No Walls and the Recurring Dream: A Memoir
Ani DiFranco
Top 10 Best Quotes
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Those who sit furthest from the center of power, see it the clearest.”
“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”
“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.”
“If you get caught with your pants down, take 'em off.”
“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.”
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Book Keywords:
beauty-standards, feminism, patriarchy
