I think we are bound to, and by, nature. We may want to deny this connection and try to believe we control the external world, but every time there's a snowstorm or drought, we know our fate is tied to the world around us
I thought you were supposed to be the champion of your people,' I said. I live because I need to do that. For anyone who is left.' Don't you see? No one will be left. Protect them now or there will be no one to protect!' This is a battle that goes on and on. It never ends. You're too young to understand. No! You're too much of a coward to fight.' I was sick of lies and secrets and of battles so old we had to erase who we were to fight back. And still we lost. Still we were tied to posts.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the importance of protecting those who are vulnerable, highlighting the ongoing nature of struggles and the courage required to confront them.
In this quote, the speaker confronts the idea of leadership and responsibility, expressing disillusionment with those who fail to protect their own people. It reflects a deep sense of urgency and despair about the consequences of inaction in the face of ongoing battles against oppression and loss of identity. The speaker’s insistence on fighting, despite the risks, underscores the necessity of courage and the emotional weight of leadership in times of crisis.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
Use this quote in a speech about social justice to highlight the necessity of taking action.
More from Alice Hoffman
All quotes →Before she realized he was next to her, he had placed his hands over hers on the countertop, then hooped his fingers through hers. Gretel looked up at him, so startled she might as well have been shot. 'I just wanted to wake you up', he said. Which is exactly what he did. One look at him and her heart was racing. One look, and whatever had been before was all over.
Do people choose the art that inspires them — do they think it over, decide they might prefer the fabulous to the real? For me, it was those early readings of fairy tales that made me who I was as a reader and, later on, as a storyteller.
I never plot out my novels in terms of the tone of the book. Hopefully, once a story is begun it reveals itself
My theory is that everyone at one time or another has been at the fringe of society in some way: an outcast in high school, a stranger in a foreign country, the best at something, the worst at something, the one who's different. Being an outsider is the one thing we all have in common.
My grandmother told me once that when you lose somebody you think you've lost the whole world as well, but that's not the way things turn out in the end. Eventually, you pick yourself up and look out the window, and once you do you see everything that was there before the world ended is out there still. There are the same apple trees and the same songbirds, and over our heads, the very same sky that shines like heaven, so far above us we can never hope to reach such heights.
Similar quotes
I declare to you that woman must not depend upon the protection of man, but must be taught to protect herself, and there I take my stand.
In 1989, thirteen nations comprising 1,695,000 people experienced nonviolent revolutions that succeeded beyond anyone's wildest expectations . . . If we add all the countries touched by major nonviolent actions in our century (the Philippines, South Africa . . . the independence movement in India . . .) the figure reaches 3,337,400,000, a staggering 65% of humanity! All this in the teeth of the assertion, endlessly repeated, that nonviolence doesn't work in the 'real' world.
I still remember the days, not wanting to see anybody, not wanting to talk to anybody, really not wanting to live. I was on an express elevator to the bottom floor, wherever that might be.
I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient.
If you learn a martial art, you learn to be dangerous, but simultaneously, you learn to control it.
It takes courage not only to make decisions, but to live with those decisions afterward