“If you want to understand any woman you must first ask about her mother and then listen carefully. Stories about food show a strong connection. Wistful silences demonstrate unfinished business. The more a daughter knows about the details of her mother's life - without flinching or whining - the stronger the daughter.”
― Anita Diamant, quote from The Red Tent
“The painful things seemed like knots on a beautiful necklace, necessary for keeping the beads in place.”
― Anita Diamant, quote from The Red Tent
“The more a daughter knows the details of her mother's life [...] the stronger the daughter.”
― Anita Diamant, quote from The Red Tent
“I wanted to cry, but I realized that I was too old for that. I would be a woman soon and I would have to learn how to live with a divided heart.”
― Anita Diamant, quote from The Red Tent
“Of all life's pleasures, only love owes no debt to death.”
― Anita Diamant, quote from The Red Tent
“I could not get my fill of looking.
There should be a song for women to sing at this moment or a prayer to recite. But perhaps there is none because there are no words strong enough to name that moment.”
― Anita Diamant, quote from The Red Tent
“The great mother whom we call Innana gave a gift to woman that is not known among men, and this is the secret of blood. The flow at the dark of the moon, the healing blood of the moon’s birth - to men, this is flux and distemper, bother and pain. They imagine we suffer and consider themselves lucky. We do not disabuse them.
In the red tent, the truth is known. In the red tent, where days pass like a gentle stream, as the gift of Innana courses through us, cleansing the body of last month’s death, preparing the body to receive the new month’s life, women give thanks — for repose and restoration, for the knowledge that life comes from between our legs, and that life costs blood.”
― Anita Diamant, quote from The Red Tent
“Egypt loved the lotus becuase it never dies. It is the same for people who are loved. Thus can something as insignificant as a name-two syllables, one high, one sweet- summon up the innumerable smiles, tears, sighs and dreams of a human life.”
― Anita Diamant, quote from The Red Tent
“Why did I not know that birth is the pinnacle where women discover the courage to become mothers?”
― Anita Diamant, quote from The Red Tent
“If you want to understand any woman, you must first ask about her mother and then listen carefully. ”
― Anita Diamant, quote from The Red Tent
“The other reason women wanted daughters was to keep their memories alive.”
― Anita Diamant, quote from The Red Tent
“He was golden and beautiful as a sunset.”
― Anita Diamant, quote from The Red Tent
“My heart is a ladle of sweet water brimming over.”
― Anita Diamant, quote from The Red Tent
“They sang the words in unison, yet somehow created a web of sounds with their voices. It was like hearing a piece of fabric woven with all the colors of a rainbow. I did not know that such beauty could be formed by the human mouth. I had never heard harmony before.”
― Anita Diamant, quote from The Red Tent
“It is terrible how much has been forgotten, which is why, I suppose, remembering seems a holy thing.”
― Anita Diamant, quote from The Red Tent
“Just as there is no warning for childbirth, there is no preparation for the sight of a first child... There should be a song for women to sing at this moment, or a prayer to recite. But perhaps there is none because there are no words strong enough to name the moment.”
― Anita Diamant, quote from The Red Tent
“on the day that the intlligence and talents of women are fully honored and employed, the human community and the planet itself will benefit in ways we can only begin to imagine.”
― Anita Diamant, quote from The Red Tent
“I moved my arms through the water, feeling them float on the surface, watching the waves and wake that followed my gesture. Here was magic, I thought. Here was something holy.”
― Anita Diamant, quote from The Red Tent
“Wherever you walk, I go with you. Selah.”
― Anita Diamant, quote from The Red Tent
“One of my great secrets was knowing I had the power to make her smile.”
― Anita Diamant, quote from The Red Tent
“The story it told was unremarkable: a tale of love found and lost- the oldest story in the world. The only story.”
― Anita Diamant, quote from The Red Tent
“We have been lost to each other for so long. My name means nothing to you. My memory is dust. This is not your fault, or mine. The chain connecting mother to daughter was broken and the word passed to the keeping of men, who had no way of knowing.”
― Anita Diamant, quote from The Red Tent
“One of his tears fell in my mouth, where it became a blue sapphire, source of strength, source of strength and eternal hope.”
― Anita Diamant, quote from The Red Tent
“In Egypt, I loved the perfume of the lotus. A flower would bloom in the pool at dawn, filling the entire garden with a blue musk so powerful it seemed that even the fish and ducks would swoon. By night, the flower might wither but the perfume lasted. Fainter and fainter, but never quite gone. Even many days later, the lotus remained in the garden. Months would pass and a bee would alight near the spot where the lotus had blossomed, and its essence was released again, momentary but undeniable.”
― Anita Diamant, quote from The Red Tent
“It's a wonder that any mother ever called a daughter Dinah again. But some did. Maybe you guessed that there was more to me than the voiceless cipher in the text. Maybe you heard it in the music of my name: the first vowel high and clear, as when a mother calls to her child at dusk; the second sound soft, for whispering secrets on pillows. Dee-nah.”
― Anita Diamant, quote from The Red Tent
“The more a daughter knows about the details of her mother's life - without flinching or whining - the stronger the daughter.”
― Anita Diamant, quote from The Red Tent
“Why did I not know that (child) birth is the pinnacle where women discover the courage to become mothers?...Until you are the woman on the bricks, you have no idea how death stands in the corner, ready to play his part. Until you are the woman on the bricks, you do not know the power that rises from other women.”
― Anita Diamant, quote from The Red Tent
“The hills in the distance held my life in a bowl filled with everything I could possibly want.”
― Anita Diamant, quote from The Red Tent
“Egypt loved the lotus because it never dies. It is the same for people who are loved.”
― Anita Diamant, quote from The Red Tent
“I need to use my mind in a way that slows the out-of-control beating in my chest. The darkness around us could be anywhere, anytime. I could be alive or dead. Okay, I choose alive. While I’m at it, I choose the darkness to be a gentle blanket on a moonless night, where I rest a few feet from a boy who’s warm and sweet. When he holds me, his heart beats strong with what I tell myself is passion, not fear.”
― quote from Nerve
“He fainted. Then he came to and remembered what happened and fainted again.”
― Donita K. Paul, quote from DragonSpell
“You are a name, not a number. Never forget that name, whatever they tell you here. You will always be Chaya—life—to me.”
― Jane Yolen, quote from The Devil's Arithmetic
“It is not a very pleasing spectacle to observe uncultivated ignorance and crudity of mind, with neither form nor taste, without the capacity to concentrate its thoughts on an abstract proposition, still less on a connected statement of such propositions, confidently proclaiming itself to be intellectual freedom and”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, quote from Phenomenology of Spirit
“The examination combines the techniques of an observing hierarchy and those of a normalizing judgement. It is a normalizing gaze, a surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, to classify and to punish. It establishes over individuals a visibility through which one differentiates them and judges them. That is why, in all the mechanisms of discipline, the examination is highly ritualized. In it are combined the ceremony of power and the form of the experiment, the deployment of force and the establishment of truth. At the heart of the procedures of discipline, it manifests the subjection of those who are perceived as objects and the objectification of those who are subjected. The superimposition of the power relations and knowledge relations assumes in the examination all its visible brilliance.”
― Michel Foucault, quote from Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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