quotes

been reading and reading and in almost every book i find really intriguing passages. actually, this section is probably more for myself so that i won't forget what struck me most in these mind-fucking books that i've been attracted to... but i guess everyone is welcome to read them. Enjoy!

J.D. Salinger in The Catcher in the Rye (1946) - I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot.

Jeanette Winterson in "Written on The Body" (1992) - in Wonderland everyone cheats and love is Wonderland isn't it? -

Sarah Waters in "Affinity" (1999) (plays in Victorian England 1874-75, talk about marriage...) - But now, keeping her eyes upon me, she rose and stretched. 'Your sister,' she said, 'that you're so envious of. What do you have to envy, really? What has she done, that is so marvellous? You think she has evolved - but is it that? To have done what everyone does? She has only moved to more of the same. How clever is that? [...]

But people, I said, do not want cleverness - not in women, at least. I said, women are bred to do more of the same - that is their function. It is only ladies like me that throw the system out, make it stagger -

(talk about spirits) - 'Are you a man or a lady?' But the guides are neither, and both; and the spirits are neither and both. It is only when they have understood that, that they are ready to be taken higher.' 'How could it be? It would be chaos! It would be a world without distinction. It would be a world without love.' - 'It is a world made of love. Did you think there is only the kind of love your sister knows for your husband? [...] And what will your sister do if her husband should die, and she should take another? [...] It may be someone she would never think to look to on the earth, someone kept from her by some false boundary...' -

Virginia Woolf in "Women and Fiction" [the working title for what would become A Room of One's Own] (published in 1929) - [...] men who had no qualifications save that they were not women, chased my simple and single question - why are some women poor? [...] To show the state of mind I was in; I will read you a few of them, explaining that the page was headed quite simply, WOMEN AND POVERTY, in block letters; but what followed was something like this:

Condition in Middle Ages of,

Habits in the Fiji Islands of,

Worshipped as godesses by,

Weaker in moral sense than,

Idealism of,

Greater conscientiousness of,

South Sea Islanders, age of puberty among,

Attractiveness of,

Offered as sacrifice to,

Small size of brain of,

Profounder sub-consciousness of,

Less hair on the body of,

Mental, moral and physical inferiority of,

Love of children of,

Greater length of life of,

Weaker muscles of,

Strength of affections of,

Vanity of,

Higher education of,

Shakespeare's opinion of,

Lord Birkenhead's opinion of,

Dean Inge's opinion of,

La Bruyère's opinion of,

Dr Johnson opinion of,

Mr Oscar Browning's opinion of,...

[...] what is so unfortunate is that wise men never think the same thing about women. [...] Are they [women] capable of education or incapable? Napoleon thought them capable. Dr Johnson thought the opposite. Have they souls or have they not souls? Some savages say they have none. Others, on the contrary, maintain that women are half divine and worship them on that account. [...] Goethe honours them; Mussolini despises them. Wherever one looked men thought about women and thought differently. It was impossible to make hand or tail of it all [...]. It was distressing, it was bewildering, it was humiliating. Truth had run through my fingers. Every drop had escaped.

I could not possibly go home, I reflected, and add as a serious contribution to the study of women and fiction that women have less hair on their bodies than men [...] -

Sarah Schulman in "Empathy" - all his life doc had been told that america was the freest country on earth. america is the most powerful country on earth. we're number one. we're number one. and americans believed it because, after all, what did they know? -

Kate Millett in Sita (1976): "Wenn das Leben eine Zeitung wäre, so groß, vielfältig, langweilig, dann wäre die Liebe ein Comic, so reizend und kurz."

Judith Butler in Gender Trouble (1990): "To make trouble was, within the reigning discourse of my childhood, something one should never do precisely because that would you get trouble. (...) The prevailing law threatened one with trouble, even put one in trouble, all to keep one out of trouble. Hence, I concluded that trouble is inevitable and the task, how best to make it, what best way to be in it."