No Walls and the Recurring Dream Quotes

“For a girl, the fear of not being pretty is the fear of not being a valuable object, which is the fear of not being loved. It is a conflation that is instilled so early on and runs so deep that, even when you know it's a fear perpetrated by patriarchy, goaded by fashion magazines, and used to manipulate you into buying stuff, you still can't stop the way it affects you. Being a woke feminist doesn't mean you've overcome it, it just means you've learned to live with your perpetual self-loathing and your anger around it, too.”
― Ani DiFranco, No Walls and the Recurring Dream: A Memoir

“You have to be able to access the profoundly spiritual understanding that people’s actions, even their very identity, are not the whole truth of who they are.”
― Ani DiFranco, No Walls and the Recurring Dream: A Memoir

“Fear is inky. Fear stains the white sheet of consciousness that one comes swaddled in and no amount of earthly scrubbing can make it completely clean again.”
― Ani DiFranco, No Walls and the Recurring Dream: A Memoir

“poetry is a way of seeing and that a poet is not so much a person skilled with words as a person who recognizes the poetry that exists all the time all around us.”
― Ani DiFranco, No Walls and the Recurring Dream: A Memoir

“That first night he rolled over and gave me half of his bed to sleep on but by the second night, reprehensible as it seemed, he insisted I use my body to pay him rent. A little send-off. It is hard to know sometimes what constitutes “rape.” Rape is a black dot in the center of a dark smudge in the center of a very big grey cloud that dissipates and pales at the edges. I have found myself in various gradations of powerlessness around that dark center and never quite known what the name is for where I am.”
― Ani DiFranco, No Walls and the Recurring Dream: A Memoir

“Women make these calls based on so many things that men can only begin to speculate about. Every situation is unique and every woman is right when she decides what is right for herself. At the core of a belief in reproductive freedom is an affirmation of diversity. The right to our human diversity, more than the right to privacy, is what we’re really talking about when we talk about the freedom of choice. Like religious freedom and the freedom of speech, reproductive freedom in America should be understood as a fundamental right of reasonable people to be different from one another and to understand things differently. Our freedom to have differences of”
― Ani DiFranco, No Walls and the Recurring Dream: A Memoir

“Those who sit furthest from the center of power, see it the clearest.”
― Ani DiFranco, No Walls and the Recurring Dream: A Memoir

“As I lay there in my bed, with only the armor of my eyelids shut tight, I learned to completely leave my body. I learned to develop my escape fantasies into plans.”
― Ani DiFranco, No Walls and the Recurring Dream: A Memoir

“If you get caught with your pants down, take 'em off.”
― Ani DiFranco, No Walls and the Recurring Dream: A Memoir

“Music was an entry point, like a passport or a key that allows you through an invisible portal into the beating heart of the world. The collective heart that unites us . . . (in a unified field of consciousness, in the bodily experience of being animals in time) and also into the hearts of individuals . . . (into that person and that person). Music showed itself to me as a fractal way in.”
― Ani DiFranco, No Walls and the Recurring Dream: A Memoir

“That trip to The City could not have lasted more than a few days, but because my universe exploded and was expanding at such a rapid speed, time stood still. Each experience imprinted itself on me like it would a newborn child. When I came home I think I called my mother and told her I was moving to New York and I think she said something to the effect of, “I trust your judgment.” It took me a few years, but eventually, that’s exactly what I did.”
― Ani DiFranco, No Walls and the Recurring Dream: A Memoir

“I was terrified and devastated and thrilled by the vastness of human experience that was suddenly all around me. There were punk bands playing in the bandshell in Tompkins Square Park and illegal squats in all the abandoned brownstones. (The driver of our van was staying at one of them.) There were elaborate shantytowns popping up on the Lower East Side and even a faint bohemian aroma still wafting through the West Village. CBGB’s was still CBGB’s and Times Square was still nasty old Times Square. The City seemed to be in the hands of immigrants and artists, punks and queers, and I felt drawn to it like iron to the center of the earth.”
― Ani DiFranco, No Walls and the Recurring Dream: A Memoir

“I found I generally preferred the old leftie, radical-activist types who stood charmingly and unfashionably on the side of substance.”
― Ani DiFranco, No Walls and the Recurring Dream: A Memoir

“and becomes that dragonfly, that mountain, that happy, cherished baby right there. Trust women and fear not. All of consciousness is manifesting, no matter who gives birth to what.”
― Ani DiFranco, No Walls and the Recurring Dream: A Memoir

“Meanwhile, each and every aborted seed is simply hurled back into the infinite field of possibility, death not being an ending, but a life process. The first law of thermodynamics (one of the classical properties of our earthly existence) is that energy cannot be created or destroyed. Why should humans be different? Where does the dream of life go when it is unable to manifest into a particular (temporary, finite) human form? It goes somewhere else. It goes into another, wanted, welcome, and supported form. It moves to the left and to the right”
― Ani DiFranco, No Walls and the Recurring Dream: A Memoir

“opinion and perception and to be allowed to live and express those perceptions is at the supposed core of the American state. Reproductive freedom must be understood as a civil right.”
― Ani DiFranco, No Walls and the Recurring Dream: A Memoir

“the deep deficiency of perception created by patriarchy. Only in a world so thoroughly immersed in patriarchy would this whole farce of enforced reproduction (or enforced sterilization) even be possible. Men dictating to women when and how they shall give birth is treason.”
― Ani DiFranco, No Walls and the Recurring Dream: A Memoir

“And now, having happily carried two children to term, I can also tell you this about pregnancy: At first it is something that happens to you, then it becomes something you do, then, many months after that, it becomes a relationship between you and “someone else.” Taking the position that a two-celled zygote has more liberty and agency, more of a right to become itself than the woman who carries it, that is the real tragedy. The real murder. For man to be unable to acknowledge the full humanity of a woman and instead to project his own ego onto a partially formed fetus hidden in the lining of her most central core being, shows”
― Ani DiFranco, No Walls and the Recurring Dream: A Memoir

“long before medical science came along to offer any compensation for the entrapments of the modern social design. When a woman chooses whether or not to reproduce, the earth itself is choosing. With or without confirmation from man, this is the reality that the earth lives every day.”
― Ani DiFranco, No Walls and the Recurring Dream: A Memoir

“man’s will towards exceptionality. His quest for superiority and mastery over all other beings, including women. Until a human fetus is viable and can live and breathe in the world, it is a thing synonymous with woman, just as the walnut is part of the walnut tree. I know I’m working this tree metaphor a little hard here but, seriously . . . it is just so damn simple! The woman is the tree, dude! Her branches have been waving and waving all this time, shouting, “Up here!” while the patriarchal gaze looks right past her, unseeing, and projects its ego like a laser into her gut. War is mass murder, capital punishment is murder, murder is murder. Abortion is part of the eternal process of natural selection, one that women have been engaging in since”
― Ani DiFranco, No Walls and the Recurring Dream: A Memoir

“The seed of a tree falls from the safety of its branch onto concrete. Another finds ground but there is no rain. Another is chewed up and eaten by an animal. Another is so lucky as to sprout but then is thwarted under a falling log. None of these things is a tree. The seedlings of animals, including humans, are no less voluminous and their deaths no more tragic. This process of selection is repeated naturally and necessarily for every actualized human being as for every mighty oak. For every tree in the forest, there are thousands of tree dreams deferred. To pull out the hearse and have a funeral for every aborted fetus is indicative of”
― Ani DiFranco, No Walls and the Recurring Dream: A Memoir

“Yes! Art is a conversation!”
― Ani DiFranco, No Walls and the Recurring Dream: A Memoir

“To put it opinionatedly, strumming an acoustic guitar is akin to scratching on the surface of a drum: antithetical to its nature.”
― Ani DiFranco, No Walls and the Recurring Dream: A Memoir

“Get ready: The truth is too valuable to put safety first. Get set: No amount of exposure is unbearable unless you let it be. Go: If you get caught with your pants down, take ’em off.”
― Ani DiFranco, No Walls and the Recurring Dream: A Memoir