Harri

“I used writing to take language where women’s pain was--and women’s fear--and I kept excavating for the words that could bear the burden of speaking the unspeakable...”
― Andrea Dworkin, Last Days at Hot Slit: The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin

“Woman is not born; she is made. In the making, her humanity is destroyed. She becomes symbol of this, symbol of that: mother of the earth, slut of the universe; but she never becomes herself because it is forbidden for her to do so.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women

“The only fiction in pornography is the smile on the woman's face.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Life and Death: Unapologetic Writings on the Continuing War Against Women

“I watch him sleep because the tenderness I have for him is what I have left of everything I started with.
My brother was like him, frail blond curls framing a guileless face, he slept the same way, back where I started. A tenderness remembered tangentially, revived when I see this pale, yellow-haired man asleep, at rest, defenseless, incomprehensibly trusting death not to come. We are innocence together, before life set in.
Sometimes I feel the tenderness for this man now, the real one asleep, not the memory of the baby brother - sometimes I feel the tenderness so acutely - it balances on just a sliver of memory - I feel it so acutely, it is so much closer to pain than to pleasure or any other thing, for instance, in one second when each knows what the other will say or without a thought our fingers just barely touch, I remember then in a sharp sliver of penetration my baby brother, pale, yellow-haired, curls framing a sleeping face while I lay awake during the long nights, one after the other, while mother lay dying. It is consumingly physical, not to sleep, to be awake, watching a blond boy sleeping and waiting for your mother to die.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Ice and Fire