Alix Kates Shulman Quotes

#1. Sexism goes so deep that at first it's hard to see; you think it's just reality.

Alix Kates Shulman

#2. In my books, my idea is always to explore social context and social forces.

Alix Kates Shulman

#3. If one day I should hear the hacker's slow, booted step on the stair, perhaps I'll suggest a cup of tea and try to get the story of his life.

Alix Kates Shulman

#4. There is a lot of gender segregation. You still have many poor women who work in women-only jobs. In the family, in most cases, only women have the double job of working outside the home and taking care of the family.

Alix Kates Shulman

#5. People often say to me now, "Your work changed my life." I'm sure that's an exaggeration, but they say it had a big effect on them and enabled them to change. I'm not sure I believe that a book will cause someone to change.

Alix Kates Shulman

#6. When you witness the end of a life up close day by day, you begin to understand time and mortality in profound ways. You see time's relativity, death's necessity.

Alix Kates Shulman

#7. Within walking distance of any spot on Earth there's probably more than enough mystery to investigate in a lifetime.

Alix Kates Shulman

#8. For many decades my relations with my parents constituted unfinished business. I had dealt with them through sheer avoidance and guilt.

Alix Kates Shulman

#9. For two years I watched my parents' lives wind to a close. This made me aware of old age as a one stage, the final one, of a long journey.

Alix Kates Shulman

#10. When I became a feminist, when the movement started in the late sixties, I started writing because I had something urgent to say. My first novel, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, is the product of that urgency.

Alix Kates Shulman

#11. The world is abundant with food for us, and with everything we need, if only we just open our eyes. There's so much food that gets thrown out or never harvested.

Alix Kates Shulman

#12. Our society has very much limited our choices, even regarding the food we think acceptable.

Alix Kates Shulman

#13. As I experienced life on the island, without electricity, plumbing or telephone, I thought it was important to show that people can live as I did without dying or falling apart. I wanted people to understand that we don't need everything that our culture tells us we have to have to be satisfied.

Alix Kates Shulman

#14. One important part of historical recording is to get people of another generation to understand the feelings, the passion that went into social transformation. That's why oral history is so valuable.

Alix Kates Shulman

#15. Fiction is ideally suited to re-creating the important emotional aspects of history.

Alix Kates Shulman

#16. It's always difficult to write honestly of one's deepest feelings, particularly without the protective veil of fiction. But the more difficult, the more rewarding if one succeeds. Rewarding not only to the work but to one's peace of mind.

Alix Kates Shulman

#17. I don't really think myself that sex work is necessarily more demeaning than other kinds of demeaning work.

Alix Kates Shulman

#18. I see old age not as something to hide from or dread (though there is much to oppose in the usual treatment of the old) but rather as something to embrace as the natural and inevitable end.

Alix Kates Shulman

#19. My mirror image always had to be interpreted. And for that I sought my reflection in someone else's eyes.

Alix Kates Shulman

#20. Usually, ordinary histories don't get the emotional feel of a period. That's what a novel can do.

Alix Kates Shulman