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As I experienced life on the island, without electricity, plumbing or telephone, I thought it was important to show that people can live as I did without dying or falling apart. I wanted people to understand that we don't need everything that our culture tells us we have to have to be satisfied.

Alix Kates Shulman

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Alix Kates Shulman
Age: 92
Born: 1932
Born: August 17
Novelist
Writer
Cleveland
Ohio
Important
Fall
Falling
Needs
Shows
Tells
Plumbing
Life
Thought
Apart
Telephone
People
Wanted
Satisfied
Telephones
Live
Dying
Electricity
Everything
Show
Island
Without
Understand
Islands
Need
Culture
Experienced

More quotes by Alix Kates Shulman

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I did not intend to be a writer. I first wanted to be a lawyer, like my father. Then I got bit by the bug of philosophy and wanted to be a philosophy professor. I went to graduate school and quickly discovered it was impossible for a woman in those days - this was the early fifties - to be a philosopher, so I gave that up.
Alix Kates Shulman
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Ever since Freud, being alone has been considered something of a psychological failure. The point, according to Freudian theory, is to be able to love and connect. But I don't believe that at all. I think that being alone and being coupled and being in a group are all natural states in which people can thrive.
Alix Kates Shulman
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When you witness the end of a life up close day by day, you begin to understand time and mortality in profound ways. You see time's relativity, death's necessity.
Alix Kates Shulman
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Solitude offers a lot that being coupled or being in a group does not. It helps us learn what we are capable of.
Alix Kates Shulman
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For many decades my relations with my parents constituted unfinished business. I had dealt with them through sheer avoidance and guilt.
Alix Kates Shulman
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I don't really think myself that sex work is necessarily more demeaning than other kinds of demeaning work.
Alix Kates Shulman
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For two years I watched my parents' lives wind to a close. This made me aware of old age as a one stage, the final one, of a long journey.
Alix Kates Shulman
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There is a lot of gender segregation. You still have many poor women who work in women-only jobs. In the family, in most cases, only women have the double job of working outside the home and taking care of the family.
Alix Kates Shulman
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When I became a feminist, when the movement started in the late sixties, I started writing because I had something urgent to say. My first novel, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, is the product of that urgency.
Alix Kates Shulman
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The world is abundant with food for us, and with everything we need, if only we just open our eyes. There's so much food that gets thrown out or never harvested.
Alix Kates Shulman
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Being alone for a woman is probably much more scary than for a man. I'm all for getting over our fears by facing them head-on.
Alix Kates Shulman
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One important part of historical recording is to get people of another generation to understand the feelings, the passion that went into social transformation. That's why oral history is so valuable.
Alix Kates Shulman
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There is still nothing like equality for women in jobs, in family. There's just an awareness that inequality is not acceptable.
Alix Kates Shulman
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Many people spend the ends of their lives alone, and probably a lot of years in the middle of their lives, and I'm glad I had the opportunity to experience the rewards of solitude.
Alix Kates Shulman
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Sexism goes so deep that at first it's hard to see you think it's just reality.
Alix Kates Shulman
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In my books, my idea is always to explore social context and social forces.
Alix Kates Shulman
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Our society has very much limited our choices, even regarding the food we think acceptable.
Alix Kates Shulman
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It's always difficult to write honestly of one's deepest feelings, particularly without the protective veil of fiction. But the more difficult, the more rewarding if one succeeds. Rewarding not only to the work but to one's peace of mind.
Alix Kates Shulman
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My mirror image always had to be interpreted. And for that I sought my reflection in someone else's eyes.
Alix Kates Shulman
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Usually, ordinary histories don't get the emotional feel of a period. That's what a novel can do.
Alix Kates Shulman