Orla Hegarty > Orla's Quotes

“When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.”
― Jimi Hendrix

“No black woman writer in this culture can write "too much". Indeed, no woman writer can write "too much"...No woman has ever written enough.”
― bell hooks, Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work

“Even if through simple living and rigorous recycling you stopped your own average Americans annual one ton of garbage production, your per capita share of the industrial waste produced in the US is still almost twenty-six tons. That's thirty-seven times as much waste as you were able to save by eliminating a full 100 percent of your personal waste. Industrialism itself is what has to stop.”
― Derrick Jensen, Deep Green Resistance

“Learning has to come from doing, not intellectualizing.”
― Derrick Jensen, The Culture of Make Believe

“If we hope to stem the mass destruction that inevitably attends our economic system (and to alter the sense of entitlement - the sense of contempt, the hatred - on which it is based), fundamental historical, social, economic, and technological forces need to be pondered, understood, and redirected. Behavior won't change much without a fundamental change in consciousness. The question becomes: How do we change consciousness?”
― Derrick Jensen, The Culture of Make Believe

“Laura felt a warmth inside her. It was very small, but it was strong. It was steady, like a tiny light in the dark, and it burned very low but no winds could make it flicker because it would not give up.”
― Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Long Winter

“I am beginning to learn that it is the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all.”
― Laura Ingalls Wilder

“One woman is a tiny divine spark in a timeless sisterhood tapestry collective;
All of us are Wild Women.”
― Jan Porter, Soul Skin, spiritual fiction by; Jan Porter: a spirited shaman's journey

“More girls were killed in the last 50 years, precisely because they were girls, than men killed in all the wars in the 20th century. More girls are killed in this routine gendercide in any one decade than people were slaughtered in all the genocides of the 20th century.

The equivalent of 5 jumbo jets worth of women die in labor each day... life time risk of maternal death is 1,000x higher in a poor country than in the west. That should be an international scandal.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide

“Grief moves us like love. Grief is love, I suppose. Love as a backwards glance.”
― Helen Humphreys, The Lost Garden

“The thing about longing is this: It is easy to feel equal to wanting. It is rare to feel equal to having.”
― Helen Humphreys, The Lost Garden

“The heart is a river. The act of writing is the moving water that holds the banks apart, keeps the muscle of words flexing so that the reader can be carried along by this movement. To be given space and the chance to leave one's earthly world. Is there any greater freedom than this?”
― Helen Humphreys, The Lost Garden

“When a writer writes, it's as if she holds the sides of her chest apart, exposes her beating heart. And even though everything wants to heal, to close over and protect the heart, the writer must keep it bare, exposed.”
― Helen Humphreys, The Lost Garden

“This is why militarism is a feminist issue, why rape is an environmental issue, why environmental destruction is a peace issue. We will never dismantle misogyny as long as domination is eroticized. We will also never stop racism. Nor will we mount an effective resistance to fascism, which is the eroticization of domination and subordination–fascism is in essence a cult of masculinity. Those are all huge spin-outs from the same beginning. The result is torture, rape, genocide, and biocide.”
― Lierre Keith, Deep Green Resistance

“John Locke, called the Father of Liberalism, made the argument that the individual instead of the community was the foundation of society. He believed that government existed by the consent of the governed, not by divine right. But the reason government is necessary is to defend private property, to keep people from stealing from each other. This idea appealed to the wealthy for an obvious reason: they wanted to keep their wealth. From the perspective of the poor, things look decidedly different. The rich are able to accumulate wealth by taking the labor of the poor and by turning the commons into privately owned commodities; therefore, defending the accumulation of wealth in a system that has no other moral constraints is in effect defending theft, not protecting against it.”
― Lierre Keith, Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet

“Intimacy requires a slow, cumulative build of safety between people who agree to a relationship, an ongoing connection of care and concern. The performance of pain is essentially a form of bonding over trauma, and people can get addicted to their endorphins.”
― Lierre Keith, Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet

“But whatever, we descendants of the Girl Line may not have wealth and proper windows in our drafty homes but at least we have rage and we will build empires with that, gentlemen.”
― Miriam Toews, All My Puny Sorrows

“Can you imagine how much our religion would change if we heard it through the mouths of women, instead of only mostly men?”
― Trista Hendren, The Girl God

“At the end, as at the beginning, stands the archetypal power of the Divine Feminine—the goddess. She is our future as she was our past. With her drum in hand, playing her sacramental rhythms, women can once again take their place in the world as technicians of the sacred. In the pulse of my drum, in the beat of my heart, I erect an alter to her forever.”
― Layne Redmond, When the Drummers Were Women: A Spiritual History of Rhythm

“We’re allowed to have the Great Mother in our spiritual paradigm if she is docile and tame like Mary, or as the Goddess that saves women in childbirth or men from bombs and typhoons. But would patriarchy have us reclaim the full meaning of the Queen Mother of Compassion, or any Goddess, if it meant embodying her might bring our world into balance and emulating her caused women to no longer serve the status quo? I think looking more deeply at Goddesses like Kwan Yin/Kannon might make the patriarchy very nervous.”
― Karen Tate, Goddess Calling: Inspirational Messages & Meditations of Sacred Feminine Liberation Thealogy

“Women need the archetypal image of a Divine Female. We need to reconnect with the inherent sacredness of woman as creator and nourisher, rather than accept a vision of ourselves as less-than-divine inferiors.”
― Layne Redmond, When the Drummers Were Women: A Spiritual History of Rhythm

“The older you get, the closer your loves are to the surface. She was breathing rarefied air, the ether you come upon at high altitudes. I understood finally how long-held grievances and petty smallnesses might get burned off, and pure creativity and humour remain.”
― Elizabeth Hay, Alone in the Classroom

“The tragedy is that women so committed to survival cannot recognize that they are committing suicide.”
― Andrea Dworkin

“Surely the freedom of women must mean more to us than the freedom of pimps.”
― Andrea Dworkin

“Feminists know that if women are paid equal wages for equal work, women will gain sexual as well as economic independence. But feminists have refused to face the fact that in a woman-hating social system, women will never be paid equal wages. Men in all their institutions of power are sustained by the sex labor and sexual subordination of women. The sex labor of women must be maintained; and systematic low wages for sex-neutral work effectively force women to sell sex to survive. The economic system that pays women lower wages than it pays men actually punishes women for working outside marriage or prostitution, since women work hard for low wages and still must sell sex. The economic system that punishes women for working outside the bedroom by paying low wages contributes significantly to women's perception that the sexual serving of men is a necessary part of any woman's life: or how else could she live? Feminists appear to think that equal pay for equal work is a simple reform, whereas it no reform at all; it is revolution. Feminists have refused to face the fact that equal pay for equal work is impossible as long as men rule women, and right-wing women have refused to forget it.”
― Andrea Dworkin

“How can you ask us to go back to our parlors?” I said, rising to my feet. “To turn our backs on ourselves and on our own sex? We don’t wish the movement to split, of course we don’t—it saddens me to think of it—but we can do little for the slave as long as we’re under the feet of men. Do what you have to do, censure us, withdraw your support, we’ll press on anyway. Now, sirs, kindly take your feet off our necks.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Invention of Wings

“It has come as a great revelation to me,” I wrote her, “that abolition is different from the desire for racial equality. Color prejudice is at the bottom of everything. If it’s not fixed, the plight of the Negro will continue long after abolition.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Invention of Wings

“The sorry truth is you can walk your feet to blisters, walk till kingdom-come, and you never will outpace your grief.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Invention of Wings

“You do your rebellions any way you can.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Invention of Wings

“Few words are so revealing of western sexual prejudice as the word Goddess, in contrast to the word God. Modern connotations vastly differ from those of the ancients, to whom the Goddess was a full-fledged cosmic parent figure who created the universe and its laws, ruler of Nature, Fate, Time, Eternity, Truth, Wisdom, Justice, Love. Birth, Death, etc.”
― Barbara G. Walker, The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets