Yanna > Yanna's Quotes

“Why do you allow yourselves to be shut up?'

'Because it cannot be helped as they are stronger than women.'

'A lion is stronger than a man, but it does not enable him to dominate the human race. You have neglected the duty you owe to yourselves and you have lost your natural rights by shutting your eyes to your own interests.”
― Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Sultana's Dream

“You can’t judge an entire population of a people by the actions of a select few. You can’t use your grief and your sorrow to justify your hate and your discrimination.”
― Nafiza Azad, The Candle and the Flame

“Death will not be denied, Fatima Ghazala. I cannot promise never to die, habibti. But before death, there is life. No matter how short our hours are or how swiftly time flees, there is life. And since there is life, habibti, let us live. Let us not squander even one second of it.”
― Nafiza Azad, The Candle and the Flame

“You do not follow me because I am the strongest. Pax is. You do not follow me because I am the brightest. Mustang is. You follow me because you do not know where you are going. I do.”
― Pierce Brown, Red Rising

“Challenge a person's beliefs, and you challenge his dignity, standing, and power. And when those beliefs are based on nothing but faith, they are chronically fragile. No one gets upset about the belief that rocks fall down as opposed to up, because all sane people can see it with their own eyes. Not so for the belief that babies are born with original sin or that God exists in three persons or that Ali is the second-most divinely inspired man after Muhammad. When people organize their lives around these beliefs, and then learn of other people who seem to be doing just fine without them--or worse, who credibly rebut them--they are in danger of looking like fools. Since one cannot defend a belief based on faith by persuading skeptics it is true, the faithful are apt to react to unbelief with rage, and may try to eliminate that affront to everything that makes their lives meaningful.”
― Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

“The scriptures present a God who delights in genocide, rape, slavery, and the execution of nonconformists, and for millennia those writings were used to rationalize the massacre of infidels, the ownership of women, the beating of children, dominion over animals, and the persecution of heretics and homosexuals. Humanitarian reforms such as the elimination of cruel punishment, the dissemination of empathy-inducing novels, and the abolition of slavery were met with fierce opposition in their time by ecclesiastical authorities and their apologists. The elevation of parochial values to the realm of the sacred is a license to dismiss other people’s interests, and an imperative to reject the possibility of compromise.”
― Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

“No woman should be made to fear that she was not enough.”
― Samantha Shannon, The Priory of the Orange Tree

“We may be small, and we may be young, but we will shake the world for our beliefs.”
― Samantha Shannon, The Priory of the Orange Tree

“A hunter in love with his prey.”
― Sophie Jordan, Firelight

“Death is the fairest thing in the world. No one's ever gotten out of it. The earth takes everyone - the kind, the cruel, the sinners. Aside from that, there's no fairness on earth.”
― Svetlana Aleksievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

“Is there anything more frightening than people?”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

“No one had taught us how to be free. We had only ever been taught how to die for freedom.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

“I'm not afraid of God. I'm afraid of man.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

“I don’t like the word “hero.” There are no heroes in war. As soon as someone picks up a weapon, they can no longer be good. They won’t be able to.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

“People are constantly forced to choose between having freedom and having success and stability; freedom with suffering or happiness without freedom. The majority choose the latter.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

“I survived because I remained soft, because I listened, because I wrote. Because I huddled close to my truth, protected it like a tiny flame in a terrible storm. Hold up your head when the tears come, when you are mocked, insulted, questioned, threatened, when they tell you you are nothing, when your body is reduced to openings. The journey will be longer than you imagined, trauma will find you again and again. Do not become the ones who hurt you. Stay tender with your power. Never fight to injure, fight to uplift. Fight because you know that in this life, you deserve safety, joy, and freedom. Fight because it is your life. Not anyone else’s. I did it, I am here. Looking back, all the ones who doubted or hurt or nearly conquered me faded away, and I am the only one standing. So now, the time has come. I dust myself off, and go on.”
― Chanel Miller, Know My Name: A Memoir

“My pain was never more valuable than his potential.”
― Chanel Miller, Know My Name

“Jolene smiled and in her smile was tomorrow, three months from now, and an infinity swimming in a lake by a summer house.”
― Priya Guns, Your Driver Is Waiting

“I was a woman who wasn’t going to take it anymore because I swear, I have taken so much already.”
― Priya Guns, Your Driver Is Waiting

“Women, they have minds, and they have souls, as well as just hearts. And they’ve got ambition, and they’ve got talent, as well as just beauty. I’m so sick of people saying that love is all a woman is fit for.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“Of all the animals, man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one that inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it.”
― Mark Twain

“The difference between regular PTSD and complex PTSD is that traditional PTSD is often associated with a moment of trauma. Sufferers of complex PTSD have undergone continual abuse—trauma that has occurred over a long period of time, over the course of years. Child abuse is a common cause of complex PTSD.”
― Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know

“people with C-PTSD can often assume problems are about them—not out of selfishness or narcissism but because they want to have enough control to be able to solve the problem.”
― Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma

“The PTSD had always told me I am alone. That I am unlovable. That I am toxic. But now, it is clear to me: That was a lie. My PTSD clouded my vision of what was actually happening.”
― Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know

“I found it fascinating that there could be so many realities. There was the truth, which was the world we lived. There was also the worlds we would create for ourselves in our minds. In truth, there are countless universes and realities hiding within all of mankind.”
― Melissa C. Water, Lady Injury

“I have to share a room. I am expected to sleep mere meters from a woman whose mental ailment is unknown to me. For all I know she might be a cannibal.”
― Emily Austin, Oh Honey

“I once told her I wasn't good at anything. She said survival is a talent.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“When apparent stability disintegrates,
As it must--
God is Change--
People tend to give in
To fear and depression,
To need and greed.
When no influence is strong enough
To unify people
They divide.
They struggle,
One against one,
Group against group,
For survival, position, power.
They remember old hates and generate new ones,
The create chaos and nurture it.
They kill and kill and kill,
Until they are exhausted and destroyed,
Until they are conquered by outside forces,
Or until one of them becomes
A leader
Most will follow,
Or a tyrant
Most fear.”
― Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower

“You’re like a rose in a graveyard. I wonder what you could have turned into without the war”
― SenLinYu, Manacled

“Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.”
― Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography