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1 " How is it that standing outside for a minute in 90 degree heat is torture, yet standing in a blistering hot shower for 20 minutes is paradise? "
― Sara Marcus
2 " i want to scream because no matter how much I scream, no one will listen. "
― Sara Marcus , Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution
3 " The girls couldn't block out these things and they didn't want to; they wanted to stay acutely aware of the war against them so they could fight back. "
4 " Anybody who listened to her talk or who read the zine she had begun publishing, Fantastic Fanzine, could easily become hypnotized by her words’ raw force: This world teaches women to hate themselves, but I refuse to listen to its message. I’m not going to let boys come between me and my girlfriends. I’m not going to try and be your idea of sexy if sexy means being thin and helpless, tottering around on high heeled shoes. I’m not going to stay home at night hating my sex because if I go out then I’m asking for trouble. "
5 " Tobi had summed it up in Jigsaw: “A band is any song you ever played with anybody even if only once. "
6 " Safety had been a key concept in feminist circles since the ‘70s. All-female events or groups were commonly described as “safe spaces”—insulated from any hint of male violence. Safe could be a slippery word, though, sometimes used to mean less “free of danger” than “comfortable” or “unchallenged”—with the added intimation that anyone who dared to disagree was not just a dissenter but an attacker. Anything that wasn’t to one’s liking, if it could be framed as a political issue, could be described as a threat to one’s safety, and Mary was learning how useful this could be. “I saw how power was gained by talking about being a victim,” she said. "
7 " I’ve always been interested in playing music with other women,” Tobi wrote in her article. “And it seems like I’ve always been misunderstood and gotten called sexist for it. I don’t know, maybe I’m crazy, but to me it seems natural to notice the difference between men and women and I don’t understand WHY I’m constantly told to ignore that in the context of rock and roll. "
8 " Some girls started zines; some formed bands; some just dug in their closets and pulled out the little-girl barrettes they'd heard riot grrrls wore, and admired themselves in the mirror with a bright plastic butterflies poised on their temples, "
9 " Maybe being a teenager was always going to be a bloodbath to some extent, but it did not have to be this particular bloodbath. Its severity and the specific tone of its miseries were political, which meant they were mutable. I felt powerless not because I was weak but because I lived in a society that drained girls of power. Boys harassed me not because I invited it but because they were taught it was acceptable and saw that no one intervened. These things weren’t my fault, and we could fight them all together. For the first time in years, I knew that I was going to be okay. "
10 " A great thing about Olympia is that everybody will clap for anything,” songwriter Lois Maffeo, who had a long-running all-girl radio show on the community radio station KAOS, said later. “You could get up and sing some godawful song and everybody would be like, ‘Yeah! Good for you, that’s so excellent! "
11 " Another artist, Nikki McClure, used to take long walks in the woods around sunset, making up songs and singing them to herself at the top of her voice; when she hit on something that sounded good to her, she’d run back to whatever house was hosting a show and sing into the mic, knowing the audience would be receptive. "
12 " The pair’s status as paradigmatic riot grrrls was only increasing, especially as their extremist rhetoric polarized longtime allies and drove many away. Politics was personal; their revolution had become about a purification of one’s individual life, habits, language, relationships. This is the revolutionary program of a moment that has lost the ability to envision large-scale change, or that sees institutions as so flawed at their core that they can never be vehicles of transformation. "
