Elise Christine > Elise's Quotes

“And I can see now there's a reason why people go through rebellious times... we as people have to test the world. We have to test our boundaries to find out who you are. How you want to live.”
― Britney Spears, The Woman in Me

“Do we try our hardest, as translators, to render ourselves invisible? Or do we remind our reader that what they are reading was not written in their native language?”
― R. F. Kuang

“English did not just borrow words from other languages; it was stuffed to the brim with foreign influences, a Frankenstein vernacular... incredible, how this country, whose citizens prided themselves so much on being better than the rest of the world, could not make it through an afternoon tea without borrowed goods.”
― R. F. Kuang

“The camera had distorted and flattened the spirit that bound them, and the invisible warmth and camaraderie between them appeared now like a stilted, forced closeness. Photography, he thought, was also a kind of translation, and they had all come out the poorer for it.”
― R. F. Kuang

“He had the oddest feeling of disappearing as he spoke, of fading into the background of a painting depicting a story which must have been old as history. And perhaps it was the drink, but he was fascinated by the way he seemed to drift outside himself, to watch from the awning as her hiccupping sobs and his murmurs mingled, floated, and became puffs of condensation against the cold stained-glass windows.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“We lose a lot by assuming everything must first come through English”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“But that's the great contradiction of colonialism... It's built to destroy that which it prizes most”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“No one focuses on how we're all connected. We only think about how we suffer, individually... There's a Chinese idiom that catches the gist... The rabbit dies, and the fox grieves, for they're animals of a kind.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“Language was just difference. A thousand different was of seeing, of moving through the world.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“That's all translation is, I think. That's all speaking is. Listening to the other and trying to see past your own biases to glimpse what they're trying to say. Showing yourself to the world, and hoping someone else understands.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“the problem of disability no longer resides in the minds or bodies of individuals but in built environments and social patterns that exclude or stigmatize particular bodies, minds, and ways of being.”
― Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip

“Impaired people are disabled by their environments”
― Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip

“I feel too small for all that's inside me”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, The Poet X

“I guess what I'm trying to say is, this place is a place, neither safe nor unsafe, just a means, just a way to get closer to escape.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, The Poet X

“Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts.”
― charles dickens, Great Expectations

“When faced with death, better to dance than to lie down for it.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Hell Bent

“A word to the unwise.
Torch every book.
Char every page.
Burn every word to ash.
Ideas are incombustible.
And therein lies your real fear.”
― Ellen Hopkins

“Let’s get one thing out of the way: Mexican immigration is an oxymoron. Mexicans are indigenous. So, in a strange way, I’m pleased that the racist folks of Arizona have
officially declared, in banning me alongside Urrea, Baca, and Castillo, that their anti-immigration laws are also anti-Indian. I’m also strangely pleased that the folks of Arizona
have officially announced their fear of an educated underclass. You give those brown kids some books about brown folks and what happens? Those brown kids change the world. In the effort to vanish our books, Arizona has actually given them enormous power. Arizona has made our books sacred documents now.”
― Sherman Alexie

“Every dictator gets rid of the artist first... They burn the books and execute the artist first... Art might do something. It's dangerous.”
― Toni Morrison

“You can't know something's missing if you don't know it exists. And that, to me, is sort of the greatest tragedy about all of this (in regard to the removal of LGBTQIA+ stories from libraries and classroom shelves).”
― Mark Oshiro

“Why is it that male physicians are more likely to interrupt their patients sooner than female physicians? Is it that women are expected to be better listeners, to interrupt less, to demonstrate emotion and empathy? What would happen if we built those expectations into every medical education, for every doctor, from the very beginning. What would medicine look like if all the female energy that was squeezed out and sidelined from it over the course of two millennia was allowed back in?”
― Elizabeth Comen, All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today

“The idea was just this: that there is something beautiful, and wonderfully feminine, and powerful and empowering at once, about a woman who can't breathe.”
― Elizabeth Comen, All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today

“Think not of the books you’ve bought as a ‘to be read’ pile. Instead, think of your bookcase as a wine cellar. You collect books to be read at the right time, the right place, and the right mood.”
― Luc van Donkersgoed

“The vision of 'women's liberation' which captured and still holds the public imagination was the one representing women as wanting what men had. And this was the vision that was easier to realize.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“They have not rejected its message; they do not know what the message is.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“Feminists are made, not born. One does not become an advocate of feminist politics simply by having the privilege of having been born female.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“Betty Friedan's The Feminist Mystique identified 'the problem that has no name' as the dissatisfaction females felt about being confined and subordinated in the home as housewives. While this issue was presented as a crisis for women it really was only a crisis for a small group of well-educated white women... a huge majority of women in the nation were in the workforce. And many of these working women, who put in long hours for low wages while still doing all the work in the domestic household would have seen the right to stay home as 'freedom'.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“Working-class women already knew that the wages they received would not liberate them.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“Consider the way many Western women, white and Black, have confronted the issue of female circumcision in Africa and the Middle East. Usually these countries are depicted as 'barbaric and uncivilized,' the sexism there portrayed as more brutal and dangerous to women than sexism in the United States. A decolonized feminist perspective would first and foremost examine how sexist practices in relation to women's bodies globally are linked.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“When men did most of the work women worked to make home a site of comfort and relaxation for males. Home was relaxing to women only when men and children were not present.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics