Andrea Dworkin Mercy Quotes

The dark was hissing and hot and hard with a jagged bone, a cold brutal bone, and hips packed tight. The dark wasn't just at night. The dark was any time, any place; you open your eyes and the dark is there, right up against you, pressing. You can't see anything and you don't know any names, not who they are or the names for what they do...

So you go away from where you were afraid. Some stay; some go; it's a big difference, leaving the humiliations of childhood, the morbid fear. We didn't have much to say to each other, the ones that left and the ones that stayed. Children get shamed by fear but you can't tell the adults that; they don't care. They make children into dead things like they are. If there's something left alive in you, you run. You run from the poor little child on her knees; fear burned the skin off all right; she's still on her knees, dead and raw and tender.

There’s a special freedom for girls; it doesn’t get written down in constitutions; there’s this freedom where they use you how they want and you say I am, I choose, I decide, I want—after or before, when you’re young or when you’re a hundred—it’s the liturgy of the free woman—I choose, I decide, I want, I am—and you have to be a devout follower of the faith, a fanatic of freedom, to be able to say the words and remember the acts at the same time; devout. You really have to love freedom, darling; be a little Buddha girl, no I, free from the chain of being because you are empty inside, no ego, Freud couldn’t even find you under a microscope.

...each day I sit down in purposeful concentration to write in a notebook, some sentences on a buried truth, an unnamed reality, things that happened but are denied. It is hard to describe the stillness it takes, the difficulty of this act. It requires an almost perfect concentration which I am trying to learn and there is no way to learn it that is spelled out anywhere or so I can understand it but I have a sense that it's completely simply, on the order of being able to sit still and keep your mind dead center in you without apology or fear. I squirm after some time but it ain't boredom, it's fear of what's possible, how much you can know if you can be quiet enough and simple enough. I move around, my mind wanders, I lose the ability to take words and roll them through my brain, move with them into their interiors, feel their colors, touch what's under them, where they come from long ago and way back. I get frightened seeing what's in my own mind if words get put to it. There's a light there, it's bright, it's wide, it could make you blind if you look direct into it and so I turn away, afraid; I get frightened and I run and the only way to run is to abandon the process altogether or compromise it beyond recognition. I think about Celine sitting with his shit, for instance; I don't know why he didn't run, he should've. It's a quality you have to have of being near mad and at the same time so quiet in your heart that you could pass for a spiritual warrior; you could probably break things with the power in your mind. You got to be able to stand it, because it's a powerful and disturbing light, not something easy and kind, it comes through your head to make its way onto the page and you get fucking scared so your mind runs away, it wanders, it gets distracted, it buckles, it deserts, it takes a Goddamn freight train if it can find one, it wants calming agents and sporifics, and you mask that you are betraying the brightest and the best light you will ever see, you are betraying the mind that can be host to it... ...Your mind does stupid tricks to mask that you are betraying something of grave importance. It wanders so you won't notice that you are deserting your own life, abandoning it to triviality and garbage, how you are too fucking afraid to use your own brain for what it's for, which is to be a host to the light, to use it, to focus it; let it shine and carry the burden of what is illuminated, everything buried there; the light's scarier than anything it shows, the pure, direct experience of it in you as if your mind ain't the vegetable thing it's generally conceived to be or the nightmare thing you know it to be but a capacity you barely imagined, real; overwhelming and real, pushing you out to the edge of ecstasy and knowing and then do you fall or do you jump or do you fly?

They don't act like human beings and they're pretty proud of it so there's no point in pretending they are; though you want to - pretend.

I always wanted excellence. I wanted to attain it. I didn't start out with apologies. I thought: I am. I wanted to mix with the world, hands on, me and it, and I'd have courage. I wasn't born nice necessarily but nurture triumphed over nature and I wanted to be the good citizen.

...and I went to the peace office and instead of typing letters for the peace boys I wrote to newspapers saying I had been hurt and it was bad and not all right and because I didn’t know sophisticated words I used the words I knew and they were very shocked to death; and the peace boys were in the office and I refused to type a letter for one of them because I was doing this and he read my letter out loud to everyone in the room over my shoulder and they all laughed at me, and I had spelled America with a “k” because I knew I was in Kafka’s world, not Jefferson’s, and I knew Amerika was the real country I lived in, and they laughed that I couldn’t spell it right.

One woman was a student and some inmates held her down and some climbed on top of her and some put their hands up her and later the newspapers said it was rape because lesbians did it so it was rape if lesbians piled on top of you and lesbians was the bad word, not rape, it was bad because lesbians did it, like Nazis, and it wasn't anything like I knew, being around girls and how we were.

Jeder richtige Gedanke ist eine wahrhafte Eroberung für Frauen unter der Herrschaft von Männern. Sie wissen nicht, wie schwer es ist, freundlich zu sein. Unser Unterdrücker verbreitet seine Version von uns überall, auf Wänden, in den Zeitungen, auf der Kinoleinwand. Wie Giftgas sickert sie ein. Jedes Wort, das wir äußern, ist eine Erklärung unserer Rechte. Jede Geste ist ein Bekenntnis. Ich mache Gesten.

And mother, handmaiden to the Lord, says wear this, do that, don't do that, don't say that, sit, close your legs, wear white gloves and don't get them dirty, girls don't climb trees, girls don't run, girls don't, girls don't, girls don't; wasn't nothing girls actually did do of any interest whatsoever. It's when they get you a doll that pees that you recognize the dimensions of conspiracy, its institutional reach, its metaphysical ambition.

He was immensely sad and immensely bitter and he said we would get married now because married people did it like this and hated each other and felt dead, fucking was like being dead for them; pity the poor husband, he felt dead. He stayed between my legs, resting. I didn't move because there is an anguish that can stop you from moving and I couldn't kill him because there is an anguish that can stop you from killing. Something awful came, a suffering bigger than my life or your life or any life or God's life, the crucifixion God; the nails are hammered in but you don't get to die. It's the cross for ladies, a bed, and you don't get to die; the lucky boy, the favorite child, gets to die. You've been mowed down inside, slaughtered inside, a genocide happened in you, but you don't get to die. You're not God's son, you're His daughter, and He leaves you there nailed because you're some stupid piece of shit who loved someone and you will be there forever, in some bed somewhere for the rest of your life and He will make it a long time, He will make you get old, and He will see to it that you get fucked, and the skin around where you get fucked will be calloused and blistered and enraged and there will be someone climbing on you and getting in you and God your Father will watch; even when you're old He'll watch.

I have a certain ruthless objectivity not uncommon among those who live inside the senses; I love him without restraint, without limit, without respect to consequences, for me or for him; I am not sentimental; I want him; this is not dopey, stupid, sentimental love; nostalgia and lingering romance; this is it; all; everything.

I believe in pure love, I-Thou, love without boundaries or categories or conditions or making someone less than you are; not treating people like they are foreign or lower or things, I-It.

I had an abhorrence for killing, but it was raped from me, raped from my brain; obliterated, like freedom.

It’s as if every crack in the sidewalk is an open door to somewhere; you can go between the cracks to the hidden world but regular people never even see the cracks.

I’ve always wanted to see a man beaten to a shit bloody pulp with a high-heeled shoe stuffed up his mouth, sort of the pig with the apple.

...der Zeitung fielen gar nicht genügend Wörter ein, um zu beschreiben, wie übel dieser Ort war und wie voller Grausamkeit, und das war bekannt; aber die Pazifisten ließen uns dort; es kratzte sie nicht; weil sie die Schreie, wenn du gefoltert wirst, genausowenig hören, wie wenn du auf einer Versammlung reden würdest; du könntest von ihnen in Stücke gerissen werden, und sie würden weitermachen, als wenn du nicht da wärst, und du warst auch nicht da, nicht für sie, in Wirklichkeit warst du nichts...

Sie sind überall in diesen Straßen, nehmen was sie wollen; zweihundert Millionen kleine Henry Millers mit steifen Schwänzen und einem miesen Prosastil; Pulitzerpreisträger-Arschlöcher,die Bargeld benutzen. Auf der Suche nach Erfahrung, und die nennen sie hinterher Möse, wenn sie in ihre gestylten Apartments zurückkommen und sich zu rechtfertigen versuchen. Die Erfahrung sind wir, die, in die sie ihn stecken. Erfahrung ist, wenn sie das Geld hinlegen, dann drehen sie dich um, als wärst du ein Hähnchen, das sie grillen; sie stecken ihn in jedes Loch, das sie finden können, nur um es auszuprobieren, oder weil sie sturzbetrunken sind und es nicht rot angemalt ist, können sie es nicht finden; du wirst zu einer Labormaus für sie; sie stecken den berühmten Stählernen Prügel in jedes Fleischerne Loch, das sie finden können, und sie rammen den Prügel hinein, wenn sie es schaffen, was Gott sei Dank oft genug nicht der Fall ist. Die Prosa wird dann richtig purpurn. Du kannst es allerdings nicht auf Impotenz zurückführen, weil sie aufs Kreuz gelegt wurden, und sie hatten Frauen, und sie fickten jede Menge; sie scheinen einfach nie über das Wunder hinwegzukommen, dass sie es sind, im Körper eines erwachsenen Mannes, die all den Schaden anrichten; Guck mal, Mammi, ich bins. Zwölfter Band. SIe benehmen sich nicht wie menschliche Wesen und sind ziemlich stolz darauf, deshalb hat es keinen Sinn, so zu tun, als seien sie doch welche; obwohl du es gerne möchtest - so tun als ob. Du würdest gerne glauben, dass sie etwas fühlen können - Traurigkeit oder Reue; oder etwas ganz Schlichtes, eine Minute des Begreifens.

Und ich hasse die Mittelschichts-Blödmänner, die so viel zu sagen haben, aber nie einen einzigen verdammten Tag mit dem Versuch verbracht haben, am Leben zu bleiben.

Es ist wie eine mathematische Gleichung, aber niemand lernt sie in der Schule auswendig; sie wird nicht deutlich auf die Tafel geschrieben. Es ist Algebra für Mädchen, aber niemand bringt sie dir bei. Du wirst zu Fall gebracht oder niedergeworfen, und du lernst selber. Keine Mutter der Welt kann es ertragen, es dir zu erklären.

Ich erfinde keine Geschichten. Ich schreibe eine andere Sorte Geschichten. Ich schreibe so wahrhaftig wie der Mann mit seinen Fingern, wenn ich nur alles behalten und sagen kann; aber ich bin nicht auf seiner Seite. Ich bin auf einer anderen Seite. Ich sage die Wahrheit, aber aus einer anderen Sicht. Ich bin diejenige, der er es angetan hat. Der Köder spricht, Süßer.

The daddy had raped the kid, over and over, so many times, she was four, he wanted custody, he got it, it was a second marriage, the first kid was raped too but the judge wouldn't admit it into evidence, said it was prejudicial, you know, just because he did it to that one doesn't prove that he did it to this one; they keep saying that; with them all; the beaters and the rapers; just stack the women they did it to before, the past women, in piles, for garbage collection; don't want them to prejudice how we look at him this time, when he did it to this one who's a slut anyway which isn't prejudicial because it is axiomatic; how many times does he get to do it in his lifetime, to how many, whatever it is he likes doing, a beater, a raper, of women, of children; that's why they don't teach girls to count. I want each one followed. I want each one killed. It is very important for women to kill men.

I'm a veteran of Birkenau and Massada and deep throat, uncounted rapes, thousands of men, I'm twenty-seven, I don't sleep. They leave the shell for reasons of their own. I have no fear of any kind, they fucked it out of me some time age, it's neither here nor there, not good or bad, except girls without fear scare them.

They didn't really believe in rape, I think. I couldn't ask anyone or tell anyone because they would just say how I was bourgeois, which was this word they used all the time. Women were it more than anybody. They were hip or cool or hipsters or bohemians or all those words you could see in newspapers on the Lower East Side but anytime a woman said something she was bourgeois. I knew what it meant but I didn't know how to say it wasn't right. They believed in nonviolence and so did I, one hundred percent. I wouldn't hurt anybody even if he did rape me but he probably didn't. Men were supposed to go crazy and kill someone if he was a rapist but they wouldn't hurt him for raping me because they didn't believe in hurting anyone and because I was bourgeois and anything that brought me down lower to the people was okay and if it hurt me I deserved it because if you were bourgeois female you were spoiled and had everything and needed to be fucked more or to begin with.

You can't forgive them when you're a child and they make you afraid. So you go away from where you were afraid. Some stay; some go; it's a big difference, leaving the humiliations of childhood, the morbid fear. We didn't have much to say to each other, the ones that left and the ones that stayed. Children get shamed by fear but you can't tell the adults that; they don't care. They make children into dead things like they are. If there's something left alive in you, you run. You run from the poor little child on her knees; fear burned the skin off all right; she's still on her knees, dead and raw and tender.

The peace boys talk, smoke, rant, make their jokes, strum guitars, run their silky white hands through their stringy long hair. They spread their legs when they talk, they spread out, their legs open up and they spread them wide and their sentences spread all over and their words come and come and their gestures get bigger and they got half erect cocks all the time when they talk, the denim of their dirty jeans is pulled tight across their cocks because of how they spread their legs and they always finger themselves just lightly when they talk so they are always excited by what they have to say. Somehow they are always half reclining, on chairs, on desks, on tables, against walls or stacks of boxes, legs spread out so they can talk, touching themselves with the tips of their fingers or the palms of their spread hands, giggling, smoking, they think they are Che.

I wasn't allowed to make the plans or write the leaflets or draft the letters or decide anything but they let me picket because they needed numbers and it was just being a foot soldier and they let me sit in because it was bodies and they let me get arrested because it was numbers for the press; but once we were arrested the women disappeared inside the prison, we were swallowed up in it, it wasn't as if anyone was missing to them. They were all over the men, to get them out, to keep track of them, to make sure they were okay, the heroes of the revolution incarnate had to be taken care of. The real men were going to real jail in a real historical struggle; it was real revolution. The nothing ones walked off a cliff and melted into thin air. I didn't mind being used but I didn't expect to disappear into a darkness resembling hell by any measure; left there to rot by my brothers; the heroes of the revolution. They got the men out; they left us in.

I had a big fight with God when I learned in Hebrew School that women couldn't go into the Temple when they had their periods because I got nine when I was in, I was an adult when I went to the movies alone in the Bible, and it hurt so terrible, so bad, and still did every month, and I couldn't think when anyone would need God more, and how could He keep me away and say awful things like that I was unclean when He gave you the thing.

and if you are a stubborn child, a strong-willed child, you say the almost-ten-year-old version of fuck you something happened all right the fuck put his hands in my legs and rubbed me all over; my legs; *my legs*; me; my; my legs; my; my; my legs; and he rubbed

His death, of course, is unbearable. His death is intolerable, unspeakable, unfair, insufferable; I agree; I learned it since the day I was born; terrible; his death is terrible; are you crazy; are you stupid; are you cruel? It's absurd; it's silly; unjustified; uncivilized; crazed; another madwoman, where's the attic? He didn't mean it; or he didn't do it, not really, or not fully, or not knowing, or not intending; he didn't understand; or he couldn't help it; or he won't again; certainly he will try not to; unless; well; he just can't help it; be patient; he needs help; sympathy; over time. Yes, her ass is grass but you can't expect miracles, it takes time, she wasn't perfect either you know; he needs time, education, help, support; yeah, she's dead meat; but you can't expect someone to change right away, overnight, besides she wasn't perfect, was she, he needs time, help, support, education; well, yeah, he was out of control; listen, she's lucky it wasn't worse, I'm not covering it up or saying what he did was right, but she's not perfect, believe me, and he had a terrible mother; yeah, I know, you had to scrape her off the ground; but you know, she wasn't perfect either, he's got a problem; he's human, he's got a problem. Oh, darling, no; he didn't have a problem before; now he's got a problem. I am on this earth to see that now he has a problem. It is very important for women to kill men; he's got a problem now.