My Life on the Road Quotes
You're always the person you were when you were born," she says impatiently. "You just keep finding new ways to express it.
I myself cried when I got angry, then became unable to explain why I was angry in the first place. Later I would discover this was endemic among female human beings. Anger is supposed to be "unfeminine" so we suppress it -until it overflows. I could see that not speaking up made my mother feel worse. This was my first hint of the truism that depression is anger turned inward; thus women are twice as likely to be depressed. My mother paid a high price for caring so much, yet being able to do so little about it. In this way, she led me toward am activist place where she herself could never go.
You should write about take no-shit women like me. Girls need to know they can break the rules" p.79.
Sometimes I think the only real division into two is between people who divide everything into two and those who don't.
If you find yourself drawn to an event against all logic, go. The universe is telling you something.
Also, one of the simplest paths to deep change is for the less powerful to speak as much as they listen, and for the more powerful to listen as much as they speak.
Long before all these divisions were opened between home and the road, betweens a woman's place and a man's world, humans followed the crops, the seasons, traveling with their families, our companions, animals, our tents. We built campfires and moved from place to place. This way of traveling is still in our cellular memory. Living things have evolved as travelers, Even migrating birds know that nature doesn't demand a choice between nesting and flight.
Remember: "For want of a nail, the horseshoe was lost, for want of a horseshoe, the horse was lost, for want of a horse, the battle was lost, for want of a battle, the war was lost." This parable should be the mantra of everyone who thinks her or his vote doesn't count.
If you want people to listen to you, you have to listen to them. If you hope people will change how they live, you have to know how they live. If you want people to see you, you have to sit down with them eye-to-eye.
Swiftboating enters the English language as a verb that means attacking strength instead of weakness. In feminist and other social justice contexts, this has long been called trashing, attacking leaders for daring to write, speak, or lead at all. Taking away the good is even more lethal than pointing out the bad. p.189.
We might have known sooner that the most reliable predictor of whether a country is violent within itself—or will use military violence against another country—is not poverty, natural resources, religion, or even degree of democracy; it’s violence against females. It normalizes all other violence.
No wonder studies show that women's intellectual self-esteem tends to go down as years of education go up. We have been studying our own absence.
Altogether, if I'd been looking at nothing but the media all these years, I would be a much more discouraged person-especially given the notion that only conflict is news, and that objectivity means being evenhandedly negative.
I wonder: If you think of someone you love, do you become a little more like them? I would like to think so.
The road is messy in the way that real life is messy. It leads us out of denial and into reality, out of theory and into practice, out of caution and into action, out of statistics and into stories—in short, out of our heads and into our hearts.
It’s said that the biggest determinant of our lives is whether we see the world as welcoming or hostile. Each becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
there’s probably a simple reason for this: send a woman out alone on a rambling nocturnal quest and she’s likely to end up a lot deader a lot sooner than a man would.
Anyone who believes we’re living in a postfeminist age will learn that violence against females—from female infanticide and child marriage to honor killings and sex trafficking—has now produced a world with fewer females than males, a first in recorded history.
Not even in a movie had I ever seen a wife with a journey of her own. Marriage was always the happy end, not the beginning. It was the 1950s, and I confused growing up with settling down.
In the face of all the dire and often accurate warnings of danger on the road for women, it took modern feminism to ask the rock-bottom question: Compared to what? Whether by dowry murders in India, honor killings in Egypt, or domestic violence in the United States, records show that women are most likely to be beaten or killed at home and by men they know. Statistically speaking, home is an even more dangerous place for women than the road. Perhaps the most revolutionary act for a woman will be a self-willed journey—and to be welcomed when she comes home.
I'm also now immune to politicians who say, "I've traveled the length and breadth of this great land, and I know..." I've traveled more than any of them, and I don't know.
I've noticed that great political leaders are energized by conflict. I'm energized by listening to people's stories and trying to figure out shared solutions. That's the work of an organizer.
I can go on the road - because I can come home. I come home - because I'm free to leave. Each way of being is more valued in the presence of the other.
What we’re told about this country is way too limited by generalities, sound bites, and even the supposedly enlightened idea that there are two sides to every question. In fact, many questions have three or seven or a dozen sides.
Men embody adventure, women embody hearth and home, and that has been pretty much it.
Even as a child, I noticed that Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz spent her entire time trying to get back home to Kansas, and Alice in Wonderland dreamed her long adventure, then woke up just in time for tea.
Flo especially took me in hand. When I felt I had to prove the existence of discrimination with statistics, for instance, she pulled me aside. 'If you're lying in the ditch with a truck on your ankle,' she said patiently, 'you don't send someone to the library to find out how much the truck weighs. You get it off!.
that turtle has probably spent a month crawling up the dirt path to lay its eggs in the mud on the side of the road—you have just put it back in the river.