Antígnome > Antígnome's Quotes

“Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“What will liberate women, therefore, from male control is the total elimination of the money-work system, not the attainment of economic equality with men within it.”
― Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto

“All things, when measured in spans of years, seem simple. But human lives do not occur in years, but slowly, day by day. A year may be easy, but its days are hard indeed.”
― Naomi Alderman, Disobedience

“Silence is not power. It’s not strength. Silence is the means by which the weak remain weak and the strong remain strong. Silence is a method of oppression.”
― Naomi Alderman, Disobedience

“Dovid thought: our words will swallow us. We have spat them out, but in the end they will drown us.”
― Naomi Alderman, Disobedience

“There’s nothing feminist about having so many resources at your fingertips and choosing to be ignorant. Nothing empowering or enlightening in deciding that intent trumps impact. Especially when the consequences aren’t going to be experienced by you, but will instead be experienced by someone from a marginalized community.”
― Mikki Kendall, Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot

“She taught me distrust. What progressives who ignore history don’t understand is that just like racism is taught, so is distrust.”
― Mikki Kendall, Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot

“Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.”
― Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto

“The denigration of those we love always detaches us from them in some degree. Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“I was born to join in love, not hate - that is my nature.”
― Sophocles, Antigone

“Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

“At the level of high culture with which this book is concerned, active bigotry is probably fairly rare. It is also hardly ever necessary, since the social context is so far from neutral. To act in a way both sexist and racist, to maintain one's class privilege, it is only necessary to act in the customary, ordinary, usual, even polite manner.”
― Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women's Writing

“One of my oldest crusades is against the distinction between thought and feeling, which is really the basis of all anti-intellectual views: the heart and the head, thinking and feeling, fantasy and judgment . . . and I don’t believe it’s true. . . . I have the impression that thinking is a form of feeling and that feeling is a form of thinking.”
― Susan Sontag, Susan Sontag: The Complete Rolling Stone Interview

“Masculinity cannot exist without femininity. On its own, masculinity has no meaning, because it is but one half of a set of power relations. Masculinity pertains to male dominance as femininity pertains to female subordination.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Unpacking Queer Politics: A Lesbian Feminist Perspective

“Not all of us can deal with the illumination that comes with justice.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties

“What if you colonize your own mind and when you get inside, the furniture is attached to the ceiling? What if you step inside and when you touch the furniture, you realize it's all just cardboard cutouts and it all collapses beneath the pressure of your finger? What if you get inside and there's no furniture? What if you get inside and it's just you in there, sitting in a chair, rolling figs and eggs around in the basked of your lap and humming a little tune? What if you get inside and there's nothing there, and then the door hatch closes and locks?

What is worse: being locked outside of your own mind, or being locked inside of it?”
― Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

“If this child is part of The Plan, then The Plan was that I would be raped. If this child is not part of The Plan, then my rape was a violation of The Plan, in which case The Plan is not a Plan at all, but a Polite fucking Suggestion”
― Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

“She is always trying to win. You want to say to her: We cannot advance together if you are like this. Love cannot be won or lost; a relationship doesn’t have a scoring system. We are partners, paired against the world. We cannot succeed if we are at odds with each other. Instead you say: Why don’t you understand? Don’t you understand? You do understand? Then what don’t I understand?”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“People ask me, “Have you tried yoga? Kombucha? This special water?” And I don’t have the energy to explain that yes, I’ve tried them. I’ve tried crystals and healing drum circles and prayer and everything. What I want to try is acceptance. I want to see what happens if I can simply accept myself for who I am: battered, broken, hoping for relief, still enduring somehow. I will still take a cure if it’s presented to me, but I am so tired of trying to bargain with the universe for some kind of cure. The price is simply too high to live chasing cures, because in doing so, I’m missing living my life. I know only that in chasing to achieve the person I once was, I will miss the person I have become.”
― Alice Wong, Disability Visibility : First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century

“To say that we want wages for housework is to expose the fact that housework is already money for capital, that capital has made and makes money out of our cooking, smiling, fucking. At the same time, it shows that we have cooked, smiled, fucked throughout the years not because it was easier for us than for anybody else, but because we did not have any other choice. Our faces have become distorted from so much smiling, our feelings have got lost from so much loving, our oversexualization has left us completely desexualized.”
― Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle

“Usually, rebellions are about saying: We are sick of the way things are— we want to create something new! What happens here, though, is: let’s accept the prevailing order— since we have suddenly realized that it is already subversive. If you feel uncomfortable about the state of things— just keep quiet! As it turns out, things are organized so rationally that resistance happens to be built into the status quo— all we have to do is realize it! Accordingly, pornography will do its own fighting for us since, in and of itself, it challenges the masculine hegemony, transforms society and reshapes our desires! (We must read at least one academic dissertation in order to understand this, however.) The purpose is not to initiate a revolt, but to legitimize the status quo. Saying that something has ‘subversive potential’ in this context is to give it a stamp of approval— not to demand action.”
― Kajsa Ekis Ekman, Being and Being Bought: Prostitution, Surrogacy and the Split Self

“One doesn’t own one’s body, one is one’s body. ‘My body is me’. Not an object, an instrument, separated from the self, something that can be sold, rented, abandoned, or kept to oneself—but being itself. One does not belong to oneself, one is oneself. This is why the prostitutes’ claims that they own their own bodies seem to me to reflect this very same alienation.”
― Kajsa Ekis Ekman, Being and Being Bought: Prostitution, Surrogacy and the Split Self

“When feminists acknowledge in one breath that black women are victimized and in the same breath emphasize their strength, they imply that though black women are oppressed they manage to circumvent the damaging impact of oppression by being strong—and that is simply not the case. Usually, when people talk about the “strength” of black women they are referring to the way in which they perceive black women coping with oppression. They ignore the reality that to be strong in the face of oppression is not the same as overcoming oppression, that endurance is not to be confused with transformation.”
― bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

“I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs...The way I write is who I am, or have become...”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“I think what you know in a language shows who you are in relation to that language. Not an instance of language shaping your worldview, but its obtuse inverse, where your worldview shapes what parts of the language you pick up. Not just : your language makes you, your language holds you prisoner to a particular way of looking at the world. But also : who you are determines what language you inhabit, the prison-house of your existence permits you only to access and wield some parts of a language.”
― Meena Kandasamy, When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife

“And I am thinking about how I am someday going to be writing all this out and I am conscious that I am thinking about this and not about the moment, and I know that I have already escaped the present and that gives me hope, I just have to wait for this to end and I can write again, and I know that because I am going to be writing about this, I know this is going to end.”
― Meena Kandasamy, When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife

“Let me tell you something that goes against popular wisdom. Love is not blind; it just looks in the wrong places.”
― Meena Kandasamy, When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife