"if being a 'victim' is what it takes to find accommodation, understanding, compassion, financial aid, and employment considerations, sure- I'll play the victim." Lisa Marie Basile

"I assert that poetry without politics is narcissistic and not useful to us. I also believe that everything is political-there is no neutral safe place we can hide out in waiting for the brutality to go away." Chrystos

"Time softens ethical bianaries and fosters a greater appreciation of what might be called the messiness of life." Jonathan Safran Foer

"Knowing is the difference between a grave error and an unforgivable crime." Jonathan Safran Foer

"Please just give me a room of my own... Virginia Woolf thought. Fair enough, I think... But the truth is, what women... need is a universe of one's own - not just a room." Antonia Hayes

"It's not enough to just point out the problems; change doesn't happen through observation. It requires action" Antonia Hayes

"I want to live in a universe where a female readership isn't considered a lesser readership. Where book clubs are seen as modern-day Greek symposiums, the forums of serious discussion about the issues of our time." Antonia Hayes

"when a thought takes one's breath away, a lesson on grammar seems an impertinence." Thomas Wentworth Higginson

"Did I want the plot line to be that the woman who has survived her own hard life--abusive mother, abusive husband, enduring poverty--also emerges with a 'likeable' personality: a pluck spirit, a determined work ethic, and a graceful self-effacing relationship to her own suffering?" Leslie Jamison

"when you have worked so hard in creating yourself... it is sometimes difficult to let other people get close enough to see the seams, the flaws, the parts of you that aren't quite done yet. David Levithan

"It's hard... when you're raised one way and then try to raise yourself another way. You're given this absolute and then, wham, it's no longer an absolute. All along you thought God was closed to interpretation and then you realize it's all interpretation. It's like being told there's no physics or chemistry, or that the dictionary isn't real." David Levithan

"To be loved by God is to be loved for who you are. To love God is to place no boundaries on who you love... Whether or not I believe in the God of my ancestors, I see God in everyone." David Levithan

"From this centre, we will spread to the far reaches, go to our homes and to the places less welcoming to us. We will not stop being together. Our love will endure." David Levithan

"Could it be that those who see things more clearly are also those who feel and suffer the most?" Clarice Lispector

" ...if the women don't win, nobody wins. If queer people and marginalized people and freaks and outsiders cannot live free, freedom is not worth the paper it's printed on." Laurie Penny

"What they seem to mean by 'identity politics' is 'politics that matter to people who aren't white men in rural towns or young boys in bedrooms convinced that their inability to get laid is an injustice that must be answered in blood and suffering.'" Laurie Penny

"I am told on a daily basis that the things I write about gender and identity... are insignificant next to the struggles of women somewhere across the sea. I am usually told this by those who have no interest in those struggles except as a means to silence women closer to home." Laurie Penny

"Any writer who claims objectivity is lying to you or to themselves... to often that's a modesty slip for the enduring suspicion that only a certain sort of well-to-do Western man can possibly have a viewpoint worth listening to." Laurie Penny

"We are taught, as women - specially as women - that before anything else, we should make ourselves likeable. Accepting that you're going to be called a bitch isn't about acquiesce. It's about choosing freedom. There are a great many worse things that can happen to you than someone not liking what you have to say." Laurie Penny

"there is no longer any 'view from nowhere'. There is... no single story to tell about the world - and there never has been. The best we can do is strive to be honest - to identify and interrogate our assumptions, and to stand firm where it matters." Laurie Penny

"It is easier for me to make those choices, of course, than it is for some people. I'm middle-class, white, well educated... I have less to lose by seeking freedom than my mother did, and she had less to lose than her mother, although they both had far more to win. There is still a world to win." Laurie Penny

"I don't hate men as individuals. I'm obliged to start out by saying that, of course, for the benefit of the fragile among us who believe that talking about women's rights is akin to calling for some sort of androcaust. In my case, the not-hating-men thing also happens to be true. I have, however increasingly little patience with men as a social phenomenon." Laurie Penny

"I have learned to fear my own capacity for empathy, where men are concerned. They can be so fragile. So often, they take any challenge to their received narratives, any questioning of their ideas about the world, as a profound identity threat, especially if the question or the challenge comes from a women. Of course, of course, not all men. But enough of them." Laurie Penny

"'Having it all', to be clear, does not mean '...the total destruction of capitalist patriarchy and my very own puppy', which is what I'd have if I had everything I wanted. No the 'it all' that every girl is supposed to want has a very specific meaning: it means the ability to simultaneously meet the demands of marriage, children and a high-powered career." Laurie Penny

"Young women are meant to prioritise men's romantic approval, and young men often struggle to imagine a world in which we might have other priorities." Laurie Penny

"in order to win (mens') approval, we are supposed to lessen our power in every other aspect of life. We are supposed to downplay our intelligence, to worry if we have more financial or professional success than our partner. We can be creative and ambitious, but never more so than the men in our lives, lest we threaten them, And there are so few men that are worth making that sort of sacrifice for." Laurie Penny

"The worst thing about traditional romantic love is that it's supposed to be the end of the story - if you're a girl. The music swells, the curtain drops as you fall into his arms, and then you're done. You get to drift off into a life of quiet bliss and baby making." Laurie Penny

"what we have right now isn't equality yet. It's nothing like equality. But it's still enough to enrage the old guard because when you've been used to privilege, equality feels like prejudice." Laurie Penny

"I'm categorically against people being parachuted into positions of power and influence just because of their gender or the colour of their skin. It's a social disease. It stops us making full use of our collective capabilities. And that's precisely why we need 'diversity hires.'" Laurie Penny

"when you tell me that a political outfit...that made a point of hiring 50 per cent women, would not be getting 'the best people for the job'...You're saying that the best people for the job aren't women. I repeat: if you thing that a truly meritocratic society would not be one in which men and women were equally represented, from politics to pop culture, what you're saying is that men are fundamentally better than women... if you truly believe in meritocracy, you must also believe in diversity - any other position is prejudice" Laurie Penny

"The...lesson...some little girls go to their graves not knowing...is that beauty is not mandatory. Some of us will never e beautiful, and none of us will be beautiful for ever, at least not by society's standards, and that's ok. Beauty is not the only or the most important measure of a person's worth if she is female." Laurie Penny

"I'm done. I am done pretending that the good intentions of white patriarchy are more important than the consequences enacted on the bodies of others. Good intentions aren't the issue here. Feel free to be as racist as you like in the privacy of your own heart, if you can live with yourself, but not - and this is very important - in the privacy of your own house." Laurie Penny

"I don't have easy answers about belief. For all that it sounds inauthentic to do something without believing in it, I think maybe the opposite is the real sin. Believing without doing. And if there is a chance that I could believe in this, that maybe I already do, then the cost of not doing it is just too high." Sierra Simone

"Instead of going to Mass on Sundays, he sat on the knoll and watched fog swirl through the gravestones and had Masses inside his own heart." Sierra Simone

"There was a time...when holy people were not safe. When they were not tame. When they were not the gentle shepherds, but the keepers of mysteries and the guardians of fire...God was not safe...So why then had he hemmed in his faith with safety?...He loved rituals, rites, and liturgies, that was unchanged. He loved the motions of them, the ancient words, the less-than-ancient words made to sound older than they were. But he'd been reduced by them...perhaps not him personally, but his understanding, his relationship with God and belief. He'd hoped to wrestle it into submission, that relationship, and make it something that matched the way other people believed...All he'd wanted, all he'd ever wanted, was to believe like other people did. Communally and pleasantly, and with glad hearts that could easily bear the distance between themselves and God. Not wild and alone. Chasing after God like an abandoned bridegroom." Sierra Simone

"Surely this was at the heart--the very haert--of how we treated the world. We minded what happened after us." Alexander McCall Smith

"You can't be in this world without feeling something...you have to feel it...and once you start to feel the pain of the world, then, oh God, it's hard to stop feeling it." Alexander McCall Smith

" what looks exciting on film is more often, in life, chaotic and destabilizing." Nina St. Pierre

" Girls are carrying too much. We are spilling over, top-heavy and destabilized, but praised for our maturity and adaptability if we take it, denigrated if we do not." Nina St. Pierre

"A wish for a tranquil mind is a wish for an apathetic one." Leslye Walton

"This is a witch hunt. We're witches, and we're hunting you." Lindy West

"patriarchy has misdiagnosed female anger... my entire life I have registered rage for very different reasons than the men I've known... When I've felt... anger, it is spurred by witnessing and experiencing injustice. In contrast... most men are provoked to anger when their ego and territory have been threatened." Reema Zaman

"no one owes you the benefit of the doubt when your actions have shown, repeatedly and with out reparation that you do not deserve it." Francesca Zappia