Naomi Alderman Quotes

It doesn't matter that she shouldn't, that she never would. What matters is that she could, if she wanted. The power to hurt is a kind of wealth.

One of them says, 'Why did they do it?' And the other answers, 'Because they could.' That is the only answer there ever is.

Gender is a shell game. What is a man? Whatever a woman isn't. What is a woman? Whatever a man is not. Tap on it and it's hollow. Look under the shells: it's not there.

This is the trouble with history. You can't see what's not there. You can look at an empty space and see that something's missing, but there's no way to know what it was.

The truth has always been a more complex commodity than the market can easily package and sell.

You have been taught that you are unclean, that you are not holy, that your body is impure and could never harbour the divine. You have been taught to despise everything you are and to long only to be a man. But you have been taught lies.

We’re only pretending everything is normal because we don’t know what else to do.

However complicated you think it is, everything is always more complicated than that.

The only wave that changes anything is a tsunami. You have to tear down the houses and destroy that land if you want to be sure no one will forget you.

It’s enough for her to know, sitting in there in the dark, that if she really wanted to she could get out. The knowledge is as good as freedom.

Nothing special has happened today; no one can say she was more provoked than usual. It is only that every day one grows a little, every day something is different, so that in the heaping up of days suddenly a thing that was impossible has become possible. This is how a girl becomes a grown woman. Step by step until it is done.

She listens at doors and around corners. She has always had this habit. A child in danger must learn to pay more attention to the adults than a child loved and cherished.

Silence is not power. It’s not strength. Silence is the means by which the weak remain weak and the strong remain strong. Silence is a method of oppression.

They say: only exceptional people can cross the borders. The truth is: anyone can cross, everyone has it in them. But only exceptional people can bear to look it in the eye.

The way we think about our past informs what we think is possible today.

Have you thought about the evolutionary psychology of it? Men have evolved to be strong worker homestead-keepers, while women—with babies to protect from harm—have had to become aggressive and violent.

The shape of power is always the same: it is infinite, it is complex, it is forever branching. While it is alive like a tree, it is growing; while it contains itself, it is a multitude. Its directions are unpredictable; it obeys its own laws. No one can observe the acorn and extrapolate each vein in each leaf of the oak crown. The closer you look, the more various it becomes. However complex you think it is, it is more complex than that. Like the rivers to the ocean, like the lightning strike, it is obscene and uncontained.

Just like a man,” she says. “Does not know how to be silent, thinks we always want to hear what he has to say, always talking talking talking, interrupting his betters.

the highest among us aren’t always the wisest,

Power has her ways. She acts on people, and people act on her.

It is a terrible, wretched thing to love someone whom you know cannot love you. There are things that are more dreadful. There are many human pains more grievous. And yet it remains both terrible and wretched. Like so many things, it is insoluble.

When does power exist? Only in the moment it is exercised. To the woman with a skein, everything looks like a fight.

It doesn't matter that she shouldn't, that she never would. What matters is that she could if she wanted. The power to hurt is a kind of wealth.

The world is the way it is now because of five thousand years of ingrained structures of power based on darker times when things were much more violent... But we don't have to act that way now. We can think and imagine ourselves differently once we understand what we 've based our ideas on.

It’s not a fucking crisis anymore. This is the new reality.

Now they will know,” shouts one woman into Tunde’s camera, “that they are the ones who should not walk out of their houses alone at night. They are the ones who should be afraid.

The power to hurt is a kind of wealth.

Gender is a shell game. What is a man? Whatever a woman isn’t. What is a woman? Whatever a man is not. Tap on it and it’s hollow. Look under the shells: it’s not there.

And all we have, in the end, are the choices we make.

All things, when measured in spans of years, seem simple. But human lives do not occur in years, but slowly, day by day. A year may be easy, but its days are hard indeed.

There is a part in each of us which holds fast to the old truth: either you are the hunter or you are the prey. Learn which you are. Act accordingly. Your life depends upon it.

It is only that every day one grows a little, every day something is different, so that in the heaping up of days suddenly a thing that was impossible has become possible.

You can’t solve anyone else’s life for them. But then, if you see someone struggling with a heavy load, isn’t it forbidden to walk on without helping them?

Beneath every story, there is another story. There is a hand within the hand...... There is a blow behind the blow.

you belong in three places: the place you grew up, the place where you went to college, and the place where the person you love is.

Sometimes it’s good to go to war, just to know you can.

Sometimes I think that God is punishing me. For what we did together. Sometimes I think that my life is a punishment for wanting. And the wanting is a punishment, too.

Already there are parents telling their boys not to go out alone, not to stray too far.

Even a stone is not the same as any other stone. There is no shape to anything except the shape it has. Every name we give ourselves is wrong. Our dreams are more true than our waking.

It was like being part of a wave of water,” she says. “A wave of spray from the ocean feels powerful, but it is only there for a moment, the sun dries the puddles and the water is gone. Then you feel maybe it never happened. That is how it was with us. The only wave that changes anything is a tsunami. You have to tear down the houses and destroy the land if you want to be sure no one will forget you.

Fox News would say whatever makes the most people tune into Fox News.

Her anger is still pure and white and electric, but she doesn’t feel the sadness of it at all. It’s just a thing she heard about once.

A year may be easy, but its days are hard indeed.

It follows that there are two ways for the nature and use of human power to change. One is that an order might issue from the palace, a command unto the people saying “It is thus.” But the other, the more certain, the more inevitable, is that those thousand thousand points of light should each send a new message. When the people change, the palace cannot hold.

It’s not for us to worry about the men,” she says. “Let them please themselves, as they always have. If they want to war with each other and to wander, let them go. We have each other. Where you go, I will go. Your people will be my people, my sisters.

It’s a story about the stuff that happens just exactly when you weren’t expecting it; just on that night you thought nothing was going to happen, everything happens.

because, honestly, which of us really understands why we do the things we do?

It is hard now, very hard, but the difficulty is familiar.

You can’t be the one that hurts and the one that comforts.

Allie says: Are you trying to tell me there’s literally no right choice here? The voice says: There’s never been a right choice, honeybun. The whole idea that there are two things and you have to choose is the problem.

no true knowledge is ever reached without pain.

Power has her ways. She acts on people, and people act on her. When does power exist? Only in the moment it is exercised.

That is how a man speaks. And that is why.

For the earth is filled with violence, and every living thing has lost its way.

intuition is just like that: sudden and complete, as if there were machinery working behind her eyes that even she has no access to. Clank, thunk.

When the people change, the palace cannot hold.

It’s been a while since someone last made her laugh. Since she last laughed without deciding beforehand that laughing was the smart thing to do.

Do you think that you are the stars, perhaps? And that I am the moon? I thought you were the moon. But I have been absent, too, you know. I think I have been absent all this time.

Men are no longer permitted to vote – because their years of violence and degradation have shown that they are not fit to rule or govern.

For this is the heart of the matter: disasters occur where accidents meet character.

The thing about the Lexington International Bank ladder was that it was very long, and climbing it was very exhausting, and so Andrew Brown didn't have a lot of time to think about whether he really wanted to get to the top of it—and besides, since so many other people were climbing too, the view from the top must be worth it. So he kept going. He worked hard. He put his heart and mind and soul into it. There was an opening for a position half a rung higher than he already was. With a promotion, he might get two hours a week of a secretary's time. He'd go to more important meetings, with more senior people, and have the opportunity to impress them, and if he did he might be promoted again and then... well, of course eventually he'd be running the whole office. It's important to have a dream: otherwise you might notice where you really are.

There are no shortcuts. Not to understanding and not to knowledge. You can't put anyone into a box. Listen, even a stone isn't the same as any other stone, so I don't know where you all think you get off labeling humans with simple words and thinking you know everything you need. But most people can't live that way, even some of the time.

People make what they need for themselves,” says Roxy. “My dad says that. If there’s something you need, something you really have to have—not just want to but have to, you’ll find a way to get it.

For a man to follow you, it must seem that you are the one who knows the way out. Every person is in a dark place. Every person wants to feel that some other man has found the road back into the light.

Scott once said to me that you belong in three places: the place you grew up, the place where you went to college, and the place where the person you love is. I’d add a fourth component to that: the place where you first sought professional psychological help.

Your whole question is the mistake. Who's the serpent and who's the Holy Mother? Who's bad and who's good? Who persuaded the other one to eat the apple? Who has the power and who's powerless? All of these questions are the wrong question.

As it is written: “She cuppeth the lightning in her hand. She commandeth it to strike.” from the Book of Eve, 13–17

Dovid thought: our words will swallow us. We have spat them out, but in the end they will drown us.

He feels excited. He feels ashamed. He wants to talk to her, but he is afraid. Maybe he imagined it all. Maybe she will call him a bad name if he asks her what happened.

The candidates hit the floor like Travolta, ready with their moves, knowing that the spotlight is going to find them and illuminate every glistening thing: both sequins and sweat.

Sometimes it's good to go to war, just to know you can

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,” says Tunde in his voiceover report, because he’s been reading about revolution, “but to be young was very heaven.

He’d said, “I am stranded a long way from home and there is no way to get back.” “We all are,” she’d said.

What is freedom, in the end, but that no one cares any longer to try to restrain us?

One of them says, “Why did they do it, Nina and Darrell?” And the other answers, “Because they could.” That is the only answer there ever is.

How quickly people forget the taste of freedom, swapping it for this easy comfortable thing they call peace. Sleep is peaceful. Death is peaceful. Freedom is life and wakefulness.

All things, when measured in spans of years, seem simple. But human lives do not occur in years but slowly, day by day. A year may be easy, but its days are hard indeed.

Have you thought about the evolutionary psychology of it? Men have evolved to be strong worker homestead-keepers, while women - with babies to protect from harm - have had to become aggressive and violent. The few partial patriarchies that have ever existed in human society have been very peaceful places.

There is a noise that is different to grief. Sadness wails and cries and lets loose a sound to the heavens like a baby calling for its mother. That kind of noisy grief is hopeful. It believes that things can be put right, or that help can come. There is a different kind of sound to that. Babies left alone too long do not even cry. They become very still and quiet. They know no one is coming.

But all these were not the true religion. For the true religion is love, not fear. The strong mother cradling her child: that is love and that is truth. The girls pass this news from one, to the next, to the next. God has returned, and Her message is for us, only us.

We are not ruled by blind instinct like the beasts. Uniquely, we can listen to the commands of God, can understand them, yet can choose disobedience. It is this, and only this, which gives our obedience its value.

Kristen is saying, The fourth-quarter forecast isn’t looking good. Matt is laughing attractively and saying, Now, I don’t understand that kind of thing at all, but I’ll tell you what I do know about: apple-bobbing.

There are strange movements rising now, not only across the world, but right here in the U.S. of A. You can see it on the internet. Boys dressing as girls to seem more powerful. Girls dressing as boys to shake off the meaning of the power, or to leap on the unsuspecting, wolf in sheep’s clothing.

The shape of power is always the same; it is the shape of a tree. Root to tip, central trunk branching and re-branching, spreading wider in ever-thinner, searching fingers. The shape of power is the outline of a living thing straining outward, sending its fine tendrils a little further, and a little further yet.

They come to ask for her teachings. They say, "Why do you call God 'She'?" Eve says, "God is neither woman nor man but both these things. But now She has come to show us a new side to Her face, one we have ignored for too long." They say, "But what about Jesus?" Eve says, "Jesus is the son. But the son comes from the mother. Consider this: which is greater, God or the world?" They say, for they have learned this already from the nuns, "God is greater, because God created the world." Eve says, "So the one who creates is greater than the thing created?" They say, "It must be so." Then Eve says, "So which must be greater, the Mother of the Son?

You have been taught that you are unclean, that you are not holy, that your body is impure and could never harbor the divine. You have been taught to despise everything you are and to long only to be a man. But you have been taught lies. God lies within you, God has returned to earth to teach you, in the form of this new power.

There is no safety that does not also restrict us. And many needless restrictions feel safe and comfortable. It is so hard to know, at any moment, the distinction between being safe and being caged. It is hard to know when it is better to choose freedom and fear, and when it is simply foolhardy. I have often, I think, too often erred on the side of caution.

The women will die just as much as the men will if we bomb ourselves back to the Stone Age. And then we'll be in the the Stone Age. Er. Yeah. And then there will be five thousand years of rebuilding, five thousand years where the only thing that matters is: can you hurt more, can you do more damage, can you instill fear? Yeah? And then the women will win.

You can’t put anyone into a box. Listen, even a stone isn’t the same as any other stone, so I don’t know where you all think you get off labelling humans with simple words and thinking you know everything you need. But most people can’t live that way, even some of the time.

But it’s more complicated than you think, how you feel about a person. Sometimes I think that if she’d asked me, even once, to stay, I would have stayed forever. The Rabbis teach that we each hold worlds within us. Maybe both these things are true. But she never asked. And so I had to leave.

We don’t know much about the culture of Mohenjo-Daro—there are some findings that suggest that they may have been fairly egalitarian in some interesting ways. But despite the lack of context, the archeologists who unearthed them called the soapstone head illustrated here “Priest King,” while they named the bronze female figure here “Dancing Girl.” They’re still called by those names. Sometimes I think the whole of this book could be communicated with just this set of facts and illustrations.

And—who can say why these things happen on Thursday, when the same events might have gone unremarked on Tuesday?—they fought back. A dozen women turned into a hundred. A hundred into a thousand. The police retreated. The women shouted; some made placards. They understood their strength, all at once.

We who live in Hendon now like to imagine ourselves elsewhere. We carry our homeland on our backs, unpacking it where we find ourselves., never too thoroughly nor too well, for we will have to pack it up again one day. Hendon does not exist; it is only where we are, which is the least of all ways to describe us.

The only thing it’s like is the Gutenberg print revolution and that was followed by four hundred years of bloody war. Suddenly, people were exposed to so much more information than ever before. They had no systems to process it or to tell truth from lies. They were overwhelmed. That’s where we are. And humanity doesn’t have time for four hundred years of bloody war right now. There are so many emergencies to deal with.

It is a dreamer's doctrine. Visionary, astonishing. And a hard road, in times of war and occupation. If all involved had listened to those words, matters would have fallen out quite differently. And if those who claimed to follow him later had dedicated themselves to that one thing- "Love your enemy"- much bloodshed might have been avoided. But perhaps the idea was too difficult, for it is not much observed, even to this day. Easier to prefer one's friend to one's enemy. Easier to destroy than to build or to keep a thing standing.

It turns out the voter's lied. Just like the accusations that they always throw at hard-working public servants, the goddamned electorate turned out to be goddamned liars themselves. They said they respected hard work, commitment and moral courage. They said that the candidate's opponent had lost their vote the moment she gave up on reasoned discourse and calm authority. But when they went into the voting booths in their hundreds, and thousands, and tens of thousands, they'd thought, You know what, though, she's strong. She'd show them.

He’s crying a little now, from the shock and the shame and the fear and the humiliation and the pain. Tunde recognizes those feelings; he’s known them since the first day Enuma touched him. He has written in the scribbled notes for his book: “At first we did not speak our hurt because it was not manly. Now we do not speak it because we are afraid and ashamed and alone without hope, each of us alone. It is hard to know when the first became the second.

This thing isn't "natural" to us, you know? Some of the worst excesses against men were never—in my opinion anyway— perpetrated against women in the time before the Cataclysm. Three or four thousand years ago, it was considered normal to cull nine in ten boy babies. Fuck, there are still places today where boy babies are routinely aborted, or have their dicks "curbed." This can't have happened to women in the time before the Cataclysm. We talked about evolutionary psychology before—it would have made no evolutionary sense for cultures to abort female babies on a large scale or to fuck about with their reproductive organs! So it's not "natural" to us to live like this. It can't be. I can't believe it is. We can choose differently.

In those days there was a great fever in the land, and a thirst for truth and a hunger to understand what the Almighty meant by making this change in the fortunes of mankind. In those days, in the South, there were many preachers who explained it: this is a punishment for sin, this is Satan walking among us, this is the sign of the end of days. But all these were not the true religion. For the true religion is love, not fear. The strong mother cradling her child: that is love and that is truth. The girls pass this news from one, to the next, to the next. God has returned, and Her message is for us, only us

Iehuda allowed his mind to follow, across the map of the wide world, across the empires and kingdoms that fought and tried to rule and subdue each other. And he imagined what might happen if these words traveled from mouth to mouth, from mind to mind, from one city to the next to the next, if this simple message- love your enemy- were the accepted creed of all the world. He did not see how it could happen. "If one man went against it," he said at last, "the whole thing would be broken. In a world like that, a world of peace, a world of soft people with no knives, one man could destroy everything." "Then we cannot rest until every man has heard it. Think," said Yehoshuah softly, "what shall we use up our lives for? More war, like our fathers and their fathers, more of that? Or shall we use ourselves for a better purpose? Is this not worth your life?