that and no other.