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"But why didn't you leave? Why didn't you take my sister and go to New York?" she would say it didn't matter, that she was lucky to have my sister and me. If I pressed hard enough, she would add, "If I'd left, you never would have been born." I never had the courage to say: But you would have been born instead."
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"Sometimes we're so concerned about giving our children what we never had growing up, we neglect to give them what we did have growing up."

"What thumbsuckers we all are...when it comes to mothers."

"Of course there are mothers,squeezing their breastsdry, pawning their bodies,shedding teeth for their children,or that's our fond belief.But remember - Hanseland Gretel were dumped in the forestbecause their parents were starving."

"We live in a world that has narrowed into a neighborhood before it has broadened into a brotherhood."

"Happy or unhappy, families are all mysterious. We have only to imagine how differently we would be described - and will be, after our deaths - by each of the family members who believe they know us."

"To each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread. We were just a family. In a family even exaggerations make perfect sense."
Explore more quotes by Gloria Steinem

"In Indian Country, he says, "we have a different sense of time. I'm learning and you're learning-and more will."

"If women are supposed to be less rational and more emotional at the beginning of our menstrual cycle when the female hormone is at its lowest level, then why isn't it logical to say that, in those few days, women behave the most like the way men behave all month long?"

"Without leaps of the imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning."

"Clearly no one knows what leadership has gone undiscovered in women of all races, and in black and other minority men."

"Happy or unhappy, families are all mysterious. We have only to imagine how differently we would be described - and will be, after our deaths - by each of the family members who believe they know us."

"No wonder male religious leaders so often say that humans were born in sin-because we were born to female creatures. Only by obeying the rules of the patriarchy can we be reborn through men. No wonder priests and ministers in skirts sprinkle imitation birth fluid over our heads, give us new names, and promise rebirth into everlasting life."

"I think we each come out of the womb with some unique way of looking at the world and if we don't express it, we loose faith in ourselves."

"Mrs. Greene made me understand the parallels between race and caste--- and how women's bodies were used to perpetuate both. Different prisons. Same key."

"Unless we include a job as part of every citizen's right to autonomy and personal fulfillment, women will continue to be vulnerable to someone else's idea of what need is."
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