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Words should not seek to please, to hide the wounds in our bodies, or the shameful moments in our lives. They may hurt, give us pain, but they can also provoke us to question what we have accepted for thousands of years.
Nawal El Saadawi
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Nawal El Saadawi
Age: 89 †
Born: 1931
Born: October 27
Died: 2021
Died: March 21
Feminist
Gynaecologist
Novelist
Physician
Physician Writer
Politician
Psychiatrist
Writer
Nawal el-Saadaoui
Nawal al Sadaawi
Nawal Saadawi
Nawal as-Saadawi
Nawäl as-Saʿdāwi
Also
Seek
Provoke
Give
Please
Shameful
Body
Question
Provoking
May
Hurt
Hide
Giving
Words
Wounds
Years
Pain
Thousands
Lives
Bodies
Moments
Accepted
More quotes by Nawal El Saadawi
We never know the reality of things: we see only what we are aware of. It is our consciousness that determines the shape of the world around us -- its size, motion and meaning.
Nawal El Saadawi
Something I tried to hold onto, to touch if only for a moment, but it slipped away from me like the air, like an illusion, or a dream that floats away and is lost. I wept in my sleep as though it was something I was losing now a loss I was experiencing for the first time, and not something I had lost a long time ago.
Nawal El Saadawi
Woman at Point Zero I wrote during the '70s in Arabic. It came in English in '82. So, almost ten years' difference between the Arabic and the English.
Nawal El Saadawi
They said, “You are a savage and dangerous woman.” I am speaking the truth. And the truth is savage and dangerous.
Nawal El Saadawi
In history, the millions win that is democracy.
Nawal El Saadawi
All the men I did get to know, every single man of them, has filled me with but one desire: to lift my hand and bring it smashing down on his face.
Nawal El Saadawi
Women are half the society. You cannot have a revolution without women. You cannot have democracy without women. You cannot have equality without women. You can't have anything without women.
Nawal El Saadawi
Memory is never complete. There are always parts of it that time has amputated. Writing is a way of retrieving them, of bringing the missing parts back to it, of making it more holistic.
Nawal El Saadawi
When I am in Egypt, I am phoned because I am listed in the medical directory under Mental Health and Psychiatry. And of course, I see very few people, because I give much more time to writing. So I cannot say that I really stopped medicine, but I practice medicine - or psychiatry - in a very different way. In an artistic way!
Nawal El Saadawi
The parts in which I elaborated on the sexual life of the doctor herself, the personal life, her relation with men [in Memoirs of a Woman Doctor]. All this. They left only some very, very minute parts. And also the political, the political element in it. So in a way, they cut pieces that to my mind were very important.
Nawal El Saadawi
Who said to kill does not require gentleness?
Nawal El Saadawi
I am becoming more radical with age. I have noticed that writers, when they are old, become milder. But for me it is the opposite. Age makes me more angry.
Nawal El Saadawi
Language, journalism, food, sex. All is politics. Even innocent love stories are politics. ... There is no such thing as neutrality.
Nawal El Saadawi
If you do not love yourself, well, you cannot do anything well, that's my philosophy.
Nawal El Saadawi
When you are intelligent and beautiful you face a lot of problems. If you are beautiful and stupid then it's easy.
Nawal El Saadawi
Man ... put himself in a tight corner when he decided that woman was innately passive.
Nawal El Saadawi
Life is very hard. The only people who really live are those who are harder than life itself.
Nawal El Saadawi
You know, I look to myself mainly as a creative writer all my life and a medical doctor.
Nawal El Saadawi
The Salafists are trying to abort the revolution and make it religious, though the revolution started secular. There was not a single Islamic slogan. It was secular men and women, and in fact, they were unified. Now they want to divide the revolution, and religion is a very strong weapon.
Nawal El Saadawi
If you are creative, you must be dissident.
Nawal El Saadawi