“

I was going to die, sooner or later, whether or not I had even spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you…. What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language.

I began to ask each time: “What’s the worst that could happen to me if I tell this truth?” Unlike women in other countries, our breaking silence is unlikely to have us jailed, “disappeared” or run off the road at night. Our speaking out will irritate some people, get us called bitchy or hypersensitive and disrupt some dinner parties. And then our speaking out will permit other women to speak, until laws are changed and lives are saved and the world is altered forever.

Next time, ask: What’s the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare. Once you start to speak, people will yell at you. They will interrupt you, put you down and suggest it’s personal. And the world won’t end.

And the speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don’t miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And you will still flirt and paint your nails, dress up and party, because, as I think Emma Goldman said, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” And at last you’ll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.

”

“For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.”

“Animals are seemingly unafraid of death—oh, they fear pain, yes, but not death—and when they are dying make no effort to live. Their bodies accept death with a kind of grace. I hope, if I am to die, that it shall be “naturally,” like a field mouse dangling tail-down from the teeth of a cat: patient and accepting.”

“It is not death but waiting for death that wears one down—and the prospect of dying alone—and the dread of what one may become.”

“I could not move my leg! I could “feel” my leg attached to my body yet I could not move my leg. When I commanded my leg to move, by an exertion of will, there was a sympathetic twitch of nerves as if an electric current had shot through the tissue; a tightening, an expectation of movement; yet finally there was no movement. And I saw that I had been mistaken, that is my eyes had been mistaken seeing what they had been conditioned to see. The fact was, my leg was no longer attached to my body.
…
The horror of this realization filled me slowly…as a sponge slowly absorbs water by a curious action of its multiple cells. (Is the sponge a “single” organism? If “dismembered,” am I, or was I, a “single” organism?) My leg would not move. It would not move because it was no longer “my” leg. It was merely “the” leg. It was…”a” leg.”

“Let’s talk about rape for a moment. Rape is not what George Lucas did to your childhood. Rape is not what happens when a sports team beats another sports team by a wide margin. Rape is not what happens when your electric bill is higher this month than it was last month. Rape is when a person violates another person in the most despicable, degrading way imaginable and among the myriad of terrible things humans can do to one another, rape is among the worst. I think the casual misappropriation of the concept of rape extending all the way to its widespread comical usage is disgusting even by Internet standards. Off my chest.”

“Most of our heroes have been ordinary people. The ordinary man is capable of enormous heroism and enormous bestiality. That’s the hard lesson of Nuremberg. It’s very easy to blame Nazism on the bestiality of these people. If a thousand people are killed by an earthquake, it’s a terrible thing, but it’s not tragic. There’s no tragedy because there’s no human element in it. It doesn’t teach you any lesson except to watch out for earthquakes. The hard lesson of the tragedy is that ordinary people can be brought into a condition to do these things. That’s much more dangerous.”

“Why did they do these things? Because it had become the thing to do. People most of them were followers. Moral standards are easily obliterated. Take Eichmann: a minor electrician in Vienna. He joins the SS and he becomes an officer and a gentleman. He likes that. He gets promoted. He never got beyond lieutenant colonel, but that was pretty good for a Viennese electrician. They so very easily fall into the pattern that their superiors set up for them, because that’s the safe way. The may be loving husbands, nice to their children, fond of music. They have been accustomed to moral standards prescribed from above by an authoritarian regime. The safe way to be comfortable in life is that way: following orders.”

“Every man, especially the youth, can be manipulated. The more you say to him, that’s the way of life, they believe it. Without being more bad than the other is. That was why a lot of German people were running behind Hitler. There’s a great danger all the time. If you get that much of people without work, if someone would come and say, “I will give you work so that your family doesn’t have to suffer,” they will run behind him. I guess if the same would happen in the United States, a lot of people would run behind Adolf Hitler, too. They don’t care about what that man will do after they got work.That’s the great danger in the future, too. If people don’t think more than they do now, someday perhaps there will be one or two other Adolf Hitlers in another name.”