A Quote by Maxine Hong Kingston

Perhaps women were once so dangerous that they had to have their feet bound — © Maxine Hong Kingston
Perhaps women were once so dangerous that they had to have their feet bound
When we Chinese girls listened to the adults talk-story, we learned that we failed if we grew up to be but wives or slaves. We could be heroines, swordswomen. Even if she had to rage across all China, a swordswoman got even with anybody who hurt her family. Perhaps women were once so dangerous that they had to have their feet bound.
Cleopatra stood at one of the most dangerous intersections in history; that of women and power. Clever women, Euripides had warned hundreds of years earlier, were dangerous.
He had the face of one who walks in his sleep, and for a wild moment the idea came to me that perhaps he was not normal, not altogether sane. There were people who had trances, I had surely heard of them, and they followed strange laws of which we could know nothing, they obeyed the tangled orders of their own sub-conscious minds. Perhaps he was one of them, and here we were within six feet of death.
When the first armies were formed, combat took courage, which women share equally with men, and strength, which we do not. But though I am only 4 feet 7 inches tall, with a gun in my hand I am the equal of a soldier who's 6 feet 7 - perhaps even at a slight advantage, as I make a smaller target.
The outburst of sexual freedom in the '60s was bound to happen because the '50s were so oppressing. You had to live that way; women had to be like this - it was all locked into a false reality.
He'd gone to Louddon's fortress to take Madelyne captive. His plan was revenge; an eye for an eye. And that had been reason enough. Until she'd warmed his feet. Everything had changed at that moment. Duncan had known with a certainty he couldn't deny that they were henceforth bound together. He could never let her go.
My grandmother's feet had been bound when she was two years old. Her mother...first wound a piece of white cloth about twenty feet long round her feet, bending all the toes except the big toe inward and under the sole. Then she placed a large stone on top to crush the arch.
The creepy stuff was that I have had sex with women who worked for me on this show. Now, my response to that is yes I have. I have had sex with women who worked on this show. Would it be embarrassing if it were made public? Perhaps it would, especially for the women.
I remember once walking out hand in hand with a boy I knew, and it was summer, and suddenly before us was a field of gold. Gold as far as you could see. We knew we'd be rich forever. We filled our pockets and our hair. We were rolled in gold. We ran through the field laughing and our legs and feet were coated in yellow dust, so that we were like golden statues or golden gods. He kissed my feet, the boy I was with, and when he smiled, he had a gold tooth. It was only a field of buttercups, but we were young.
I tended to be hard on the egos of a certain kind of men. The ones who normally swept women off their feet had never moved me much, because I'd always felt that if they swept me off my feet they'd practiced on a lot of women before me, and would practice more with women after me. I'd rarely been wrong on that. ~Anita Blake
It just struck me as really odd that there were all of these conversations going on about what young women were up to. Were young women having too much sex? Were young women politically apathetic? Are young women socially engaged or not? And whenever these conversations were happening, they were mostly happening by older women and by older feminists. And maybe there would be a younger woman quoted every once in a while, but we weren't really a central part of that conversation. We weren't really being allowed to speak on our own behalf.
The human species has all but lost its heart; we gave it up for the illusionary fruits of the material world. But a life without heart is a life without life force. The psyche, as well as the body, needs both heart and brain in order to survive. Like Chinese women who bound their feet and the could no longer walk freely, we have bound our hearts, and thus stunted our growth as moral beings.
The freedom movement transformed the status of women. Women fought along with men as comrades. In the process, the shackles that had bound them fell away.
Why was Christ so compassionate towards sexual sinners, especially women? Think of the woman caught in adultery. Think of the prostitute who wept at his feet. Could it be because Christ knew that these women, who had been deceived by counterfeit loves, were actually looking for him, the true Bridegroom?
Perhaps loneliness had nothing to do with place or circumstance; perhaps it was in you; yourself. Perhaps, wherever you were, you took your little circle of loneliness with you.
Perhaps some of the appeal of the dangerous-but-yummy paranormal anti-hero lies in his scorn for societal expectations. Yes, women have come a long way, but there are still some cultural stigmas more associated with women than men.
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