Ann Carpizo > Ann's Quotes

“A crippled child
Said, "How shall I dance?"
Let your heart dance
We said.

Then the invalid said:
"How shall I sing?"
Let your heart sing
We said

Then spoke the poor dead thistle,
"But I, how shall I dance?"
Let your heart fly to the wind
We said.

Then God spoke from above
"How shall I descend from the blue?"
Come dance for us here in the light
We said.

All the valley is dancing
Together under the sun,
And the heart of him who joins us not
Is turned to dust, to dust.”
― Gabriela Mistral

“I write poetry because I can’t disobey the impulse; it would be like blocking a spring that surges up in my throat. For a long time I’ve been the servant of the song that comes, that appears and can’t be buried away. How to seal myself up now?…It no longer matters to me who receives what I submit. What I carry out is, in that respect, greater and deeper than I, I am merely the channel.”
― Gabriela Mistral

“Many things we need can wait. The child cannot. Now is the time his bones are formed, his mind developed. To him we cannot say tomorrow, his name is today.”
― Gabriela Mistral

“Love that stammers, that stutters, is apt to be the love that loves best.”
― Gabriela Mistral

“You educate a man; you educate a man. You educate a woman; you educate a generation.”
― Brigham Young

“When a man gives his opinion, he's a man. When a woman gives her opinion, she's a bitch.”
― Bette Davis

“I hate to hear you talk about all women as if they were fine ladies instead of rational creatures. None of us want to be in calm waters all our lives.”
― Jane Austen, Persuasion

“I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.”
― Rebecca West

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

“I hate men who are afraid of women's strength.”
― Anaïs Nin, Henry and June: From the Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin

“The thing women have yet to learn is nobody gives you power. You just take it. ”
― Roseanne Barr

“No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor. ”
― Betty Friedan

“It is easier to live through someone else than to complete yourself. The freedom to lead and plan your own life is frightening if you have never faced it before. It is frightening when a woman finally realizes that there is no answer to the question 'who am I' except the voice inside herself.”
― Betty Friedan

“What Friedan gave to the world was, "the problem that has no name." She not only named it but dissected it. The advances of science, the development of labor-saving appliances, the development of the suburbs: all had come together to offer women in the 1950s a life their mothers had scarcely dreamed of, free from rampant disease, onerous drudgery, noxious city streets. But the green lawns and big corner lots were isolating, the housework seemed to expand to fill the time available, and polio and smallpox were replaced by depression and alcoholism. All that was covered up in a kitchen conspiracy of denial...
[i]nstead the problem was with the mystique of waxed floors and perfectly applied lipstick.”
― Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

“...women who 'adjust' as housewives, who grow up wanting to be 'just a housewife,' are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps...they ate suffering a slow death of mind and spirit.”
― Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

“The feminist revolution had to be fought because women quite simply were stopped at a state of evolution far short of their human capacity.”
― Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

“The man who is extremely and dangerously hungry has no other interest but food. Capacities not useful for the satisfying of hunger are pushed into the background. 'But what happens to man's desires when there is plenty of food and his belly in chronically filled? At once, other (and higher) needs emerge and these, rather than the psychological hungers, dominate the organism.”
― Betty Friedan, Feminine Mystique

“The feminists had destroyed the old image of woman, but they could not erase the hostility, the prejudice, the discrimination that still remained.”
― Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

“It was during my study in Israel that I came to the realization that most of what I had learned in my courses in religion in the United States was outdated or in error. In order to understand what the biblical position is on any subject and, particularly on the subject of sex, one has to do it from a Hebrew perspective.”
― Roy B. Blizzard, The Bible Sex and You

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”
― Mark Twain

“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”
― Socrates

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”
― Isaac Asimov

“If things do not turn out as we wish, we should wish for them as they turn out.”
― Aristotle, Metaphysics

“The investigation of the truth is in one way hard, in another easy. An indication of this is found in the fact that no one is able to attain the truth adequately, while, on the other hand, no one fails entirely, but everyone says something true about the nature of all things, and while individually they contribute little or nothing to the truth, by the union of all a considerable amount is amassed.”
― Aristotle, Metaphysics

“But with regard to incomposites, what is being or not being, and truth or falsity? A thing of this sort is not composite, so as to 'be' when it is compounded, and not to 'be' if it is separated, like 'that the wood is white' or 'that the diagonal is incommensurable'; nor will truth and falsity be still present in the same way as in the previous cases. In fact, as truth is not the same in these cases, so also being is not the same; but (a) truth or falsity is as follows--contact and assertion are truth (assertion not being the same as affirmation), and ignorance is non-contact. For it is not possible to be in error regarding the question what a thing is, save in an accidental sense; and the same holds good regarding non-composite substances (for it is not possible to be in error about them). And they all exist actually, not potentially; for otherwise they would have come to be and ceased to be; but, as it is, being itself does not come to be (nor cease to be); for if it had done so it would have had to come out of something. About the things, then, which are essences and actualities, it is not possible to be in error, but only to know them or not to know them. But we do inquire what they are, viz. whether they are of such and such a nature or not.”
― Aristotle, Metaphysics

“This is slavery, not to speak one's thought.”
― Euripides, The Phoenician Women

“Anger exceeding limits causes fear and excessive kindness eliminates respect.”
― Euripides

“Cleverness is not wisdom.”
― Euripides, The Bacchae

“Arm yourself, my heart: the thing that you must do is fearful, yet inevitable.”
― Euripides, Medea and Other Plays

“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.”
― Roland Barthes