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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
Without
Understand
Islands
Need
Culture
Experienced
Important
Fall
Falling
Needs
Shows
Tells
Plumbing
Life
Thought
Apart
Telephone
People
Wanted
Satisfied
Telephones
Live
Dying
Electricity
Everything
Show
Island

More quotes by 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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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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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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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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I am not a psychological novelist, and I try very hard not to allow the reader to see the plight or circumstances of the characters as individual psychological plights. That's my preference still, a lot of people do read my novels as psychological studies, and they're right to read them that way too, if that's what they mean to them.
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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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 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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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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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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People often say to me now, Your work changed my life. I'm sure that's an exaggeration, but they say it had a big effect on them and enabled them to change. I'm not sure I believe that a book will cause someone to change.
Alix Kates Shulman
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Fiction is ideally suited to re-creating the important emotional aspects of history.
Alix Kates Shulman
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Within walking distance of any spot on Earth there's probably more than enough mystery to investigate in a lifetime.
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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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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Usually, ordinary histories don't get the emotional feel of a period. That's what a novel can do.
Alix Kates Shulman
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I am a feminist. I'm trying to show the relationships between men and women, always the structural relations, not individual villains. I'd never make a husband a villain. I try very hard in my work not to - because if I made one man a villain, the rest would be off the hook. I'm interested in the system of oppression.
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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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