Quotes About Empowerment

What they held was already inside me, and together we could get away. And standing over the smoldering pile of paper and type, still warm the next cold morning, I understood that there was something else I could do. Fuck it, I thought, I can write my own.

At my most precarious, I balanced on a book, and the books rafted me over the tides of feelings that left me soaked and shattered.

Mrs Ratlow was a widow, and she was head of English, but she still did all the cooking and cleaning for her two sons, and she never took holidays because she said -- and I will never forget it -- When a woman alone is no longer of any interest to the opposite sex, she is only visible where she has some purpose.

Darkness was a presence. I learned to see in it, I learned to see through it, and I learned to see the darkness of my own.

A woman who slaves for a man does not have a marriage; she has a master.

It's why I am a writer...To avoid the narrow mesh of Mrs Winterson's story I had to be able to tell my own.

Of course people will laugh at you, but people laugh at a great many things, so there's no need to take it personally.

If you can't survive in this world, you had better make a world of your own.

I would cross seas and suffer sunstroke and give away all I have, but not for a man, because they want to be the destroyer and never be destroyed.

Everyone has a demon as you so rightly observed [...] but not everyone knows this, and not everyone knows how to make use of it. [...] We're [the demons] here to keep you in one piece, if you ignore us, you're quite likely to end up in two pieces, or lots of pieces, it's all part of the paradox.

Memories can be tools for change; they don't have to be weapons used against us, or baggage we have to drag around.

The future is not fixed unless we allow it to be so.

In this life you have to be your own hero. By that I mean you have to win whatever it is that matters to you by your own strength and in your own way.

Free will depends on being stronger than the moment that traps you.

It works because the principle of personal space is always the same, whether you're fending off an elemental or someone's bad mood. It's a force field around yourself, and as long as our imagining powers are weak, it's useful to have something to remind us.

And I thought about women. All these books, and how long had it taken for women to write their share, and why were their still so few women poets and novelists, and even fewer who were considered to be important?

A tough life needs a tough language - and that is what poetry is.

If you want to keep your own teeth, make your own sandwiches

Under her fierce gaze my past is burned away.

I could see in her a piece of the bright hope I once had in myself and it made me sour and angry. It made me feel sorry for her too. I wanted to take both her hands in mine, look her in the eye, and let her see that the world isn't interested in a little black girl's dreams.

Sempre pensamos que aquilo de que precisamos para transformar tudo — o milagre — está em outro lugar, mas muitas vezes está ali, bem ao nosso lado. Algumas vezes, o milagre somos nós mesmos.

Toplum kad?nlar? topal b?rak?r ve onlar? sakat yaratm?? olan sanki Tanr?, DoÄŸa ya da genetik faktörlermiÅŸ gibi davran?r.

The devil had attacked me at my weakest point: my inability to realise the limitations of my sex.

Art can make a difference because it pulls people up short. It says, don't accept things for their face value; you don't have to go along with any of this; you can think for yourself.