In the Country of Women Quotes

“I went to Planned Parenthood the week I turned sixteen because I was terrified almost every day of my life. I went to Planned Parenthood because I was poor and prey, and girls had told me where the building was because they, too, were afraid of the same thing: We were certain we’d be raped at some point, and we didn’t want to have babies because of that. We didn’t want to have to marry our rapists. But I was a girlfriend by then. My boyfriend was a large man. No one who knew us would bother me. I was also endlessly distracted by story and curiosity, and would talk to anyone, at the movie theater, at basketball games, at parties. Our senior year, at a New Year’s Eve party in 1977, in a house near the foothills, more than a hundred of us drinking and dancing inside and outside, I saw a young man maybe twenty-five stagger across the lawn, his shirt unbuttoned, his long black hair in Bee Gee waves around his”
― Susan Straight, In the Country of Women

“There was inside her a core of fury and independence and self-preservation, the genetic heritage of survival.”
― Susan Straight, In the Country of Women

“All we women have to give you is memory. Everything we washed is there. Everything we cooked. Everything we said. What we felt we might keep to ourselves, unless someone wrote it down.”
― Susan Straight, In the Country of Women

“Only memory cannot be burned.”
― Susan Straight, In the Country of Women

“We are the result of the love of thousands.”
― Susan Straight, In the Country of Women

“Our country feels as if it has gathered itself at a cliff and is studying the long scree of loose rock, deciding whether to slide down and descend completely again into open hatred.”
― Susan Straight, In the Country of Women

“lynchings between 1900 and the 1950s, to the murders during the civil rights movement, to killings that happen right now. This moment.”
― Susan Straight, In the Country of Women