Ayesha U

“I was the kid who made a beeline for the library when the last bell rang, but also harder, because how do you define yourself against such an identity? On what grounds? With what confidence?”
― Haroon Moghul, How to Be a Muslim: An American Story

“In our co-lecturing days, Flo Kennedy and I were sitting in the back of a taxi on the way to the Boston airport, discussing Flo’s book Abortion Rap. The driver, an old Irish woman, the only such cabbie I’ve ever seen, turned to us at a traffic light and said the immortal words, “Honey, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament!” Would she have wanted to own her words in public? I don’t know, but I so wish we had asked her name. When Flo and I told this taxi story at speeches, the driver’s sentence spread on T-shirts, political buttons, clinic walls, and protest banners from Washington to Vatican Square, from Ireland to Nigeria. By 2012, almost forty years after that taxi ride, the driver’s words were on a banner outside the Republican National Convention in Tampa, when the party nominated Mitt Romney for president of the United States on a platform that included criminalizing abortion. Neither Flo nor the taxi driver could have lived to see him lose—and yet they were there.”
― Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road

“Books are the best means—private, discreet, reliable—of overcoming reality.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, In Other Words: A Memoir

“That’s what he always used to say to me. Don’t expect me to be sane, Anna. Not with you.”
― Paula Hawkins, The Girl on the Train