Pardis Sabeti Quotes

I went to an all-boys school, where I played rugby, so ballet wasn't the coolest thing to do.

Apart from a small minority, teenage boys fall into three distinct categories: macho, metro, or just plain muddled.

In the end, I do think it's insulting to men and women to insist that they fit a certain profile. I never understood that.

American men are like women.

I grew up playing soccer with the boys - quite far from reading magazines.

People try to make women a very specific thing so that we like them.

I think growing up, the assimilation of most cultural conventions typically encouraged by a heightened awareness of gender and sex encourages a sort of separation of the self. What's so special about 'Hanna' is that her upbringing has negated this indoctrination; she's almost absolved of the pressures of gender or gender itself.

When I was a young girl I had to deal with people calling me weird and strange because I spent so much time around boys playing football.

We've been socialised and told that there is a way to describe people, and that way is by their gender or their sex.

In America, more than anywhere else in the world, care has been taken constantly to trace clearly distinct spheres of action for the two sexes, and both are required to keep in step, but along paths that are never the same.

Even if society dictates that men and women should behave in certain ways, it is fathers and mothers who teach those ways to children not just in the words they say, but in the lives they lead.

The witty woman is a tragic figure in American life. Wit destroys eroticism and eroticism destroys wit, so women must choose between taking lovers and taking no prisoners.

When I was in high school, the genders were so separate from each other. If you weren't 'dating' somebody, you couldn't just be friends with somebody.

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.

I have spent much of my life where the boys are, first as a tomboy and then on Wall Street. Growing up, I loved every and any sport. I was frustrated by girls who didn't, so I spent most of my afternoons with the boys.

Men were only made into 'men' with great difficulty even in primitive society: the male is not naturally 'a man' any more than the woman. He has to be propped up into that position with some ingenuity, and is always likely to collapse.

What works for a man, still does not work for a woman - both in terms of how they see themselves and how we see them.

The parts for women, you're either like the quietly suffering wife or the wild girl.

One is not born a woman, but becomes one.

Some boys accepted me, some didn't. And my family had comments made to them. Brazil is still a very macho society, and sports are mainly for boys, so people would say to them: 'What is this girl doing? Why is she always out there in the soccer games with the boys?'

They had always told me that I wrote like a man.

Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life.

I think there are a lot of rules for women. We have a lot of expectations and a lot of rules for women. So we're expected to march in a straight line, and when we don't, all hell breaks loose.

I felt like one of the boys. My friends were boys. In school I related to boys.

I don't really relate to certain blokey men who just want to talk about blokey things. I never really know what to say and I always feel I have to act blokey in order to have them not say, 'You're a weirdo.'