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1 " Dear men in Congress, You think banning birth control is conservative progress? You think sanctioning my ovaries won’t bring me to violence? How about I tell you what to do with your caucus? It is now illegal to think about me topless. To keep your lotion where your socks is. To refer to powerful women as monsters like those jocks at Fox did. "
― Amber Tamblyn , Dark Sparkler
2 " Forty-two: On your first mission into space, you recall your mother’s umbilical cord being cut from you. Your high heels floating down the river, all the way into the Atlantic Ocean. "
3 " Sip Someone else's logic then spit it out "
― Amber Tamblyn , Bang Ditto
4 " I cast out the crime of me; my casualty. Silence, you must leave. Sadness, go. Surrender, shame. Cruelty, quiet now. "
― Amber Tamblyn , Any Man
5 " It is not easy to be brave. This world discourages authenticity from infancy. It is not easy to do what you just did. It is not easy to just . . . speak. Or even to wait to speak, for that matter. "
6 " Tell me how you prove coercion? How you prove the difference between being hit on and hunted? How you prove your arms were held down? Your body was touched? Your life was threatened if you ever told anyone? For people who have suffered violent sexual crimes, proof—the very act of proving—is more than just a burden. It is boundless bearing. An eternity of futility. "
7 " It’s you versus you.” Meaning, you’re the only thing standing in your own way. "
8 " I live in a country built on celebritizing its citizens’ grief and amplifying stories of violence and assault for political gain, click counts, or television ratings. Let me be emphatically clear: They. Don’t. Care. About. Us. People who live through sexual assault are a crash on the side of the road, and the American media is nothing more than cars slowing down just long enough to take a peek. "
9 " Your career has another five years, maybe, she says, if you’re lucky. According to who? I ask. According to every actress who’s come before you. So I turn my focus to every actress coming after me. I "
10 " Until women are allowed to make mediocre works of art while still succeeding in the way that many white men get to do this every single day, we will not have the power to take our creative freedoms back. We will be limited by impossible expectations reserved for the few. As long as we are put and put ourselves on a patriarchal pedestal, too high to succeed and doomed to fail, then surely we will be set up to do exactly that, every time. "
― Amber Tamblyn , Era of Ignition: Coming of Age in a Time of Rage and Revolution
11 " Sexual assault is the single least-reported violent crime. And when it is reported, the victims are blamed and shamed. Or not believed. Or silenced. Punished. Or their attackers are never prosecuted at all. "
― Amber Tamblyn
12 " The mind is the master and the body is the servant. "
13 " We publicized it. We capitalized on it. We exploited it for ratings or whatever, for stories, with our memes and GIFs and tweeting and all that. We jump on the train. We show their pictures on live TV. We make clever hashtags. We find ways to, like, absolve ourselves from responsibility or say we’ve helped out with a retweet or something. We’ve helped because we’ve mentioned an injustice in passing to our neighbor and we both got to shake our heads. "
14 " I’ve learned how to make a meal out of pain, how to brand my sorrow. "
15 " Have you ever heard wolves howl in a place where wolves do not reside? "
16 " How can you go on living when you’re now being lived in? When you’ve been invaded? How can you tell a joke and enjoy laughter without hearing the one laugh that owns every root in you now? How can you accept air into your lungs from the very perennials whose life you’ve taken? How can you forgive the person . . . the woman who raped you, who has no face to forgive, who has no intention to understand, who is nowhere forever and everywhere inside you for eternity? How can you forgive yourself? How can you enjoy the trees and not plead continuous fucking guilt to them? How can you end your own suffering, without ending completely? How can you accept touch? Or walk through your life, a lived wound, forever avoiding some terrible, inevitable wind. "
17 " No one should have to look back to see the bright future ahead of them. "
18 " People marched not just because of what Donald Trump did, but because of what all the Donald Trumps have always done. Women marched not just because a woman had lost, but because we too were all done with losing. "
19 " We are taught so little about the health and safety of our physical bodies and also so little about how to protect them. Women have been kept in the dark of our own light, having to go to extraordinary lengths to educate others about what we need, from our basic rights to affordable health care, to our own sexual pleasures, to our emotional well-being. The burden is on women to be self-taught in a world where most men are already self-made—the latter being defined by expectations, the former by limitations. "
20 " A crisis of character is nothing new for the United States of America and its long history of abuses of power. When I look at our country today, I see a nation deep in the terror of its own retooling, stuck between a past it can’t outrun and the trajectory of a future it must outgrow. We are a nation that still cannot wrap its head around the overwhelming inequality among genders and races in our society and institutional systems. We are a nation that cannot agree on the definition of misogyny, let alone put a finger on its pervasiveness or manifestation. But there seem to be benchmark eras in our history that have brought great and radical change to fruition—times when we weren’t just living through difficulties, but actively confronting our values and agitating for revolutionary change. I believe we are in one of those eras right now. "
