Nawal El Saadawi

Don't you just love it, that something delicious can come out of complete emptiness?

People who think that politics has nothing to do with their lives must be made to understand that politics is now everything to do with their lives.

What I feared most was the isolation that would be imposed on me by my polite society if I were to criticize its values without conforming in any way to its demands.

Becoming convinced you produced fear, self-hatred and the complete submission of your will.

I could pretend that the world outside was utterly indifferent to us—and that reduced my guilt considerably and made me stop feeling defensive and start feeling like a conqueror.

What is the point of a life which I think is not a life at all but merely a cocoon, a waiting, a nothingness sleep around which the jaws of darkness open wider and wider?

To find out what I had existed for—to rectify my error, which was to write.

It's as if those women, who smell of sex, [the prostitutes] were engulfing, were blinding the ship’s sail … and smearing the salt winds with eau-de-cologne and talcum powder, which they kept on in the presence of visitors.

But can’t you at least help women refugees by hiring them, since you men are so fond of exploiting those who work for you?

… in governments and at international conferences, they bargain over women’s bodies…

Life for each of these women is reduced to animal instincts—eating, sleeping, excreting, and waiting in terror for the man who will sleep with her next.

For the first time I have no fear of death. To die rather than save oneself by killing.