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Quotes by Australian Authors
"Abandonment of slavery is also the banishment of the chimera of security. The world will not change overnight, and liberation will not happen unless individual women agree to be outcasts, eccentrics, perverts, and whatever the powers-that-be choose to call them."
"Your progress as a Jiu Jitsu practitioner is a direct reflection of the standards you have for yourself."
"I believe that which you study is only matched in importance by the sincerity with which you approach it."
"If women understand by emancipation the adoption of the masculine role then we are lost indeed. If women can supply no counterbalance to the blindness of male drive the aggressive society will run to its lunatic extremes at ever-escalating speed. Who will safeguard the despised animal faculties of compassion, empathy, innocence and sensuality?"
"If female liberation is to happen, if the reservoir of real female love is to be tapped, this sterile self-deception must be counteracted. The only literary form which could outsell romantic trash on the female market is hard-core pornography."
"To know our values is to have a foundation on which to build a great life. Our environment and education will play a large part in influencing our formulation of this world view, but is ultimately ourselves that have the final say. We must decide what we value, and then live accordingly. After all, in the eyes of the world we could achieve great success, but if our actions do not coincide with what we ourselves truly deem worthy, we will find no peace."
"A child must have care and attention, but that care and attention need not emanate from a single, permanently present individual. Children are more disturbed by changes of place than by changes in personnel around them, and more distressed by friction and ill-feeling between the adults in their environment than by unfamiliarity."
"All of my work is based on nature. I grew up in a rural environment and living in the Bay Area allows for immediate access to wonderful natural environs. Basically nature is my Genus Loci, or the place where my spirit resides."
"I train jiu jitsu because I love jiu jitsu. But I also train knowing that my practice in this art will allow me better practice in any art. If you have learned one thing, you have learned all things, because you have learned how to learn. I can think of no more worthwhile pursuit of education."
"Marriage made more sense when it was indissoluble. It's the woman trying to cope with the strains of a one-parent family who will suffer most from the relaxation of the divorce laws."
"Politics calls for robust debate and criticism, but this should never descend to personal and demeaning slurs."
"You've got a great chance in college to do all sorts of terrible irresponsible things, and you should totally do them. I mean, make huge mistakes. This is the time in your life if you screw up, it's okay because you can bounce back from it."
"In some ways the operation of the feminine stereotype is so obvious and for many women entirely unattainable, that it can be easily reacted against. It takes a great deal of courage and independence to decide to design your own image instead of the one that society rewards, but it gets easier as you go along. Of course, a woman who goes her own way will find her conditioning is ineradicable, but she at least can recognize its operation and choose to counteract it, whereas a man might find that he was being more subtly deluded."
"Until women themselves reject stigma and refuse to feel shame for the way others treat them, they have no hope of achieving full human stature."
"I am inspired by many mediums and use them to express varied aspects of my philosophies and life observations."
"Anything you say at this point cannot be trusted. You know I am well and truly angry, so you are in the grip of fear. This means I cannot trust any word you say, as it comes from fear. You are clever, and charming, and a liar. I know you can bend the world with your words. So I will not listen."
"In search of Magnum opus - perhaps you were divined to be mine."
"After an awkward pause, Bast extended his hand. Chronicler hesitated for a bare moment before reaching out quickly, as if he were sticking his hand into a fire. Nothing happened, both of them seemed moderately surprised."Amazing, isn't it?" Kvothe addressed them bitingly. "Five fingers and flesh with blood beneath. One could almost believe that on the other end of that hand lay a person of some sort."
"We have dozens and dozens and dozens of judicial nominees up there waiting and we have a court system that's crying out for more judges."
"Human beings love, despite their compulsions to limit it and exploit it chaotically. Their love persuades them to make vows, build houses and turn their passion ultimately to duty."
"The stereotype is the Eternal Feminine. She is the Sexual Object sought by all men, and by all woman. She is of neither sex, for she has herself no sex at all. Her value is solely attested by the demand she excites in others."
"Forever present, always knowing that you are the only one for me."
"In order to approximate those shapes and attitudes which are considered normal and desirable, both sexes deform themselves, justifying the process by referring to the primary, genetic difference between the sexes. But of forty-eight chromosomes only one is different: on this difference we base a complete separation of male and female, pretending as it were that all forty-eight were different."
"Every song is a story unfolding."
"Every human body has its optimum weight and contour, which only health and efficiency can establish. Whenever we treat women's bodies as aesthetic objects without function we deform them and their owners. Whether the curves imposed are the ebullient arabesques of the tit-queen or the attenuated coils of art nouveau, they are deformations of the dynamic, individual body, and limitations of the possibilities of being female."
"So many of life's eventualities are beyond your control. Work out what things you can influence and come to a peaceful acceptance of the rest."
"Those miserable women who blame the men who let them down for their misery and isolation enact every day the initial mistake of sacrificing their personal responsibility for themselves."
"We can say the brotherhood of man, and pretend that we include the sisterhood of women, but we know that we don't. Folklore has it that women only congregate to bitch an absent member of their group, and continue to do so because they are to well aware of the consequences if they stay away. It's meant to be a joke, but like jokes about mothers-in-law it is founded in bitter truth."
"Woman cannot be content with health and agility: she must make exorbitant efforts to appea something that never could exist without a diligent perversion of nature. Is it too much to ask that women be spared the daily struggle for superhuman beauty in order to offer it to the caresses of a subhumanly ugly mate? Women are reputed never to be disgusted. The sad fact is that they often are, but not with men; following the lead of men, they are most often disgusted with themselves."
"Thirty years on, femininity is still compulsory for women-and has become an option for men-while genuine femaleness remains grotesque to the point of obscenity. Meanwhile, the price of the small advances we have made towards sexual equality has been the denial of femaleness as any kind of a distinguishing character."
"It is agreed that 'girls take more bringing up' than boys: what that really means is that girls must be more relentlessly supervised and repressed if the desired result is to ensue."
"Freedom from the thinking mind is our underlying goal for most of human activity."
"Liberty is terrifying but it is also exhilarating."
"I am acutely aware that all I have been able to achieve has been in large part due to circumstances outside my control. This is why I teach, and this is why I write. I want to be one of those opportunities for others. Perhaps this is the true measure of success."
"The more specifically you define your goals the more attainable they become."
"Sex is not only the basis of life, it is the reason for life."
"If you fall, you fall," Elodin shrugged. "Sometimes falling teaches us things too." In dreams you often fall before you wake."
"Money I could hardly think of it. "Go on, take it."
"I never set out to become 'famous.' I mean, when you're 14 you think 'I'm gonna become a writer and people will want my autograph and that'll be cool,' but you grow up and you learn that's just not how the world works. I resigned myself to the fact that I would probably never be published and if I did it probably wouldn't be a big deal."
"Men are the enemy in much the same way that some crazed boy in uniform was the enemy of another like him in most respects except the uniform. One possible tactic is to try to get the uniforms off."
"Until our own time, history focussed on man the achiever; the higher the achiever the more likely it was that the woman who slept in his bed would be judged unworthy of his company. Her husband's fans recoiled from the notion that she might have made a significant contribution towards his achievement of greatness. The possibility that a wife might have been closer to their idol than they could ever be, understood him better than they ever could, could not be entertained."
"Women's liberation did not see the female's potential in terms of the male's actual, the visionary feminists of the late sixties and early seventies knew that women could never find freedom by agreeing to live the lives of unfree men."
"Energy is the power that drives every human being. It is not lost by exertion but maintained by it for it is a faculty of the psyche."
"A writer who presents men and women as creatures truncated below the waist is exposed as one who goes about without his trousers saying, 'see, I have had my testicles removed.'"
"I got him' is nonsense in terms of love relationships, and so is 'I lost him'. If we could stop thinking in terms of capture, we would not have to fear the loosening of the captives' bonds and our failing beauty, and he would not have ulcers about being outsrtipped or belittled."
"The woman who realizes that she is bound by a million Lilliputian threads in an attitude of impotence and hatred masquerading as tranquility and love has no option but to run away, if she is not to be corrupted and extinguished utterly."
"We can only afford two children' is a squalid argument, but more acceptable in our society than 'we don't like children'."
"She shelled the nuts and toasted them, jiggling them about in the pan. She sprinkled them with salt and ate them each by each. Some were bitter. Some were sweet. Some were hardly anything. That was just the way of things."
"If she is efficient and capable or ambitious, it is assumed that she has failed to find satisfaction as a normal woman, even to the extent of implying a glandular abnormality or sexual perversion."
"Every time a man unburdens his heart to a stranger he reaffirms the love that unites humanity."
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