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“In analyzing the sex-class system, feminists are accused of inventing or perpetuating it. Calling attention to it, we are told, insults women by suggesting that they are victims, stupid enough to allow themselves to be victimized. Feminists are accused of being the agents of degradation by postulation that such degradation exists.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women

“The accounts of rape, wife beating, forced childbearing, medical butchering, sex-motivated murder, forced prostitution, physical mutilation, sadistic psychological abuse, and other commonplaces of female experience that are excavated from the past or given by contemporary survivors should leave the heart seared, the mind in anguish, the conscience in upheaval. But they do not. No matter how often these stories are told, with whatever clarity or eloquence, bitterness or sorrow, they might as well have been whispered in wind or written in sand: they disappear, as if they were nothing. The tellers and the stories are ignored or ridiculed, threatened back into silence or destroyed, and the experience of female suffering is buried in cultural invisibility and contempt… the very reality of abuse sustained by women, despite its overwhelming pervasiveness and constancy, is negated. It is negated in the transactions of everyday life, and it is negated in the history books, left out, and it is negated by those who claim to care about suffering but are blind to this suffering.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women

“I could not bear his expression. That look said, this is a long good-bye, yet not time enough. I have no aptitude for this. I cannot learn this. I would hold on, and hold on, until my hands clutch at emptiness.”
― Juliet Marillier, Son of the Shadows

“There may not be as much humanity in the world as one would like to see. But there is some. There's more than one would think. In any case, if you break faith with what you know, that's a betrayal of many, many, many, many people. I may know six people, but that's enough. Love has never been a popular movement and no one's ever wanted really to be free. The world is held togther, really it is held together, by the love and the passion of very few people. Otherwise, of course you're in despair. Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon, and look around you. What you've got to remember is what you're looking at is also you. Everyone you're looking at is also you. You could be that person. You could be that person, you could be that cop. And you have to decide in yourself not to be.”
― James Baldwin