A Woman Is No Man

by Etaf Rum

You think you’re doing the right thing by wearing this hijab, but that’s not what Americans will see when they look at you. They won’t see your modesty or your goodness. All they’ll see is an outcast, someone who doesn’t belong.”

“Sometimes I wish I could’ve been born a man, just to see how it feels. It would’ve spared me a lot of grief in life.”

For a thousand and one nights, Scheherazade’s stories were resistance. Her voice was a weapon—a reminder of the extraordinary power of stories, and even more, the strength of a single woman.”

She knew that the suffering of women started in the suffering of men, that the bondages of one became the bondages of the other.

“The boys are twice as needed and the girls are twice as hard to raise.”

“It’s not strange at all,” Sarah said. “It’s the loneliest people who love books the most.”

“Too often being happy means being passive or playing it safe. There’s no skill required in happiness, no strength of character, nothing extraordinary. Its discontent that drives creation the most—passion, desire, defiance. Revolutions don’t come from a place of happiness. If anything, I think it’s sadness, or discontent at least, that’s at the root of everything beautiful.”