Battered Women Quotes & Sayings

Men, crumpled like bed-sheets in hospitals,
And women, battered like overused proverbs. — Vladimir Mayakovsky

Empowerment is being aware that there is no one to blame for my choices and actions; that I have a personal choice and responsibility for my life. — Steve Maraboli

Second conclusion: If you can see a bandwagon, it's too late to get on. I think the person who said that to me — Lee Child

But while my inner voice was clearly telling me I was at my core an entrepreneur, it's inconvenient to decide at twenty-three that you can't really work for other people. — Kelly Cutrone

Battered Women: sounds delicious. Doesn't make it right. — B.J. Novak

The most fundamental in me is coming uppermost, and the transient, the sensational, is dispersing, because it can't adversely influence what is essential to me. — Oskar Kokoschka

The year the police called Sherrena, Wisconsin saw more than one victim per week murdered by a current or former romantic partner or relative. 10 After the numbers were released, Milwaukee's chief of police appeared on the local news and puzzled over the fact that many victims had never contacted the police for help. A nightly news reporter summed up the chief's views: "He believes that if police were contacted more often, that victims would have the tools to prevent fatal situations from occurring in the future." What the chief failed to realize, or failed to reveal, was that his department's own rules presented battered women with a devil's bargain: keep quiet and face abuse or call the police and face eviction. — Matthew Desmond

They were women then
My mama's generation
Husky of voice stout of
Step
With fists as well as
Hands
How they battered down
Doors
And ironed
Starched white
Shirts
How they led
Armies
Headragged generals
Across mined
Fields
Booby-trapped
Ditches
To discover books
Desks
A place for us
How they knew what we
MUST know
Without knowing a page
Of it
Themselves. — Alice Walker

But even now, especially now, it seems to me that women have a strength about them that men never had. And I wonder how did men always get portrayed in the movies and such as the strong ones? How did it come to be that women are made to look like the weak ones who need protectin'? Truth is, it's men who need the protectin'. Really they do. Women have the strong thing inside of them and the can get through anything. They just can. They're used to pain of child birthing - pain no man knows - and some women being battered around and not treated right through all the centuries and having to learn at a real young age how to stay alive on the inside when the outside is being hurt real bad. Most all women know that. But men. Those poor men. They just don't have the inside strength the women do. It's harder for men to feel pain. — Sarah Felix Burns

What if she doesn't worry about her body and eats enough for all the growing she has to do? She might rip her stockings and slam-dance on a forged ID to the Pogues, and walk home barefoot, holding her shoes, alone at dawn; she might baby-sit in a battered-women's shelter one night a month; she might skateboard down Lombard Street with its seven hairpin turns, or fall in love with her best friend and do something about it, or lose herself for hours gazing into test tubes with her hair a mess, or climb a promontory with the girls and get drunk at the top, or sit down when the Pledge of Allegiance says stand, or hop a freight train, or take lovers without telling her last name, or run away to sea. She might revel in all the freedoms that seem so trivial to those who could take them for granted; she might dream seriously the dreams that seem to obvious to those who grew up with them really available. Who knows what she would do? Who knows what it would feel like? — Naomi Wolf

My niece was a sexual-assault victim. My sister is a survivor of domestic violence. We have more shelters for animals than for battered women. That's not the message we should be sending. — Hilda Solis

The guarantee of safety in a battering relationship can never be based upon a promise from the perpetrator, no matter how heartfelt. Rather, it must be based upon the self-protective capability of the victim. Until the victim has developed a detailed and realistic contingency plan and has demonstrated her ability to carry it out, she remains in danger of repeated abuse. — Judith Lewis Herman

I want to warn potential victims. Many of them are women, and many of them are battered women. It's a cause for me. When I look back, though, so many of the books I've written are about wives who just couldn't get away. — Ann Rule

Oy, Jake," he said, shaking his head, like a benevolent rabbi I'd disappointed with my weak will. "Impatience. Seriously. I know this is hard for you ... " He glazed over. Drifted a moment. Went through something in his impenetrable interior ... "Actually I do know this is hard for you. I'm sorry. I'm not using my imagination. That was my New Year's resolution, you know. Work on standing in the other fellow's shoes. That and to read one poem every day. — Glen Duncan

There's no battered woman alive who didn't know in advance that the man was bad. — Laura Schlessinger

Fat men in tank tops drank beer while the women and children streamed back and forth between the tables and their battered station wagons, bringing ice chests and boxes of potato chips and marshmallows. A little dog was doing circles around the kids' legs. The far curb of the turnout lane was lined with semis, the cabs dark and the drivers inside sleeping or shaving or eating, staring at the horizon and thinking whatever it is truckers think. — Rick Riordan

Schopenhauer's saying, that "a man can do as he will, but not will as he will," has been an inspiration to me since my — Albert Einstein

The truth remains quiet inside us,floundering like a battered bird,desperately wanting to spread its
wings and fly away.
-TARA — Amita Trasi

Men, permitted to put words (and other things) in women's mouths, create scenes in which women desperately want to be bound, battered, tortured, humiliated, and killed. — Catharine MacKinnon

The great tragedy in the new feminist theory in America is the loss of a sense of public commitment ... Hungry women are not fed by this, battered women are not sheltered by it, raped women do not find justice in it, gays and lesbians do not achieve legal protections through it. — Martha C. Nussbaum

An overwhelming curiosity makes me ask myself what their lives might be like. I want to know what they do, where they're from, their names, what they're thinking about at that moment, what they regret, what they hope for, their past loves, their current dreams ... and if they happen to be women (especially the young ones) then the urge becomes intense.
How quickly would you want to see her naked, admit it, and naked through to her heart. How you try to learn where she comes from, where she's going, why she's here and not elsewhere!
While letting your eyes wander all over her, you imagine love affairs for her, you ascribe her deep feelings. You think of the bedroom she must have, and a thousand things besides ... right down to the battered slippers into which she must slip her feet when she gets out of bed. — Gustave Flaubert

My mother didn't have a heart, Kreacher," Sirius snapped. "She kept herself alive out of pure spite" -Sirius Black to Kreacher, the Order of the Phoenix — J.K. Rowling

The Bobbit case, which brought to life the ancient mythic archetype of woman as castrator, demonstrated that women are as aggressive as men and that sex is a dark, dangerous force of nature. But of course the feminist establishment, stuck in its battered-woman blinders, learned nothing as usual from this lurid refutation of its normal views. Classic art works like Bizet's Carmen tell us more about the irrationality of love, jealousy and revenge than do all the pat formulas of the counseling industry. — Camille Paglia

Battered women is a phrase that uncovered major, long-hidden violence. It helps us to face the fact that, statistically speaking, the most dangerous place for a woman is in her own home, not in the streets. — Gloria Steinem

Many women say that verbal violence causes more harm than physical violence because it damages self-esteem so deeply. Women have not wanted to hear battered women say that the verbal abuse was as hurtful as the physical abuse: to acknowledge that truth would be tantamount to acknowledging that virtually every woman is a battered woman. It is difficult to keep strong against accusations of being a bitch, stupid, inferior, etc., etc. — Suzanne Pharr

Sanchez looked at me and we locked eyes a second too long. There was nothing I could do about it. The signal went out. A moment of clear, silent hostility passed between us as hotly charged and unintentional as a thousand-volt arc through a squirrel. — Rick Riordan

In a sane world, love and sex would not divide by gender. We could love like and unlike beings, love them for a variety of reasons. The battered adjectives for homosexuality
queer, lesbian, gay
would disappear and we would only have people making love in different ways, with different body parts. We are too far gone with overpopulation to insist that procreation be an immutable part of desire. Desire needs only itself, not the proof of a baby. We would do well to baby each other instead of making all these unwanted babies that no one has time to nurture or to love.
At this point in my life, I am blessed by my friendships with women. I make no distinction between my gay and straight women friends. I hat the very terms, feeling that any of us could be anything
if we were to unlock the full range of possibilities within. — Erica Jong

Eleven men and women, exhausted, battered, and armed with captured weapons, against fifty battle-armored foes desperate to kill them. Every one of those eleven knew exactly what their odds of living through the next three minutes were, but it didn't matter. They were all that stood between six hundred civilians and cold-blooded murder, and Alicia's green eyes were hard as she watched the gaps being punched through the western wall.
"Make it count, people," she said, almost conversationally. — David Weber

We live in a world in which women are battered and are unable to flee from the men who beat them, although their door is theoretically standing wide open. One out of every four women becomes a victim of severe violence. One out of every two will be confronted by sexual harassment over her lifetime. These crimes are everywhere and can take place behind any front door in the country, every day, and barely elicit much more than a shrug of the shoulders and superficial dismay. — Natascha Kampusch

I represent an affluent district, but when I worked to form my county's first battered-women's shelter, some nights there were no beds left. Violence against women crosses all economic lines. — Lynn Woolsey

The theatre is a machine of transformations: everything is transformed into another thing; a bald man has thick hair on his head; a man with strong legs gains a limp and a sharp-eyed person becomes blind; an actor who is an atheist immediately turns into the most pious priest on earth! ~ — Mehmet Murat Ildan

In their quest to hit cloud Nine, our young men and women in
their prime are gradually finding themselves on ground Zero,
emotionally battered, academically bankrupt and medically
paralyzed. — Oche Otorkpa

You look at shows like The Simpsons or Larry Sanders or Curb Your Enthusiasm or Seinfeld, they're really sophisticated shows that we all love back home. — Simon Pegg

I was in a conversation and someone said: "You know, we were talking about the whole issue of transgender and how it has become so accepted now, and somebody said, 'You know the Oprah show, I think has had a big impact.'" I said, I don't think so. We did several transgender [shows], but we didn't do as much for transgender as I did for, say, abused kids or battered women. And they said, "But no, you started the conversation. You started the conversation and the conversation has led us to here." — Oprah Winfrey

And our footsteps rang and echoed till it sounded like the room was full of dancers, the house calling up all the people who had danced here across centuries of spring evenings, gallant girls seeing gallant boys off to war, old men and women straight-backed while outside their world disintegrated and the new one battered at their doors, all of them bruised and all of them laughing, welcoming us into their long lineage. — Tana French

As well as being a vulgar producer of her own spectacle, and an embarrassment to her family, Cindy Sheehan is at best a shifty fantasist. — Christopher Hitchens

Our myths are so many, our vision so dim, our self-deception so deep and our smugness so gross that scarcely any way now remains of reporting the American Century except from behind the billboards ... — Nelson Algren

In order to gain their freedom, survivors may have to give up almost everything else. Battered women may lose their homes, their friends, and their livelihood. Survivors of childhood abuse may lose their families. Political refugees may lose their homes and their homeland. Rarely are the dimensions of this sacrifice fully recognized. — Judith Lewis Herman

The mining industry might make wealth and power for a few men and women, but the many would always be smashed and battered beneath its giant treads ... — Katharine Susannah Prichard

To accept the environmentalist argument that the suffering of individual animals is inconsequential compared to the ozone layer, we must be willing to admit that the sufferings of minority groups, raped women, battered wives, abused children, people sitting on death row, and our loved ones are small potatoes beneath the hole in the sky. To worry about any of them is, in effect, to miniaturize the big picture to portraits of battered puppy dogs. — Karen Davis

In a shelter meant for battered women, there were only two reasons a person would decide to leave. One, she had decided to launch out on her own and begin a new life. Or two, she had decided to go back to someone who had hurt her. — Deborah Bedford

Typically, when you have a depressed individual, they feel hopeless. They feel miserable. Their mind is racing, their heart is pounding. They feel anxious. They feel exhausted yet they can't sleep. — Dale Archer