"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
— Oscar Wilde (Lady Windermere's Fan)

"Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination."
— Oscar Wilde

"You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray and Three Stories)

"Different though the sexes are, they inter-mix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above. "
— Virginia Woolf

"For most of history, Anonymous was a woman."
— Virginia Woolf

"One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. "
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

"The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself. "
— Virginia Woolf

"The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity. "
— Virginia Woolf

"Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man, at twice its natural size. "
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

"Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor. "
— James Baldwin

"Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality. "
— James Baldwin

"Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law."
— James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time)

"I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain."
— James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time)

"I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. "
— James Baldwin

"Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. "
— James Baldwin

"Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch. "
— James Baldwin

"Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock. "
— James Baldwin

"The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. "
— James Baldwin

"To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time. "
— James Baldwin

"Sexual difference is probably the issue in our time which could be our 'salvation' if we thought it through."
— Luce Irigaray

"I am making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings. Michael Foucault's. biopolitics is a flaccid premonition of cyborg politics, a very open field."
— Donna J. Haraway

"By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs."
— Donna J. Haraway

"The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity."
— Donna J. Haraway

"Cyborgs are not reverent; they do not re-member the cosmos. They are wary of holism, but needy for connection- they seem to have a natural feel for united front politics, but without the vanguard party. The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins."
— Donna J. Haraway

"Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and art)ficial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert."
— Donna J. Haraway (Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature)

"Consciousness of exclusion through naming is acute. Identities seem contradictory, partial, and strategic."
— Donna J. Haraway

"The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self. This is the self feminists must code."
— Donna J. Haraway (Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature)

"Cyborg writing must not be about the Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-a-time wholeness before language, before writing, before Man. Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other."
— Donna J. Haraway

"Good things happen to those who hustle."
— Chuck Noll

"My work is not worthy of respect. Why then do you join in it with me?"
— Nawal El Saadawi (Woman At Point Zero)

""They said, “You are a savage and dangerous woman.”
"I am speaking the truth. And the truth is savage and dangerous.” "
— Nawal El Saadawi (Woman At Point Zero)

"Now i had learnt that honor required large sums of money to protect it, but that large sums of money could not be obtained without losing one's honor. An infernal circle whirling round and round, draggng me up and down with it."
— Nawal El Saadawi (Woman At Point Zero)

"Revolutionary men with principles were not really different from the rest. They used their cleverness to get, in return for principles, what other men buy with their money."
— Nawal El Saadawi

"Men impose deception on women and punish them for being deceived, force them down to the lowest level and punish them for falling so low, bind them in marriage and then chastise them with menial service for life, or insults, or blows."
— Nawal El Saadawi (Woman At Point Zero)

"What we require is not a formal return to tradition and religion, but a rereading, a reinterpretation, of our history that can illuminate the present and pave the way to a better future. For example, if we delve more deeply into ancient Egyptian and African civilisations we will discover the humanistic elements that were prevalent in many areas of life. Women enjoyed a high status and rights, which they later lost when class patriarchal society became the prevalent social system."
— Nawal El Saadawi

"Writing: such has been my crime ever since I was a small child. To this day writing remains my crime. Now, although I am out of prison, I continue to live inside a prison of another sort, one without steel bars. For the technology of oppression and might without justice has become more advanced, and the fetters imposed on mind and body have become invisible. The most dangerous shackles are the invisible ones, because they deceive people into believing they are free. This delusion is the new prison that people inhabit today, north and south, east and west...We inhabit the age of the technology of false consciousness, the technology of hiding truths behind amiable humanistic slogans that may change from one era to another...Democracy is not just freedom to criticize the government or head of state, or to hold parliamentary elections. True democracy obtains only when the people - women, men, young people, children - have the ability to change the system of industrial capitalism that has oppressed them since the earliest days of slavery: a system based on class division, patriarchy, and military might, a hierarchical system that subjugates people merely because they are born poor, or female, or dark-skinned."
— Nawal El Saadawi (Memoirs from the Women's Prison)

"Here the oppression of women is very subtle. If we take female circumcision, the excision of the clitoris, it is done physically in Egypt. But here it is done psychologically and by education. So even if women have the clitoris, the clitoris was banned; it was removed by Freudian theory and by the mainstream culture. "
— Nawal El Saadawi

"Interviewer: What would you say to a woman in this country who assumes she is no longer oppressed, who believes women's liberation has been achieved?

el Saadawi: Well I would think she is blind. Like many people who are blind to gender problems, to class problems, to international problems. She's blind to what's happening to her. "
— Nawal El Saadawi

"And so I went through the looking glass, stepped into the netherworld, where up is down and food is greed, where convex mirrors cover the walls, where death is honor and flesh is weak. It is ever so easy to go. Harder to find your way back."
— Marya Hornbacher (Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia)

"And when, after fifteen years of bingeing, barfing, starving, needles and tubes and terror and rage, and medical crises and personal failure and loss after loss - when, after all this, you are in your early twenties and staring down a vastly abbreviated life expectancy, and the eating disorder still takes up half your body, half your brain, with its invisible eroding force, when you have spent the majority of your life sick, when you do not yet know what it means to be 'well,' or 'normal,' when you doubt that those words even have meaning anymore, there are still no answers. You will die young, and you have no way to make sense of that fact.
You have this: You are thin."
— Marya Hornbacher (Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia)

"It is not a sudden leap from sick to well. It is a slow, strange meander from sick to mostly well. The misconception that eating disorders are a medical disease in the traditional sense is not helpful here. There is no 'cure'. A pill will not fix it, though it may help. Ditto therapy, ditto food, ditto endless support from family and friends. You fix it yourself. It is the hardest thing that I have ever done, and I found myself stronger for doing it. Much stronger."
— Marya Hornbacher (Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia)

"It is, at the most basic level, a bundle of contradictions: a desire for power that strips you of all power. A gesture of strength that divests you of all strength."
— Marya Hornbacher (Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia)

"My bones are brittle, my heart weak and erratic, my esophagus and stomach riddled with ulcers, my reproductive system shot, my immune system useless... I'm not going to have a happy ending."
— Marya Hornbacher (Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia)

"My god! people say. You have so much self-control! And later: My god. You're so, so sick. When people say this, they turn their heads, you've won your little game. You have proven your thesis that no-body-loves-me-every-body-hates-me, guess-I'll-just-eat-worms. You get to sink back into your hospital bed, shrieking with righteous indignation. See? you get to say. I knew you'd give up on me. I knew you'd leave."
— Marya Hornbacher (Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia)

"By November, you wish you were dead. You want nothing more. Every day, every fucking day, you run up the steps of the house, breathing hard, swing open the cupboards, thinking: You pitiful little bitch. Fucking cow. Greedy pig. All day, your stomach pinches and spits up its bile. You sway when you walk. You begin to get cold again."
— Marya Hornbacher (Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia)

"There is never a sudden revelation, a complete and tidy explanation for why it happened, or why it ends, or why or who you are. You want one and I want one, but there isn't one. It comes in bits and pieces, and you stitch them together wherever they fit, and when you are done you hold yourself up, and still there are holes and you are a rag doll, invented, imperfect. And yet you are all that you have, so you must be enough. There is no other way."
— Marya Hornbacher (Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia)

"You begin to forget what it means to live. You forget things. You forget that you used to feel all right. You forget what it means to feel all right because you feel like shit all the time, and you can't remember what it was like before. People take the feeling of full for granted. They take for granted the feeling of steadiness, of hands that do not shake, heads that do not ache, throats not raw with bile and small rips of fingernails forced to haste to the gag spot. Stomachs that do not begin to wake up in the night, calves and thighs knotting in muscles that are beginning to eat away at themselves. they may or may not be awakened at night by their own inexplicable sobs."
— Marya Hornbacher (Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia)

"You never come back, not all the way. Always there is an odd distance between you and the people you love and the people you meet, a barrier thin as the glass of a mirror, you never come all the way out of the mirror; you stand, for the rest of your life, with one foot in this world and no one in another, where everything is upside down and backward and sad."
— Marya Hornbacher (Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia)

"Bear in mind, people with eating dissorders tend to be both competitive and intelligent. We are incredibly perfectionistic. We often excel in school,athletics,artistic pursuits. We also tend to quit without warning. Refuse to go to school,drop out,quit jobs,leave lovers,move,lose all our money. We get sick of being impressive. Rather,we tire of having to seem impressive. As a rule,most of us never really believed we were any good in the first place."
— Marya Hornbacher (Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia)

"I wanted to kill the me underneath. That fact haunted my days and nights. When you realize you hate yourself so much, when you realize that you cannot stand who you are, and this deep spite has been the motivation behind your behavior for many years, your brain can’t quite deal with it. It will try very hard to avoid that realization; it will try, in a last-ditch effort to keep your remaining parts alive, to remake the rest of you. This is, I believe, different from the suicidal wish of those who are in so much pain that death feels like relief, different from the suicide I would later attempt, trying to escape that pain. This is a wish to murder yourself; the connotation of kill is too mild. This is a belief that you deserve slow torture, violent death."
— Marya Hornbacher (Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia)