Jaani Ramaki

“She said nothing, she only looked at me without a word. But it hurts more, it hurts more when they don't blame!”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“take a deep breath. Well, no going back now, not after crossing so many borders, military ones, geographical ones, physical ones, psychological ones, mental ones.”
― Adania Shibli, Minor Detail

“Woman is lost. Where are the women? Today's women are not women"; we have seen what these mysterious slogans mean. In the eyes of men — and of the legions of women who see through these eyes — it is not enough to have a woman's body or to take on the female function as lover and mother to be a "real woman"; it is possible for the subject to claim autonomy through sexuality and maternity; the "real woman" is one who accepts herself as Other. The duplicitous attitude of men today creates a painful split for women; they accept, for the most part, that woman be a peer, an equal; and yet they continue to oblige her to remain the inessential; for her, these two destinies are not reconcilable; she hesitates between them without being exactly suited to either, and that is the source of her lack of balance.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“Said Simone de Beauvoir in her groundbreaking book The Second Sex,
"Just as in America there is no Negro problem but rather a white problem; just as 'anti-Semitism is not a Jewish problem; it is our problem'; so the women problem has always been a man's problem. . . . Men have always held the lot of women in their hands; and they have determined what it should be, not according to her interest, but rather with regard to their own projects, their fears, and their needs.”
― Mary Gabriel, Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art