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"Women who disapprove of men - and there's plenty to disapprove of - should remember how we started out, and how far we had to travel."
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"By naming sexism as the problem it went directly to the heart of the matter. Practically, it is a definition which implies that all sexist thinking and action is the problem, whether those who perpetuate it are female or male, child or adult."

"The Chorus Line:A Rope-Jumping Rhymewe are the maidsthe ones you killedthe ones you failedwe danced in airour bare feet twitchedit was not fairwith every goddess, queen, and bitchfrom there to hereyou scratched your itchwe did much lessthan what you didyou judged us badyou had the spearyou had the wordat your commandwe scrubbed the bloodof our deadparamours from floors, from chairsfrom stairs, from doors,we knelt in waterwhile you staredat our bare feetit was not fairyou licked our fearit gave you pleasureyou raised your handyou watched us fallwe danced on airthe ones you failedthe ones you killed."

"Go," she whispered. "Go. Show them you spell your name W-O-M-A-N."

"What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed up against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, criscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be."

"I am wondering if many of the things that we say about ourselves as women, are actually responsible for leading us down detrimental paths in life. For example, usually we like to say that we're crazy, messy and lost. But when I think about it, I want to be of sound mind, with purpose and unlost (if there is such a word as unlost). Really, who wants to be mentally unstable and eternally insecure? I think maybe we need to stop saying these things about ourselves and we need to start seeing ourselves as what and who we really want to be."

"When I was young, women were raped on the campus of a great university and the authorities responded by telling all the women students not to go out alone after dark or not to be out at all. Get in the house. (For women, confinement is always waiting to envelope you.) Some pranksters put up a poster announcing another remedy, that all men be excluded from campus after dark. It was an equally logical solution, but men were shocked at being asked to disappear, to lose their freedom to move and participate, all because of the violence of one men."
Explore more quotes by Nick Hornby

"There were only seven years between the first and last Beatles albums. That's nothing, seven years, when you think of how their hairstyles changed and their music changed. Some bands now go seven years without hardly bothering to do anything."

"You don't ask people with knives in their stomachs what would make them happy; happiness is no longer the point. It's all about survival; it's all about whether you pull the knife out and bleed to death or keep it in, in the hope that you might be lucky, and the knife has actually been staunching the blood. You want to know the conventional medical wisdom? The conventional medical wisdom is that you keep the knife in. Really."

"And another way of explaining it is to say that shit happens, and there's no space too small, too dark and airless and fucking hopeless, for people to crawl into."

"You may think that you don't want to read about the problems of being brought up Mennonite, but the great thing about books is that you'll read anything a good writer wants you to read."

"A while back, when Dick and Barry and I agreed that what really matters is what you like, not what you are like, Barry proposed the idea of a questionnaire for prospective partners."

"A middle-aged woman who looked like someone's cleaning lady, a shrieking adolescent lunatic and a talkshow host with an orange face... It didn't add up. Suicide wasn't invented for people like this. It was invented for people like Virginia Woolf and Nick Drake. And Me. Suicide was supposed to be cool."

"I used to think--and given the way we ended up, maybe I still do--that all relationships need the kind of violent shove that a crush brings, just to get you started and to push you over the humps. And then, when the energy from that shove has gone and you come to something approaching a halt, you have to look around and see what you've got. It could be something completely different, it could be something roughly the same, but gentler and calmer, or it could be nothing at all."

"And I have to say, books haven't helped much with all this. Because whenever you read anything about love, whenever anyone tries to define it, there's always a state or an abstract noun, and I try to think of it like that. But actually, love is, Well, it's just you. And when you go, it's gone. Nothing abstract about it."

"The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don't know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they've been listening to the sad songs longer than they've been living the unhappy lives."
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