Quotes About Empowerment

You are the agent of power in your sex life, even if what you want is to relinquish your power and agency while you're having sex. You can take that power back at any moment. Which means, of course, that you always had it.

I never got to be in the driver's seat of my own life. I always did what someone else wanted me to do. I've always been someone's daughter or mother or wife. I've never just been me.

I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me.

I was entering. I was leaving. California streamed behind me like a long silk veil. I didn't feel like a big fat idiot anymore. And I didn't feel like a hard-ass motherfucking Amazonian queen. I felt fierce and humble and gathered up inside, like I was safe in this world too.

The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, and The Optimist's Daughter, by Eudora Welty.

Trust yourself. It's Sugar's golden rule. Trusting yourself means living out what you already know to be true.

when I lay alone and lonely in my tent at night I asked, often out loud: Who is tougher than me? The answer was always the same, and even when I knew absolutely there was no way on this earth it was true, I said it anyway: No one.

There are so many things to be tortured about, sweet pea. So many torturous things in this life. Don't let a man who doesn't love you be one of them.

it with their fingers out of my hands,

I didn't want to hurt for him anymore, to wonder whether in leaving him I'd made a mistake, to torment myself with all the ways I'd wronged him.

So much had been denied me, I reasoned. Why should I deny myself?

I only felt that in spite of all the things I'd done wrong, in getting myself here, I'd done right. I

I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me. Insisting on this story was a form of mind control, but for the most part, it worked.

But as you are surely aware, forgiveness doesn't mean you let the forgiven stomp all over you once again.

Books] were the world I could lose myself in when the one I was actually in became too lonely or harsh or difficult to bear.

But a woman who walks alone in the wilderness for eleven hundred miles? I'd never been anything like that before. I had nothing to lose by giving it a whirl.

The trees were tall, but I was taller

There are so many amazing things in this world... I felt fierce and humble and gathered up inside, like I was safe in this world too.

Yes. I get to do this. I get to waste my life. I get to be junk.

I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong.

Basking in the attention of the people who gathered around me, I didn't just feel like a backpacking expert. I felt like a hard-ass motherfucking Amazonian queen.

How strange and glorious it was to be anchored to nothing, to be free, in some particular way, for the first time in my life.

It was as if I'd finally come across a mountian lion and I'd remembered, against all instinct, not to run. Not to incite him with my fast motions or antagonize him with my anger or arouse him with my fear.

I have carried the weight of my student loan debt for about half of my life now, but I have not been "defined by my 'student loan' identity." I do not even know what a student loan identity is. Do you? What is a student loan identity?