“Women have always been seen as waiting: waited to be asked, waiting for our menses, in fear lest they do or do not come, waiting for men to come home from wars, or from work.”

The woman’s body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.

Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling.

A patriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country as she wrestles for her own being.

I am a feminist because I feel endangered, psychically and physically, by this society and because I believe that the women’s movement is saying that we have come to an edge of history.

To allow what you’re reading to pierce routines, safe and impermeable, in which ordinary carnal life is tracked, charted, channeled. Then, what of the right answers.

It can speak to people who have themselves felt like monsters and say: you are not alone, this is not monstrous. It can disturb and enrapture.

We have seen over and over that white male historians in general have tended to dismiss any history they didn’t themselves write,on the grounds that it is unserious, unscholarly, a fad, too “political,” “merely” oral and thus unreliable.

I think about the possibilities for empathy, for mutual solidarity among gay men and lesbians, not simply as people who suffer under homophobia, but as people who are also extremely creative, active, and have a particular understanding of the human condition.

The decision to feed the world is the real decision. No revolution has chosen it. For that choice requires that women shall be free.

White hate crimes, white hate speech. I still try to claim I wasn’t brought up to hate. But hate isn’t the half of it. I grew up in the vast encircling presumption of whiteness.

The mind’s passion is all for singling out. Obscurity has another tale to tell.

They can rule the world while they can persuade us our pain belongs in some order is death by famine worse than death by suicide, than a life of famine and suicide…?

An honorable human relationship … is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.’”

Our personalities seem dangerously to blur and overlap with our mother’s; and, in a desperate attempt to know where mother ends and daughter begins, we perform radical surgery.

When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.

My journey began with a single pencil. While traveling through India in 2006

I just consider myself a piece of the puzzle and I’m lucky enough to be asked or invited to the party, if you will. I hope I can bring some laughs and grimaces to the fans.

Many times I heard Imam Ahmad saying (when asked to give his opinion) on controversial scholarly issues ‘I do not know.’

I asked my daughter when she was 16, What’s the buzz on the street with the kids?

I read a story about some old opera singer once, and when a guy asked her to marry him, she took him backstage after she had sung a real triumph, with all the people calling for her, asked, ‘Do you think you could give me that?’

They asked me, How did you learn to sing the blues like that? How did you learn to sing that heavy? I just opened my mouth and that’s what I sounded like.

We have been given a role to play. We have been asked to provide, to give lectures on the role of Islamic development and the way we do it here, so the people who are Muslims there would understand what the role of Islam is.

This is asked of little kids. But I still live in the same outcome.