Naomi Alderman Quotes

My hand found the kitchen light switch before I could remember that I might not know where it was.

That those who live narrow lives have only themselves to blame when they find themselves shocked.

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

I came to a long, wide table. Table, it said. I am a table. All that I have ever been or ever will be is a table. And on the table was a book. And the book was him. I knew him y his words. Truthfully, I would have known him if he'd been a lamp, or a pot plant, or a scale model of the Long Island Expressway. But, appropriately enough, he was a book. The words on the cover were simple, good words. I don't remember what they were.

The castle's chapel has been remade. The glass-and-gold chandelier still floats in the center of the room, the wires holding it up too thin to be seen by candlelight. All these electric miracles. The windows depicting the angels praising Our Lady have remained intact, as have the panels to Saint Theresa and Saint Jerome. The others - and the enameled paintings in the cupola - have been replaced and reimagined according to the New Scripture. There is the Almighty speaking to the Matriarch Rebecca in the form of a dove. There is the Prophet Deborah proclaiming the Holy Word to the disbelieving people. There - although she protested - is Mother Eve, the symbolic tree behind her, receiving the message from the Heavens and extending her hand filled with lightning. In the center of the cupola is the hand with the all-seeing eye at its heart. That is the symbol of God, Who watches over each of us, and Whose mighty hand is outstretched to both the powerful and the enslaved.

The point of which is - it is technically possible to check in to, say, a transatlantic flight, check your bags, go through passport control, wave good-bye to your loved ones (or loathed ones, whichever is more applicable in your particular circumstances), and yet nonetheless somehow not leave when the plane does. You just have to be really motivated.

There's a girl on the beach at high tide, lighting up the sea with her hands. The girls from the convent watch her from the clifftop. She's waded into the ocean up to her waist, higher. She's not even wearing a bathing suit - just jeans and a black cardigan. And she's setting the sea on fire.

He could not hope to discover, let alone understand, what thoughts moved her as she sat holding his hand to her cheek. He was alone, in the smallness of the room, in the space within him. And yet they were both together, alone. He understood, as if the knowledge had been waiting for him in this windowless chamber. That was, at bottom, what it amounted to. To be alone, together.

I was looking for...the mountain cult," he barks out at last. His throat is dry and his head aches.
She laughs. "Yea, well. You found it. So that was a bloody stupid idea, wasn't it?

Power doesn't care who uses it.

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

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 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.

We did not go out of each other's lives in a blaze of anger. We simply fell out of the habit of speaking. We lost our common language and so lost everything. There was nothing for us to say.

All gods are one God. Your Goddess is another way that the One has expressed Herself in the world. She came to you as She came to me, preaching compassion and hope, teaching vengeance against those who have wronged us and love for those who are close to us. Your Goddess is our Lady. They are one.

The other women take it up and the street is filled with the sound, the city is filled with it; the country- Tunde thinks- must be full of this joyful warning. He is the only man here, the only one filming. This revolution feels like his personal miracle, a thing to overturn the world.

(E)very 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.

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.

Often it may seem that time has taken us very far from our origin. But if we take only a few more steps, we will round the corner and see a familiar place. And sometimes it may seem that in all our traveling we have returned to the place where we began. But although the view may be similar, it will never be identical; we should remember that there is no return.

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.

Not even a stone is the same as another stone

When we learn to TOLERATE boredom, we find out who we really are.

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.

no true knowledge is ever reached without pain.

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.

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.

The moon was absent, a circle of darkness denoting the possibility of presence, the inevitability of return.

If the world didn't need shaking up, why would this power have come alive now?

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.

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. Therapy has a way of tying you to a location, of fastening you to its
way of thinking. In any case, by either reckoning, I now belong in New York more than I belong in London. I went to college here, Dr. Feingold is here. If you can stretch "person you love" to "person you like to have sex with," then Scott's here, too.

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

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.

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.

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

Tunde tries to imagine what it'd be like to have one. A power you can't give away or trade. He feels himself yearning for it, repulsed by it. He reads online forums where men say that if all the men in the world had one everything would be back to the way it ought to be. They're angry and afraid. He understands that.

And from this we learn that we are not to look to Heaven to solve the difficulties of our lives, that we are not to interpret signs and wonders to live our lives by them. We learn that there is value in making our own choices, even if God Himself communicates clearly that the choices we make are wrong. We learn that we may argue with God, that we may disobey His direct commandments and yet delight Him with our actions. We learn of God's compassion for us - in the end, broader than we can understand.

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 are those who believe all secrets to be guilty. If the truth is innocent, they declare, why can it not be revealed? The very existence of a secret indicates malice and wrongdoing. All should be open, all exposed.

Still, it was hard to believe in a faint shadow on the lung. Who could see a shadow? What was a shadow? The congregation could not believe that Rav Krushka could succumb to a shadow.

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.

I think that's what most of us want, really, isn't it? A challenge that's just hard enough that we can accomplish it, but it'll take everything we've got. So that there's no room left in us for the doubt, the worry, the internal crises. We have to let it fill us up because that's the only way to get the job done.

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.

These things are happening all at once. These things are one thing. They are the inevitable result of all that went before. The power seeks its outlet. These things have happened before; they will happen again. These things are always happening.

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.

Because while you don't have a choice about what you are, you have a
choice about what you show. You always have a choice about whether you "out" yourself. Every time you meet someone new, it's a decision. You always have a choice about whether you practice. Practice, of course, means a lot of different things. Probably something different to everyone. You can practice every day, or just once in a while. But if you don't ever practice, you'll never know what it could have meant to you. You'll never know who you might have been. If you don't practice, you'll probably even feel awkward claiming that identity: if it has no function in your life, what's the point of saying it? It's still there, of course. It'll never go away. But if you don't practice, it can never change your life. Honestly, with the world the way it is, it's probably easier not to practice. You'll fit in better. If that's what you want. Me, though, I've never been that interested in fitting in.

There was a time when Esti thought that Ronit's face contained the world, but now, well, it's just a face. She's grateful for that, grateful for the change, because it's not good to see the world in a face that doesn't belong to you, that's always turning away from you.

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.

Ease, luxury, and plenty are not shameful, but they are not happiness.

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.

I was four years old when my mother died. It's young enough that I might never think of her. Old enough that the knowledge would always be with me. And I don't. And it is.

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 or the Son?

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?