Dworkin Heartbreak Quotes

You tell the truth and people can shit all over it... but somehow once it's said it can't be unsaid; it stays living, somewhere, in someone's heart.

Books were my church but even more my native land, my place of refuge, my DP camp. I was an exile early on, but exile welcomed me; it was were I belonged.

I hope for nothing; I fear nothing; I am free.

What I've learned is that women suffer from terrible shame and the shame comes from having been complicit in abuse because one wants to live.

And yes, I mean it. A man who sticks his cock in an infant`s mouth belongs to Himmler`s circle of hell.

How did I become who I am? I have a heart easily hurt. I believed that cruelty was most often caused by ignorance. I thought that if everybody knew, everything would be different. I was a silly child who believed in the revolution. [...] I can`t be bought or intimidated because I`m already cut down in the middle. I walk with women whispering in my ears. Every time I cry there`s a name attached to each tear. [...] I long to touch my sisters; I wish I could take away the pain.

It had been communicated to me through the odd, secret whispers of women that a female’s nose must never shine. In war, in famine, in fire, it had to be matte, and no one got a lipstick without the requisite face powder. … I was taunted by the problem: how could someone write something like the ‘Symposium’ and make sure her nose did not shine at the same time? It didn’t matter to me that I was reading a translation. I’d read Plato’s brilliant, dense prose and not be able to tear myself away. Even as a reader my nose shined. It was clearly either/or. You had to concentrate on either one or the other. In a New York minute, the oil from Saudi Arabia could infiltrate your house and end up on your nose. It didn’t hurt, it didn’t make noise, it didn’t incapacitate in any way except for the fact that no girl worth her salt took enough time away from vigilance to read a book let alone write one.

Sitting with Ricki [Abrams], talking with Ricki, I made a vow to her: that I would use everything I knew, including from prostitution, to make the women`s movement stronger and better; that I`d give my life to the movement and for the movement. I promised to honour-bound to the well-being of women, to do anything necessary for that well-being. I promised to live and to die if need be for women. I made that vow some thirty years ago, and I have not betrayed it yet.

I`m tired, very weary, and I cry for my sisters. Tears get the nothing, of course. One needs a generation of warriors who can`t be tired out or bought off. Each woman needs to take what she endures and turn it into action. With every tear, accompanying it, one needs a knife to rip a predator apart; with every wave of fatiguem one needs another platoon of strong, tough women coming up over the horizon to take more land, to make it safe for women. I`m willing to count the inches. The pimps and rapists need to be dispossessed, forced into a mangy exile; the women and children - the world`s true orphans - need to be empowered, cosseted with respect and dignity

Only the toughest among women will make the necessary next moves, the revolutionary moves, and among prostituted women one finds the toughest if not always the best. If prostituted women worked together to end male supremacy, it would end. Surviving degradation is an ongoing process that gives you rights, honor and knowledge, because you earn them.

Feminists have good reasons for feeling tired. The backlash against feminism has been deeply stupid.

It’s not as if there’s an empty patch that one can see and so one can say, ‘There’s my ignorance; it’s about ten by ten and a dozen feet high and someday someone will fill in the empty patch.

Each time the women’s movement achieves success in providing a way for a woman to speak out, in court or in the media, the prorape constituency lobbies against her: against her credibility. It’s as if we’re going to have a vote on it, the new reality TV: are we for her or against her? Is she a liar or - let’s be kind - merely disturbed? In the United States it is increasingly common to have the lawyers defending the accused rapist on television talk shows. The victim is slimed; the jury pool is contaminated; what happens to the woman after the trial is lost; she’s gone, disappeared, as if her larynx had been ripped out of her throat and even her shadow had been rent.

She’s got the mark of Cain on her; he does not. All the sympathy tilts toward him, and he has an unchangeable kind of credibility with which he was born. To ruin his life with a charge of rape is heinous - more heinous than the rape.

Huey Newton sent me his poems before he shot and killed a teenage prostitute, the event that caused him to flee the United States. Since I didn't believe that the police framed him, one might say that a rift had opened between him and me.

One wonders about how to be what one wants to be - that genius of a writer who takes literature to a new level or that genius of a writer who brings humanity forward or that genius of a writer who tells a simple, gorgeous story or that genius of a writer who holds hands with Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy or that genius of a writer who lets the mute speak, especially the last, letting the mute speak. Can one make a sound that the deaf can hear? Can one write a narrative visually accessible to the blind? Can one write for the dispossessed, the marginalized, the tortured?