She did not tell him this, because it would hurt him to know she had felt that way for a while, that her relationship with him was like being content in a house but always sitting by the window and looking out.
We teach girls shame; close your legs, cover yourself, we make them feel as though by being born female they’re already guilty of something.
To choose to write is to reject silence.
Of course I am not worried about intimidating men. The type of man who will be intimidated by me is exactly the type of man I have no interest in.
Never ever accept ‘Because You Are A Woman’ as a reason for doing or not doing anything.
Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people. But stories can also repair that broken dignity.
If you start thinking about being likable you are not going to tell your story honestly.
Our society teaches a woman at a certain age who is unmarried to see it as a deep personal failure. While a man at a certain age who is unmarried has not quite come around to making his pick.
You Americans, always peering under people’s beds to look for communism.
Privilege blinds, because it’s in its nature to blind. Don’t let it blind you too often. Sometimes you will need to push it aside in order to see clearly.
The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.
The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognizing how we are. Imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves, if we didn’t have the weight of gender expectations.
The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be, rather than recognising how we are.
All over the world, there are so many magazine articles and books telling women what to do, how to be and not to be, in order to attract or please men. There are far fewer guides for men about pleasing women.
I’m very feminist in the way I look at the world, and that worldview must somehow be part of my work.
The real tragedy of our postcolonial world is not that the majority of people had no say in whether or not they wanted this new world; rather, it is that the majority have not been given the tools to negotiate this new world.
She rested her head against his and felt, for the first time, what she would often feel with him: a self-affection. He made her like herself.
There are some things that are so unforgivable that they make other things easily forgivable.
I am a strong believer in the ability of human beings to change for the better. I am a strong believer in trying to change what we are dissatisfied with.
There are people who dislike you because you do not dislike yourself.