Ana > Ana's Quotes

“Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it's all a male fantasy: that you're strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride

“The thing about this life: if we knew nothing of what was missing, what has been removed, it would look full, and beautiful.”
― Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“I've never been in love, never in my life.
Oh, I've dreamed of love, dreamed endlessly, day and night,
but my soul is like a fine piano that's locked,
and the key is lost.”
― Sarah Ruhl, Chekhov's Three Sisters & Woolf's Orlando

“I felt cold and dry, like a Martini.”
― Ursula Parrott, Ex-Wife

“Yes, another Great Romance would be the death of me. One gets the same feeling, or near enough, on four Manhattans if they’re good; and that failing, one can see what five will do. The hangover from Manhattan’s shorter’n that from Romances. . . .”
― Ursula Parrott, Ex-Wife

“All I want is peace. I feel as old as Time, no matter how perennial Iook.”
― Ursula Parrott, Ex-Wife

“We have to just keep living. We'll keep going. Uncle Johnny? You and me will keep going - through the long procession of days and endless evenings, through how much it hurts, through the pain that we endure, and we will work everyday to make someone else rich and finally we'll collapse into old age, and, when the time comes, drop into our graves with the sad knowledge we would always end up there.”
― Robert Icke, Uncle Vanya

“We would not be born out of sweetness, we were born out of rage.”
― Dizz Tate, Brutes

“If she wants him sexually he names her slut; if she does not want him he rapes her and says she does; if she would rather study or paint he names her repressed and brags he can cure her pathological interests with the apocryphal “good fuck.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women

“Many women, I think, resist feminism because it is an agony to be fully conscious of the brutal misogyny which permeates culture, society, and all personal relationships.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics

“Becoming a man requires that the boys learn to be indifferent to the fate of women. Indifference requires that the boy learn experience women as objects. The poet, the mystic, the prophet, the so-called sensitive man of any stripe, will still hear the wind whisper and the trees cry. But to him, women will be mute. He will have learned to be deaf to the sounds, sighs, whispers, screams of women in order to ally himself with other men in the hope that they will not treat him as child, that is, as one who belongs with the women.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women

“If birth was being thrown energetically up into the air, we aged as we rose. At the height of our ascent we were middle-aged and then we fell for the rest of our lives, the whole second half. Falling might take just as long, but it was nothing like rising. The whole time you were rising you could not imagine what came next in your particular, unique journey; you could not see around the corner. Whereas falling ended the same way for everyone.”
― Miranda July, All Fours

“Life didn’t just get better and better. You could actually miss out on something and that was that. That was your chance and now it was over.”
― Miranda July, All Fours

“no reason was turning out to be a major theme in life. generally speaking, when real pain was involved, there was no reason. no one to hold accountable, no apology.
pain just was. it radiated with no narrative and no end.”
― Miranda July, All Fours

“A nuclear family can destroy a woman artist. I'd always known that. But I'd never suspected how easily I'd fall into one anyway.”
― Sarah Manguso, Liars

“But dying alone, cradled by the universe, continuous with the rest of its energy, wasn’t something I dreaded anymore. Worse things had already happened.”
― Sarah Manguso, Liars

“Inflicting abuse isn't the hard part. Controlling the narrative is the main job.”
― Sarah Manguso, Liars

“A husband might be nothing but a bottomless pit of entitlement. You can throw all your love and energy and attention down into it and the hole will never fill. ”
― Sarah Manguso, Liars

“Calling a woman crazy is a man's last resort when he's failed to control her.”
― Sarah Manguso, Liars

“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”
― Toni Morrison

“Mostly I have felt myself becoming a servant of sadness. I am still looking for the beauty in that.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one’s solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“Aflição de ser eu e não ser outra.
Aflição de não ser, amor, aquela
Que muitas filhas te deu, casou donzela
E à noite se prepara e se adivinha
Objeto de amor, atenta e bela.

Aflição de não ser a grande ilha
Que te retém e não te desespera.
(A noite como fera se avizinha)

Aflição de ser água em meio à terra
E ter a face conturbada e móvel.
E a um só tempo múltipla e imóvel

Não saber se se ausenta ou se te espera.
Aflição de te amar, se te comove.
E sendo água, amor, querer ser terra.”
― Hilda Hilst, Da Poesia