"I feel that what women can offer to the wilderness is concern and care. The more people who love something, the more chance that something has to survive. If you learn to enjoy a walk in the woods more than an afternoon in a shopping center, you’ll be willing to fight to keep precious undeveloped areas, especially near population centers, from going under concrete." — Maggie Nichols via Anne LaBastille Women and Wilderness
"Decisions are best made by the people affected by them." — Gloria Steinem My Life on the Road
"You’re not gonna be able to reverse history—but you can change what the future looks like for sure." — Brandon Belcher For the Love of Climbing, Episode 17, "What We Know"
"Everyone is charmed by a little tomboy, a scrappy little girl in overalls with a ponytail and scraped knees, who loves soccer and baseball and comic books and dirt. But what are we charmed by? It’s not just that she’s cute—it’s that she innocently thinks she’s going to stay this way forever. But we all know she won’t, and why is that? Because as much as we like a tomboy, nobody likes a tomman." — Jessi Klein You’ll Grow Out of It
"In her home, she struggles to find the right words to recognize her husband’s efforts. 'I don’t mean to say that I’m not grateful for you,' she tells him, 'but I really hate that I’m expected by society to be super-grateful for the fact that you’re not totally worthless around the house.'" — Lenny Letter
"I was sick of dating funny but emotionally-stunted guys. I wanted to find a Grown Man. It seemed only fair, I decided, that if that was what I wanted then I should make some attempt to become a Grown Woman. But when I looked at what it would mean to become a woman, one of those standard grown-up ladies, like the ones from commercials for gum or soda or shampoo, it all seemed to involve shrinking, rather than growing." — Jessi Klein You’ll Grow Out of It
"My interpretation of the treatment we all recieved is that when a woman is inexperienced, young, and eager, male professionals are pleased to help her learn basic skills and knowledge, almost as if she were a little sister or a protégé. But once she demonstrates her competence and determination to succeed in an all-male domain, she meets resistance and even jealousy. Only after a woman has incontestably proven herself in any number of ways… is she “accepted” into the professional clique or organization." — Anne LaBastille Women and Wilderness
"A woman has to be twice as good to be considered half as good." — Unknown
"No wonder studies show that women's intellectual self-esteem tends to go down as years of education go up. We have been studying our own absence." — Gloria Steinem My Life on the Road
"On the bike, I’d have either a good day or bad day. Typically the good days would be when I had some sort of tailwind; then the next day, I’d have this horrible headwind. I thought a lot about how that’s a good metaphor for life for women that generally have this kind of headwind that they have to work against; as a white male, I probably have that tailwind kind of pushing me through life a little bit. It’s not fair to expect a woman to achieve the same things, yet give her a headwind entire time—and it could be a little headwind or a massive hurricane." — Rob Lea via Shawnte Salabert Adventure Journal, "Rob Lea Swam the English Channel, Climbed Everest, Biked the US—In Six Months"
"I know this must feel so strange, but ordinary is just what you’re used to. This may not be ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. This will become ordinary. (Aunt Lydia)" — Margaret Atwood The Handmaid's Tale
"Black people are apparently responsible for calming the fears of violent cops in the way women are supposedly responsible for calming the sexual desires of male rapists. If we don’t, then we are blamed for our own assaults, our own deaths." — Ibram Kendi How to Be an Antiracist
"We have all been programmed to respond to the human differences between us with fear and loathing and to handle that difference in one of three ways: ignore it, and if that is not possible, copy it if we think it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is subordinate. But we have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals." — Audre Lorde "Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference"
"Separation is not always segregation." — Ibram Kendi How to Be an Antiracist
