Kate DiCamillo Quotes

I don't belong to anything, nobody's listening to me and I don't have any levers that control my own life.

Powerlessness and silence go together.

Would it not grieve a woman to be over-mastered by a piece of valiant dust? to make an account of her life to a clod of wayward marle?

Any unarmed people are slaves, or are subject to slavery at any given moment.

The personal is political, but only to a point.

I grew up believing that I was fundamentally powerless.

As long as I am nothing but a ghost of the civil dead, I can do nothing.

Waiting is the great vocation of the dispossessed.

This world is run by people who know how to do things. They know how things work. They are equipped. Up there, there's a layer of people who run everything. But we - we're just peasants. We don't understand what's going on, and we can't do anything.

The loss of liberty which must attend being a wife was of all things the most horrible to my imagination.

It's frustrating not to have more control over your material.

Give the peasants neither life nor death.

The role of the inhabitants of the American hemisphere has for centuries been purely passive. Politically they were nonexistent. We are still in a position lower than slavery, and therefore it is more difficult for us to rise to the enjoyment of freedom.

The one without a sword gets humiliated.

Not a single one, not a single one among us [French Canadians], in 200 years, has won a battle... and this is what it is to be colonized! When we have but martyrs! How can we have aspirations!? How can we have the will to fight!?

Those who are most desperate for change are those who are the most powerless to effect it.

The real reason for apathy is usually a feeling of powerlessness.

There's nothing worse in life than to sit there and be the victim of a process that's outside your control.

The black man has become a shell, a shadow of man, completely defeated, drowning in his own misery, a slave, an ox bearing the yoke of oppression with sheepish timidity.

There's a great feeling of powerlessness in America. When I express ideas to people, they say, 'That's terrific, but do you think it really counts?'

In many, many parts of the world, being a female, you're really just wallpaper. If you take care to blend in, no one would think in a thousand years that you were doing anything suspicious.

I didn't have a voice or a vote at Madrid.

It's the most annoying thing, when you've got the answers, but you're not heard.

What words can express her [the white woman’s] humiliation when, at the close of this long conflict, the government which she had served so faithfully held her unworthy of a voice in its councils, while it recognized as the political superiors of all the noble women of the nation the negro men just emerged from slavery, and not only totally illiterate, but also densely ignorant of every public question.

Men go where they will, they do as they must; it is not a woman's part to bid them to stay, nor yet to reproach them for being what they are-or for not coming back.