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There's power to: and everyone should have that, but everyone doesn't. Power to play Bach, or tennis, or boccie if you like. And there's power over and no one should have that, but people do.

Marilyn French

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Marilyn French
Age: 79 †
Born: 1929
Born: November 21
Died: 2009
Died: May 2
Author
Feminist
Novelist
Social Critic
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Doesn
Power
Play
Like
People
Bach
Tennis
Everyone

More quotes by Marilyn French

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My goal in life is to change the entire social and economic structure of western civilization, to make it a feminist world.
Marilyn French
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For many people, morality means a set of rules governing the disposition on one's genital organs or a set of injunctions against lying, stealing, or killing except when such acts are sanctioned by church or state.
Marilyn French
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To nourish children and raise them against odds is in any time, any place, more valuable than to fix bolts in cars or design nuclear weapons.
Marilyn French
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Marriage accustomed one to the good things, so one came to take them for granted, but it magnified the bad things, so they came to feel as painful as a grain in one's eye. An open window, a forgotten quart of milk, a TV set left blaring, socks on the bathroom floor could become occasions for incredible rage.
Marilyn French
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Anyone determined to find another person or group inferior can always find whole lists of grounds that demonstrate inferiority because we are all inferior to the ideals of humanness we have erected.
Marilyn French
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'I hate discussions of feminism that end up with who does the dishes,' she said. So do I. But at the end, there are always the damned dishes.
Marilyn French
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there's no justice, there's only love.
Marilyn French
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you can't equate passive dependent power with assertive power because the dependent kind isn't fun, it doesn't give you a kick, it just allows you to survive.
Marilyn French
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Never underestimate the power of helplessness!
Marilyn French
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loneliness is not a longing for company, it is a longing for kind. And kind means people who can see you who you are, and that means they have enough intelligence and sensitivity and patience to do that.
Marilyn French
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She drowned in words that could not teach her how to swim.
Marilyn French
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When they kept you out it was because you were black when they let you in, it is because you are black. That's progress?
Marilyn French
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Nothing is ever simple. What do you do when you discover you like parts of the role you're trying to escape?
Marilyn French
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The very notion of superiority of one kind over another will have to disappear, although differences among kind will remain.
Marilyn French
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It isn't success after all, is it, if it isn't an expression of your deepest energies?
Marilyn French
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One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.
Marilyn French
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In a great gasp, puts her head in her hands again and cries as if her throat were a cave, as if the howling winds came from her belly, she cries like a storm that will never end.
Marilyn French
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rain is one thing the British do better than anybody else.
Marilyn French
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Oh, God, why don't I remember that a little chaos is good for the soul?
Marilyn French
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When a baby first looks at you...when it laughs that deep, unselfconscious gurgle or when it cries and you pick it up and it clings sobbing to you...then you are-happy is not the precise word-filled.
Marilyn French