By Any Other Name

by Jodi Picoult

“Life as a woman is not without risks,”

“Women are given nothing,” she said flatly. “You must learn how to take what you want.”

The Heavens can shift and alter. The world itself can change.

Because a man who argues is ambitious, but a woman who argues is just a bitch.”

being judged constantly. For your clothes. For your curves. It’s being told every time you turn on the TV that you have to be thinner or more beautiful. It means doing the same job as a man and getting paid less for it. It means if you age naturally you’re letting yourself go, and if you get work done, you’re trying too hard.” She drew in a shaky breath. “Being a woman means being told to speak up for yourself in one breath, and to shut up in the next. It means fighting all the fucking time.”

No man shall have the power to you repress…but a woman would.

“I prefer to be the one dreaming up the stories,”

“Speech without thought can be quite dangerous, can it not?”

How charmed a life: to play at being a woman yet take off the costume at the end of the day and go about the world with the privileges of a man.

It was her soul that was the melody, and that was hers alone.

What incredible power it was to create something from nothing.

Men believed that women were meant to exist on the fringes of their lives, instead of being the main characters in their own stories. But why would God have given her a voice if it wasn’t meant to be used?

As any real poet knows, the best tales are the ones that contain a kernel of truth.

“When I die, then, we shall cut you out in stars, and you will make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night.”

do not need the adoration of the world,” Southampton said. “Just yours.”

But emotions did have a way of spilling out when they could not be contained in your heart. You could love someone even when you were apart. You could grieve before you lost him.

“You have the power to close a show with your opinion, and Joe from Iowa does not,” Andrea said. “And your taste is biased by your experience. Things that appeal to you might be different from subjects that appeal to someone Black or nonbinary or female, because you haven’t lived their lives. There aren’t many Black or nonbinary or female theater critics—they’re mostly white men.”

“No, but it does mean that if you don’t like something, you might not realize it wasn’t meant for you to like.”

Was he that blind? Had he ever dismissed a play that “didn’t speak to him” not because of a flaw in the execution of the show but because it didn’t resonate with his personal experience?

“Because sometimes the only way to value love is to lose it first,” Emilia said.

Grief was the tax of having something precious.

By the time she reached the unlikely group of a maid, a common boy, and a courtly

that there was nothing silly about love—but there was: its untested arrogance.

But she would never tell him she was a hidden Jew. A playwright. That she had conceived, and aborted, his child. And if he didn’t know those things, did he truly

Emilia, or just the person he tho...

You would think she would have learned, by now, to be more careful with her prayers.

Perhaps it was better this way, that Odyllia know nothing in her life but love.

“Do not all artists start from a place of pain?”

“They call it a loss, but that’s misconstered, is it not? They remain with us.”

When grief could drive you mad.

It was so that Southampton might hear a conversation that was meant for only the two of them.

Melina confessed that a producer once told her the problem with female playwrights is that they write about emotions, while men write about ideas.

“Are you not tired?” Maria asked. “Of struggling?” “All the time,” Emilia admitted. “I think that is what it is to be a woman.”

They were tangible proof that, once, she had been beloved. That she had loved.

“You know, it takes a hundred years for a river to change course, from silt or stone deposits under the surface,” Kit said. “No one sees what’s causing it, but a century later, the water flows in a different direction. No one can dispute the change.”