21
" The feminist story, she reminded me, is a counternarrative, a narrative of disobedience, a chronicle of battle, nto of surrender. Women who do not fit the mold are too often maneuvered, manipulated, and mangled into some culturally safe archetype. The makers of history transformed perpetua intoa cold, unfeeling mother - a villan of sorts. But who is to say that becoming a mother didn't also push Perpetua to become a martyr, didn't cause her to passionatley uphold her religious ideals because she wanted to offer her son the greatest gift she could - an ideal? Maybe, in the end, Perpetua's maternal instincts were precisely what gave her the strength to confront the burliest Roman gladiator and the to lie down with dignity? "
25
" One day I was through Strachan’s Corner just hanging out, and they must have picked up Scrooge earlier for a pep talk, so they were now dropping him back home in one of their police vehicle. Supt. Strachan was in the back seat talking with him, while a male officer was driving. So I asked her, what were some of the things you used to say to Scrooge?
I used to tell him it is not worth it, You are hurting people. You are only going to end up in jail for the rest of your life, or you are going to end up in the grave. I knew that he was listening to me. I would talk to him and encourage him. My other colleagues used to say I was soft on crime because of what I was doing, but I could be tuff. I am a mother of two sons; just ask my sons how tuff I can be.
If I feel that I have done the best that I can, and cannot do no more than that is it. This was what I was telling those kids down there.
I told them if you do not change, you are going to die. Sad to say, that is what happened to some of them eventually. The best came out of you and others in another way. Supt. Allerdyce Strachan, the first female officer to rise to the rank of superintendent on the Royal Bahamas Police Force. "
― , The Fight of My Life is Wrapped Up in My Father (The Fight of My Life is Wrapped in My Father)
31
" For all the pain you suffered, my mama. For all the torment of your past and future years, my mama. For all the anguish this picture of pain will cause you. For the unspeakable mystery that brings good fathers and sons into the world and lets a mother watch them tear at each other’s throats. For the Master of the Universe, whose suffering world I do not comprehend. For dreams of horror, for nights of waiting, for memories of death, for the love I have for you, for all the things I remember, and for all the things I should remember but have forgotten, for all these I created this painting—an observant Jew working on a crucifixion because there was no aesthetic mold in his own religious tradition into which he could pour a painting of ultimate anguish and torment. "
― Chaim Potok , My Name Is Asher Lev
36
" We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character. Here again we come up against what I have called the “intolerable compliment.” Over a sketch made idly to amuse a child, an artist may not take much trouble: he may be content to let it go even though it is not exactly as he meant it to be. But over the great picture of his life—the work which he loves, though in a different fashion, as intensely as a man loves a woman or a mother a child—he will take endless trouble—and would doubtless, thereby give endless trouble to the picture if it were sentient. One can imagine a sentient picture, after being rubbed and scraped and re-commenced for the tenth time, wishing that it were only a thumb-nail sketch whose making was over in a minute. In the same way, it is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love but for less. "
― C.S. Lewis , The Problem of Pain