As long as women are isolated one from the other, not allowed to offer other women the most personal accounts of their lives, they will not be part of any narratives of their own…women will be staving off destiny and not inviting or inventing or controlling it.
Interpretation
Women need to connect and share their experiences to shape their own narratives and destinies.
This quote emphasizes the importance of women sharing their personal stories and experiences with each other. It suggests that isolation prevents women from forming a collective narrative, limiting their abilities to influence their own destinies and recount their lives meaningfully.
In practice
During a women's empowerment event to encourage sharing personal stories.
Women, I believe, search for fellow beings who have faced similar struggles, conveyed them in ways a reader can transform into her own life, confirmed desires the reader had hardly acknowledge-desires that now seem possible. Women catch courage from the women whose lives and writings they read, and women call the bearer of that courage friend. [p. 138]
Ironically, women who acquire power are more likely to be criticized for it than are the men who have always had it.
Why do you always have to be right. Why do you always have to have the last word. For once in your life just let it go.
The relationship to one's fellow man is the relationship of prayer, the relationship to oneself is the relationship of striving; it is from prayer that one draws the strength for one's striving.
When you drop a glass or a plate to the ground, it makes a crashing sound. When a window shatters, a table breaks, or a picture fall of the wall, it makes noise. But as for your heart, when that breaks, it's completely silent... and you almost wish there was a noise to distract you from the pain.
Life cannot be without relationship, but we have made it so agonizing and hideous by basing it on personal and possessive love. Can one love and yet not possess? You will find the true answer not in escape, ideals, beliefs but through the understanding of the causes of dependence and possessiveness.
Meditate or spend silent time in nature with your partner. When going for a walk or sitting in the car or at home, become comfortable with being in stillness together. Stillness cannot and need not be created. Just be receptive to the stillness that is already there, but is usually obscured by mental noise.
A woman may very well form a friendship with a man, but for this to endure, it must be assisted by a little physical antipathy.
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