Noor

“We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls, you can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful. Otherwise, you would threaten the man. Because I am female, I am expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. Now marriage can be a source of joy and love and mutual support but why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don’t teach boys the same? We raise girls to see each other as competitors not for jobs or accomplishments, which I think can be a good thing, but for the attention of men. We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists

“Loving someone who cannot love you the same way in return is not weakness. It’s one of the most courageous things you’ll ever do. You are putting your armour at their feet and you are saying ‘I will not fight you in this. I have loved you and that means that I have already won.”
― Azra T.

“A childhood without books – that would be no childhood. That would be like being shut out from the enchanted place where you can go and find the rarest kind of joy.”
― Astrid Lindgren

“...her wings are cut and then she is blamed for not knowing how to fly.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex