charlotte > charlotte's Quotes

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”
― Mary Oliver

“I was going to die, sooner or later, whether or not I had even spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you.... What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language."

I began to ask each time: "What's the worst that could happen to me if I tell this truth?" Unlike women in other countries, our breaking silence is unlikely to have us jailed, "disappeared" or run off the road at night. Our speaking out will irritate some people, get us called bitchy or hypersensitive and disrupt some dinner parties. And then our speaking out will permit other women to speak, until laws are changed and lives are saved and the world is altered forever.

Next time, ask: What's the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare. Once you start to speak, people will yell at you. They will interrupt you, put you down and suggest it's personal. And the world won't end.

And the speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don't miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And you will still flirt and paint your nails, dress up and party, because, as I think Emma Goldman said, "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution." And at last you'll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.”
― Audre Lorde

“When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.”
― Audre Lorde

“Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.”
― Audre Lorde

“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
― Margaret Atwood

“Feminism is the radical notion that women are human beings.”
― Cheris Kramarae

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel

“Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent”
― Victor Hugo

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
― Albert Einstein

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
― Maya Angelou

“The Witch's Life"

When I was a child
there was an old woman in our neighborhood whom we called The Witch.
All day she peered from her second story
window
from behind the wrinkled curtains
and sometimes she would open the window
and yell: Get out of my life!
She had hair like kelp
and a voice like a boulder.

I think of her sometimes now
and wonder if I am becoming her.”
― Anne Sexton

“I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.”
― audre lorde

“For 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. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.”
― Audre Lorde

“Revolution is not a one time event.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it.”
― Audre Lorde

“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“We accept the love we think we deserve.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories

“Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.”
― Narcotics Anonymous

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
― William Shakespeare, As You Like It

“The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.”
― Elie Wiesel

“A woman is like a tea bag; you never know how strong it is until it's in hot water.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt