A Quote by Debra Winger

"Stand up against the wall!" That's what everybody gets offered, especially women. When women started appearing on TV again in something other than the girl or the mother role it was all, "Get up against the wall," or, "The skin underneath her fingernail would tell me that she," you know, forensic stuff. Oh, God gross. Now, they're hunting terrorists.
How big are souls anyway?" asked Coraline. The other mother sat down at the kitchen table and leaned against the back wall, saying nothing. She picked at her teeth with a long crimson-varnished fingernail, then she tapped the finger, gently, tap-tap-tap against the polished black surface of her black button eyes.
We stand against fate, as children stand up against the wall in their father's house, and notch their height from year to year. But when the boy grows to a man, and is master of the house, he pulls down that wall and builds it new and bigger.
My mother had a wall of degrees in our house, and she would walk me up to the wall and say, 'When you have this many degrees, you can tell me what to do.'
She yearned to see her mother again, and Robb and Bran and Rickon… but it was Jon Snow she thought of most. She wished somehow they could come to the Wall before Winterfell, so Jon might muss up her hair and call her “little sister.” She’d tell him, “I missed you,” and he’d say it too at the very same moment, the way they always used to say things together. She would have liked that. She would have liked that better than anything.
I had started acting when I was 7, and I was always wrong. I would always get to the very end [of the audition], but I wasn't a perfect package of one thing. I wasn't a cliche, and it always worked against me. I wasn't pretty enough to play the popular girl, I wasn't mousy enough to be the mousy girl. Then there was a TV show that Toni Collette was starring in. And when a role to play a girl who was struggling with identity came, I thought: "Oh, this is what I was supposed to do. Everything's leading up to this moment." I was 18. I was like, "This is it." I didn't get it. And I was devastated.
She gathers my half of the blankets around her and curls up against the wall. She will sleep for hours more, dreaming endless landscapes and novas of colour both gorgeous and frightening. If I stayed she would wake up and describe them to me. All the mad plot twists and surrealist imagery, so vivid to her while so meaningless to me. There was a time when I treasured listening to her, when I found the commotion in her soul bitter-sweet and lovely, but I can no longer bear it.
One group of people that get a lot of PTSD are soldiers who have been in combat. You know who gets more PTSD, has higher rates of PTSD? Women who have escaped prostitution. That tells me that the war that men wage against women is actually worse than the wars they wage against each other.
My grandmother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house. It leaked, she contended, out of empty sockets if the wall switch had been left on. She would go around screwing in bulbs, and if they lighted up, she would fearfully turn off the wall switch and go back to her Pearson's or Everybody's, happy in the satisfaction that she had stopped not only a costly but dangerous leakage. nothing could ever clear this up for her.
I've always loved strong women, which is lucky for me because once you're over about twenty-five there is no other kind. Women blow my mind. The stuff that routinely gets done to them would make most men curl up and die, but women turn to steel and keep on coming. Any man who claims he's not into strong women is fooling himself mindless; he's into strong women who know how to pout prettily and put on baby voices, and who will end up keeping his balls in her makeup bags.
Why would twenty-six-year-old "teenagers" care about political ramifications if their backs are not up against the wall? But if their backs are against the wall they may be plucked to fight in Iraq, and all of sudden they become politicized real quick.
Gory stuff can be shocking but it doesn't really scare me. I'd say the kind of stuff that gets under my skin is the unknown. You hear a knock behind a wall and you don't know what it is. Is there something there or not?
Gory stuff can be shocking but it doesn’t really scare me. I’d say the kind of stuff that gets under my skin is the unknown. You hear a knock behind a wall and you don’t know what it is. Is there something there or not?
My mom was the only one who didn't bleach her skin. She was the one who kept her natural complexion. So yes, I consider her a role model. All of her other family members would say to us, 'Oh, your mom is so beautiful. She's lucky she kept her skin.' Those comments stayed with me.
In the classics section, she had picked up a copy of The Magic Mountain and recalled the summer between her junior and senior years of high school, when she read it, how she lay in bed hours after she should have gotten up, the sheet growing warmer against her skin as the sun rose higher in the sky, her mother poking her head in now and then to see if she'd gotten up yet, but never suggesting that she should: Eleanor didn't have many rules about child rearing, but one of them was this: Never interrupt reading.
When we think about Islamic feminism, it is not just about women's rights. It's about a more progressive and tolerant expression of Islam in the world for all people. Women's rights is one aspect of it, it's not the end-all, but I also think that the women's issue is the strongest entry point that we've got to challenging extremism. You raise a woman's issue and you get the backs of the conservatives up against the wall faster than just about any other issue in our community. It's the fastest path that we've got to making change happen.
I talked to my mother about it a lot. I asked her what it was like to grow up in New York and Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s, and I asked her about a woman leaving her husband. I asked her about how she would feel about that woman, and my mother grew up in the Church Of God In Christ, and she told me that the woman might be isolated because the other women thought she might go and come after their husbands. That's how they thought then.
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