Olivia > Olivia's Quotes

“When a woman is pregnant, her freedom to choose her future for herself - and to act on that choice, whatever it may be - is the most powerful express of human agency there can be.”
― Ann Furedi, The Moral Case for Abortion

“Women do not seek abortion because they are ignorant that the fetus is a potential child - they seek abortion precisely because they know it.”
― Ann Furedi, The Moral Case for Abortion

“Our ability to make moral judgements, decisions and choices is a pre-condition of human development in a free society. To deny that women have the capacity to make reproductive choices denies their moral agency; it denies their humanity.”
― Ann Furedi, The Moral Case for Abortion

“The freedom to make moral choices is the most important freedom we have; the freedom to act on our moral choices is the most important privilege we can claim.”
― Ann Furedi, The Moral Case for Abortion

“Women's rights must not be treated as trivial adjuncts to great questions of war and peace, poverty and development. What's at stake are not lifestyles but lives.”
― Michelle Goldberg, The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World

“In our new world, patriarchy isn't only unjust. It is maladaptive.”
― Michelle Goldberg, The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World

“I acknowledge to myself that sometimes I am a snail. I move myself by gliding. I contract my muscles and produce a slime of tears. Sometimes you see the tears and sometimes you don't. It is my tears that allow me to glide.”
― Chinelo Okparanta, Under the Udala Trees

“I'm very glad my mother left my father, of course, but as I got older it did get harder to valorize that flight. This cover-seeking - desperate, adrenalized - had constituted her whole life as far as I could see. In avoidance of any reflection, thought. In which case her leaving him was a result of the same impulse that had her hook up with him in the first place. Not to think, not to connect: marry an insane bully. Simper at him. Not to be killed: get away from him. And her children? Her issue? How did they fit into her scheme? As sandbags? Decoys?”
― Gwendoline Riley, First Love

“Can the future be a white expanse? Can you run in, heart pounding?

I find I've never given much thought to the future. Beyond that sense of getting away. Derelictions, you see, left and right. Yet here I am.”
― Gwendoline Riley, First Love

“I've always engaged with the heart as a metaphor: a desire, a thing to survive, to heal from or shoot for.

Now I know there's nothing more real.

We walk through the world at its leisure. We're here at its mercy and with its blessing.

At some point, we have to ask ourselves how we want to live.”
― Megan Stielstra, The Wrong Way to Save Your Life: Essays – Intellectually Fierce and Achingly Human Stories on Art, Courage, and Justice

“When I look back at my sexual history - those singular still shots and picture postcards - so little of it involves the actual physical act. Rather the before and after - the buildup to and takeaway from. It's me figuring out what I want and what I'm worth, a long line of cause and effect that started with spinning and ended in electricity.”
― Megan Stielstra, The Wrong Way to Save Your Life: Essays – Intellectually Fierce and Achingly Human Stories on Art, Courage, and Justice

“As I was watching, I thought about how unfair it was that she and I had to think about having kids - that we had to sit here talking about it, feeling like if we didn't have children, we would always regret it. It suddenly seemed like a huge conspiracy to keep women in their thirties - when you finally have some brains and some skills and experience - from doing anything useful with them at all. It is hard to when such a large portion of your mind, at any given time, is preoccupied with the possibility - a question that didn't seem to preoccupy the drunken men at all.”
― Sheila Heti, Motherhood

“The conversation went on for another half hour, before this man's girlfriend, who had not said much of anything until then, remarked, Being a woman, you can't just say you don't want a child. You have to have some big plan or idea of what you're going to do instead. And it better be something great. And you had better be able to tell it convincingly - before it even happens - what the arc of your life will be.”
― Sheila Heti, Motherhood

“There is a kind of sadness in not wanting the things that give so many other people their life's meaning. There can be sadness at not living out a more universal story - the suppose life cycle - how out of one life cycle another cycle is supposed to come. But when out of your life, no new cycle comes, what does that feel like? It feels like nothing. Yet there is a bit of a let-down feeling when the great things that happen in the lives of others - you don't actually want those things for yourself.”
― Sheila Heti, Motherhood

“I think I don't want to seem ordinary in Miles's eyes; I would rather not have a child than appear that way. Or maybe I can't say it because I don't want to lose face, not after saying so often that it's what I don't want. Do I want to be seen as having changed my mind, or for him to think I'm ridiculous, which he certainly would if I suddenly brought it up? Maybe I would rather leave him than say it.”
― Sheila Heti, Motherhood

“It seemed to me like all my worrying about not being a mother came down to this history - this implication that a woman is not an end in herself. She is a means to a man, who will grow up to be an end in himself, and do something in the world. While a woman is a passageway through which a man might come. I have always felt like an end in myself - doesn't everyone? - but perhaps my doubt that being an end-in-myself is enough comes from this deep lineage of women not being seen as ends, but as passageways through which a man might come. If you refuse to be a passageway, there is something wrong. You must at least try. But I don't want to be a passageway through which a man might come, then manifest himself in the world however he likes, without anyone doubting his right.”
― Sheila Heti, Motherhood

“She doesn't want a baby - but her body doesn't believe her. On some level, no one believes her. On some level, she doesn't even believe herself.”
― Sheila Heti, Motherhood

“Rape doesn't disturb the peace, it's already part and parcel of the city.”
― Virginie Despentes, King Kong théorie

“The conservative, who does not dispute the validity of revolutions deeply buried in history, invokes visions of impending anarchy in order to legitimize his demand for absolute obedience. Law and order, with the major emphasis on order, is his watchword. The liberal articulates his sensitiveness to certain of society's intolerable details, but will almost never prescribe methods of resistance which exceed the limits of legality - redress through electoral channels is the liberal's panacea.”
― Angela Y. Davis, If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance