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During the '80s I wrote Memoirs from the Women's Prison. This is one of my most important books. It came out in Arabic in '83. About my experience in prison.

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
Came
Experience
Arabic
Women
Memoirs
Book
Memoir
Important
Wrote
Prison
Books

More quotes by Nawal El Saadawi

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Motherhood goes back in history to a time when a father had no way of knowing his children. Fatherhood only became known when class patriarchal society had established itself and imposed monogamous marriage on women. Motherhood is like sun and rain and plants, a quality and product of nature which does not require laws or systems in order to exist.
Nawal El Saadawi
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First of all, I hated the medical profession. Medical education in Egypt was taken from the British, French, colonial educational system. And it's very, very lacking - there is no sexology. I never read the word clitoris in any medical book when I was educated.
Nawal El Saadawi
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If you are creative, you must be dissident.
Nawal El Saadawi
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My skin is soft, but my heart is cruel, and my bite is deadly.
Nawal El Saadawi
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I've lived here [in Egypt] among Christians and Muslims, and we never had a conflict. Now you have a conflict between Christians and Muslims and Baha'is and Sunni and Shia. The Salafists are trying to abort the revolution and make it religious, though the revolution started secular.
Nawal El Saadawi
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Home to me is the world because my books have been translated into more than 30 languages.
Nawal El Saadawi
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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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Fearing servility, people become servile.
Nawal El Saadawi
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She is free to do what she wants, and free not to do it.
Nawal El Saadawi
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I've lived in Egypt among Christians and Muslims, and we never had a conflict. Now you have a conflict between Christians and Muslims and Baha'is and Sunni and Shia.
Nawal El Saadawi
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There is not a revolution that succe Saudi Arabia paid $7 billion for the Salafists to come, and the United States and Israel are pouring a lot of money into Egypt. Why? To divide the country by religion.
Nawal El Saadawi
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To me, 'beauty' means to be natural, creative, honest - to say the truth.
Nawal El Saadawi
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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
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All revolutions in history have obstacles. There is not a revolution that succes.
Nawal El Saadawi
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The feminists who are aware of the effects of patriarchy realize that we are all in the same boat from the dangers of patriarchy, and that the oppression of women is universal.
Nawal El Saadawi
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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
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The family code in Egypt is one of the worst family codes in the Arab world. Polygamy. The husband is having absolute power over the family.
Nawal El Saadawi
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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
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Who said to kill does not require gentleness?
Nawal El Saadawi
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In history, the millions win that is democracy.
Nawal El Saadawi