Favorite Quotes from When Women were Birds

Loved the quotes in this book and thought some of you did too.
Which are your favorite?
Share a quote and a page number.

A pencil is a wand and a weapon. Be careful. Protect yourself. It can be glorious. Pg.39

Earth receives ten tons of dust from outer space. Not only do we take in the world with each breath, we are inhaling the universe. We are made of stardust. Pg. 40

To be read. To be heard. To be seen. I want to be read, I want to be heard. I don't need to be seen. To write requires an ego, a belief that what you say matters. Pg 47

"If women are suffering children are suffering. Empower women, and you empower the community." (p. 109)

"In the desert I often whisper. Junipers are excellent sounding boards. They have been shaped by wind. Rocks seem to care nothing about what I say, yet when I speak to them, they feel porous, capable of receiving my words and taking them in as part of their history of brokenness." (pg. 64)

"At the heart of my emerging voice was the belief that nature held the secret to harmony and unity, not just outside us, but inside us, no separation." [pg 56] If you have had opportunity to climb a 14er or be in the Amazon - you are in nature and surrounded by nature listening to the silence and then you [or at least I] am complete.

Once upon a time, when women were birds, there was the simple understanding that to sing at dawn and to sing at dusk was to heal the world through joy. The birds still remember what we have forgotten, that the world is meant to be celebrated. Page 225

Page 60: what they thought was silence, because they didn't know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds.
Page 114: what are the consequences when we go against our instincts? Eat are the consequences of not speaking out? What are the consequences of guilt, shame, and doubt?

Earth. Mother. Goddess. In every culture the voice of the Feminine emerges from the land itself. . . . She is the one who embodies the Moon, honoring the cyclic nature of life. (p. 92)

I have tagged too many quotes in this book to count but one that hit home is about relationships. " security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what it was in nostalgia nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living the present relationship and accepting it as it is now." I am working hard on learning to live in the now and it was just a reminder of doing so in all aspects of life.

p.125 But harboring regrets is making love to the past, and there is no movement there. It's not the lips of the prince that will save us, but our own lips speaking.
p. 96 Perfection is a flaw disguised as control.
p. 97 Reading has not only changed my life but saved it. The right book picked at the right times---especially the one that scares us, threatens to undermine all we have been told, the one that contains forbidden thoughts---these are the books that become Eve's apples.

There are too many quotes to list, but here are several that made me stop and think:

A reaction to the "empty journals:
"I am afraid of silence. Silence creates a pathway to peace through pain, the pain of a distracted and frantic mind before it becomes still." p. 59

"[My mother] left me her 'Cartographies of Silence.' I will never know what she was trying to tell me by telling me nothing.
But I can imagine.
And isn't this the beautiful truth of love and power?" p.168
"Empty pages become possiblilies." p. 169

After being with her dad at an opera and commenting on the wild applause....she says..my mother's journals are like applauding with white gloves on (paraphrase)

Page no. ?? "DEVIL spelled backwards is LIVED. " This appeared in discussion about Eve.
"Why would she want to be a goddess when she could be human?" This gives us options to experiment, I think.

My mother came alive for me as I read this book...she spoke to me thro this quote from Mimi...
"once at Bud Lake, I looked at my mother's face, and I felt a deep message was inside her. She was staring out at the lake and I guessed she was thinking of the soothing repeat of nature. The assurance that bare branches will bring the buds of spring, that yellow dandelions will become white with seeds, and that each life is precious unto itself...she turned to me and said, "we are part of nature"....