Buchi Emecheta Quotes

Women must not shout back when their husbands come home and shout at them for any reason.

Women is fine once you got em pinned down, boss, but when they ain't pinned down they're hell.

I mean, they censor your work when they're scared of it.

But it will be said that the husband provides for the wife, or in other words, he feeds, clothes and shelters her! I wish I had the power to make every one before me fully realize the degradation contained in that idea.

Some husbands regard it as their prerogative to compel their wives to fit their standards of what they think to be the ideal.

Obviously, the anti-ERA people are tickled about my ordeal because it proves that the ERA breaks up families. When they point out that feminism is a dangerous thing, I just say marriage is pretty precarious too.

The patriarchy is alive and well in Egypt and the wider Arab world. Just because we got rid of the father of the nation in Egypt or Tunisia, Mubarak or Ben Ali, and in a number of other countries, does not mean that the father of the family does not still hold sway.

Today, my freedom as a poet is taken by a censor; tomorrow, my freedom as a citizen will be taken by a policeman. Today I am banished from the theater; tomorrow, I shall be banished from the land. Today, I am gagged; tomorrow, I shall be deported. Today a state of siege exists in literature; tomorrow, it will exist in the city.

Like most dictators, Col Gaddafi detests the metropolis. His vision of Libya is a kind of Bedouin romantic medievalism, suspicious of universities, theatres, galleries and cafes, and so monitors the cities' inhabitants with paranoid suspicion.

I think maternal instinct is a male construct that has been used for centuries to keep women in their place, at home.

Even if censorship might encourage creative ways to circumvent it, it still slows down progress and our ability to realise our full creative potential. And that is why I vehemently fight against it.

It's hard to imagine what the Bronte sisters' lives would've been like had they been men. Different things would've been expected of them, and maybe they wouldn't have ended up writing because they would've been packed off to do something else.

Thus the woman, who had perversely exceeded her proper bounds, is forced back to her own position. She had, indeed, previously been subject to her husband, but that was a liberal and gentle subjection; now, however, she is cast into servitude.

The mechanism of violence is what destroys women, controls women, diminishes women and keeps women in their so-called place.

Whenever citizens are seen routinely as enemies of their own government, writers are rountinely seen to be the most dangerous enemies.

She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.

Weak logic, inconsistencies and alienation from the people are common features of authoritarianism. The relentless attempts of totalitarian regimes to prevent free thought and new ideas and the persistent assertion of their own rightness bring on them an intellectual stasis which they project on to the nation at large. Intimidation and propaganda work in a duet of oppression, while the people, lapped in fear and distrust, learn to dissemble and to keep silent.

For if the talent or individuality is there, it should be expressed. If it doesn't find its way out into the air, it can be turned inward and gnaw like the fox at the Spartan boy's belly.

Like all dominant groups, men seek to promote an image of their subordinate's nature that contributes to the preservation of the status quo. For thousands of years, males have seen women not as women could be, but only as males want them to be.

Those who begin by burning books will end by burning people.

You know what they say: When people start burning books they'll soon burn human beings.

No art ever survived censorship; no art ever will.

Men create their own gods and thus have some slight understanding that they are self-fabricated. Women are much more susceptible, because they are completely oppressed by men; they take men at their word and believe in the gods that men have made up. The situation of women, their culture, makes them kneel more often before the gods that have been created by men than men themselves do, who know what they've done. To this extent, women will be more fanatical, whether it is for fascism or for totalitarianism.

Men have hitherto treated women like birds which have strayed down to them from the heights; as something more delicate, more fragile, more savage, stranger, sweeter, soulful--but as something which has to be caged up so that it shall not fly away.

A book is somehow sacred. A dictator can kill and maim people, can sink to any kind of tyranny and only be hated, but when books are burned the ultimate in tyranny has happened. This we cannot forgive.