Kathe > Kathe's Quotes

“The minute you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for. ”
― Maureen Dowd

“I embrace the label of bad feminist because I am human. I am messy. I’m not trying to be an example. I am not trying to be perfect. I am not trying to say I have all the answers. I am not trying to say I’m right. I am just trying—trying to support what I believe in, trying to do some good in this world, trying to make some noise with my writing while also being myself.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist

“It’s hard to be told to lighten up because if you lighten up any more, you’re going to float the fuck away.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays

“But when I am around strangers, I turn into a conversational Mount St. Helens. I'm dormant, dormant, quiet, quiet, old-guy loners build log cabins on the slopes of my silence and then, boom, it's 1980. Once I erupt, they'll be wiping my verbal ashes off their windshields as far away as North Dakota.”
― Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation

“Robert Todd Lincoln, a.k.a. Jinxy McDeath.”
― Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation

“You do it because the doing of it is the thing. The doing is the thing. The talking and worrying and thinking is not the thing.”
― Amy Poehler, Yes Please

“Telling me to relax or smile when I’m angry is like bringing a birthday cake into an ape sanctuary. You’re just asking to get your nose and genitals bitten off.”
― Amy Poehler, Yes Please

“However, if you do start crying in an argument and someone asks why, you can always say, "I'm just crying because of how wrong you are.”
― amy poehler, Yes Please

“Don’t waste your energy trying to educate or change opinions; go over, under, through, and opinions will change organically when you’re the boss. Or they won’t. Who cares? Do your thing, and don’t care if they like it.”
― Tina Fey, Bossypants

“One, remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Two, never give up work. Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it. Three, if you are lucky enough to find love, remember it is there and don't throw it away.”
― Stephen Hawking

“Stories are compasses and architecture, we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice.”
― Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

“For me, childhood roaming was what developed self-reliance, a sense of direction and adventure, imagination, a will to explore, to be able to get a little lost and then figure out the way back.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“There are other ways women have been made to disappear. There is the business of naming.In some cultures women keep their names, but in most their children take the father's name, and in the English-speaking world until very recently, prefaced by Mrs. You stopped, for example, being Charlotte Bronte and became Mrs. Arthur Nicholls. Names erased a woman's genealogy and even her existence.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“Listen, it is not the charcoal that draws the picture. It is you. It is your hand, which is attached to your body, and in that body is a beating heart...”
― Jandy Nelson, I'll Give You the Sun

“Or maybe a person is just made up of a lot of people,” I say. “Maybe we’re accumulating these new selves all the time.” Hauling them in as we make choices, good and bad, as we screw up, step up, lose our minds, find our minds, fall apart, fall in love, as we grieve, grow, retreat from the world, dive into the world, as we make things, as we break things.”
― Jandy Nelson, I'll Give You the Sun

“When a woman says, ‘I have nothing to wear!’, what she really means is, ‘There’s nothing here for who I’m supposed to be today.”
― Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman

“I cannot understand anti-abortion arguments that centre on the sanctity of life. As a species we've fairly comprehensively demonstrated that we don't believe in the sanctity of life. The shrugging acceptance of war, famine, epidemic, pain and life-long poverty shows us that, whatever we tell ourselves, we've made only the most feeble of efforts to really treat human life as sacred.”
― Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman

“But, of course, you might be asking yourself, 'Am I a feminist? I might not be. I don't know! I still don't know what it is! I'm too knackered and confused to work it out. That curtain pole really still isn't up! I don't have time to work out if I am a women's libber! There seems to be a lot to it. WHAT DOES IT MEAN?'
I understand.
So here is the quick way of working out if you're a feminist. Put your hand in your pants.

a) Do you have a vagina? and
b) Do you want to be in charge of it?

If you said 'yes' to both, then congratulations! You're a feminist.”
― Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman

“You can tell whether some misogynistic societal pressure is being exerted on women by calmly enquiring, ‘And are the men doing this, as well?’ If they aren’t, chances are you’re dealing with what we strident feminists refer to as ‘some total fucking bullshit’.”
― Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman

“But as the years went on, I realised that what I really want to be, all told, is a human. Just a productive, honest, courteously treated human.”
― Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman

“When statistics come in saying that only 29 percent of American women would describe themselves as feminist - and only 42 percent of British women - I used to think, What do you think feminism IS, ladies? What part of 'liberation for women' is not for you? Is it freedom to vote? The right not to be owned by the man you marry? The campaign for equal pay? 'Vogue' by Madonna? Jeans? Did all that good shit GET ON YOUR NERVES? Or were you just DRUNK AT THE TIME OF SURVEY?”
― Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman

“Samuel Johnson: A book should either allow us to escape existence or teach us how to endure it .”
― David Shields, How Literature Saved My Life

“Anything processed by memory is fiction.”
― David Shields

“Good teachers don't approach a child of this age with overzealousness or with destructive conscientiousness. They're not drill-masters in the military or floor managers in a production system. They are specialists in opening small packages. They give the string a tug but do it carefully. They don't yet know what's in the box. They don't know if it's breakable. ”
― Jonathan Kozol, Ordinary Resurrections: Children in the Years of Hope

“The future teachers I try to recruit are those show have refused to let themselves be neutered in this way, either in their private lives or in the lives that they intend to lead in school. When they begin to teach, they come into their classrooms with a sense of affirmation of the goodness and the fullness of existence, with a sense of satisfaction in discovering the unexpected in their students, and with a longing to surprise the world, their kids, even themselves, with their capacity to leave each place they've been ... a better and more joyful place than it was when they entered it.”
― Jonathan Kozol

“There is something deeply hypocritical in a society that holds an inner-city child only eight years old "accountable" for her performance on a high-stakes standardized exam but does not hold the high officials of our government accountable for robbing her of what they gave their own kids six or seven years before.”
― Jonathan Kozol, The Shame of the Nation

“Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.”
― Jonathan Kozol

“You have to remember. . .that for this little boy whom you have met, his life is just as important to him, as your life is to you. No matter how insufficient or how shabby it may seem to some, it is the only one he has.”
― Jonathan Kozol, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation

“I always want to tell these young idealists that the world is not as dangerous as many in the older generation want them to believe...The [people] for whom I feel the greatest sadness are the ones who choke on their beliefs, who never act on their ideals, who never know the state of struggle in a decent cause, and never know the thrill of even partial victories.”
― Jonathan Kozol