“Fear is what you're feeling but courage is what you're doing.”

“The surgeons are playing on the myth's double standard for the function of the body. A man's thigh is for walking, but a woman's is for walking and looking "beautiful." If women can walk but believe our limbs look wrong, we feel that our bodies cannot do what they are meant to do; we feel as genuinely deformed and disabled as the unwilling Victorian hypochondriac felt ill.”

“What are other women really thinking, feeling, experiencing, when they slip away from the gaze and culture of men?”

“Where woman do not fit the Iron Maiden [societal expectations/assumptions about women's bodies], we are now being called monstrous, and the Iron Maiden is exactly that which no woman fits, or fits forever. A woman is being asked to feel like a monster now though she is whole and fully physically functional. The surgeons are playing on the myth's double standard for the function of the body. A man's thigh is for walking, but a woman's is for walking and looking "beautiful." If women can walk but believe our limbs look wrong, we feel that our bodies cannot do what they are meant to do; we feel as genuinely deformed and disabled as the unwilling Victorian hypochondriac felt ill.”

“You actually cannot sell the idea of freedom, democracy, diversity, as if it were a brand attribute and not reality -- not at the same time as you're bombing people, you can't.”

“What is wrong with life is human memory, she thought. What is the point of life and history--all that human beings sacrifice and endure, overcome and rejoice over--if we do not remember? What point are the centuries, years, months, hours, minutes, if they slip through our fingers, if we learn nothing?”

“When novelist Margaret Atwood asked women what they feared most from men, they said: 'We're afraid they'll kill us.' When men were asked the same question about women, they said: 'we're afraid they'll laugh at us.”