Quotes About Empowerment

She did not need a library; she was a library.

It was during the war, too, that I learned how to be comfortable sitting alone in a bar or restaurant. For many women, this is a strangely difficult thing to do, but eventually I mastered it. (The trick is to bring a book or newspaper, to ask for the best table nearest to the window, and to order your drink just as soon as you sit down.) Once I got the hang of it, I found that eating alone by the window in a quiert restaurant is one of life's greatest secret pleasures.

There are so many good reasons to stop complaining if you want to live a more creative life.

Famously, Gloria Steinem once advised women that they should strive to become like the men they had always wanted to marry. What I've only recently realized is that I not only have to become my own husband, but I need to be my own father, too.

You can believe that you are neither a slave to inspiration nor its master, but something far more interesting—its partner—and that the two of you are working together toward something intriguing and worthwhile.

She stopped feeling like she was nothing more than a consumer, nothing more than the sum of her daily obligations and duties.

alongside me. The fact that I am here at all is evidence that I have the right to be here. I have a right to my own voice and a right to my own vision. I have a right to collaborate with creativity, because I myself am a product and a consequence of Creation. I'm on a mission of artistic liberation, so let the girl go." See? Now you're the one doing the talking.

As the saying goes: "Argue for your limitations and you get to keep them.

Stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone ought to be.

Never learn to type, kiddo. And if you do learn to type, never tell anybody you can type, or they'll make you do it forever. Never learn shorthand either. It'll be the death of you. They'll put a steno pad in a woman's hand and it'll never come out.

You can let yourself off the hook anytime you want, Liz. That's the divine contract of a little something we call free will.

You made it; your get to put it out there. Never apologize for it, never explain it away, never be ashamed of it. You did your best with what you knew, and you worked with what you had, in the time that you were given.

Step forward out of your own lingering residual sense of smallness, take up every inch of life that is your blessed inheritance, and DO YOUR THING.

The guardians of high culture will try to convince you that the arts belong only to a chosen few, but they are wrong and they are also annoying. We are all the chosen few. We are all makers by design.

Admittedly, I am not the one who looks fantastic in everything, but still I cannot help loving myself.

And this commitment of ours—consciously devoid of official commitment—felt miraculous in its liberation.

The sooner and more passionately you get married to this idea—that it is ultimately entirely up to you—the better off you'll be.

if your life has become a trash compactor, then you are allowed to try to escape that trash compactor, whatever it takes.

I would so much rather that you wrote a book in order to entertain yourself than to help me. Or if your subject matter is darker and more serious, I would prefer that you made your art in order to save yourself, or to relieve yourself of some great psychic burden, rather than to save or relieve us.

it's a mighty act of human love to remind somebody that they can accomplish things by themselves

in order to let go of the addiction to creative suffering, you must reject the way of the martyr

Nunca olvides que una vez, en el momento más inesperado, te viste a ti misma como una amiga.

you are allowed to have a voice and a vision of your own.

1950s. It was on the rooftop of our little bridal boutique that I learned this truth: when women are gathered together with no men around, they don't have to be anything in particular; they can just be.