Nawal El Saadawi

Everybody does wrong. Life is made up of right and wrong. We only come to know what’s right through our mistakes. It’s not weak and stupid to do wrong, but to continue doing wrong.

Who says murder does not require that a person be gentle?’

My father, a poor peasant farmer, who could neither read nor write, knew very few things in life. How to grow crops, how to sell a buffalo poisoned by his enemy before it died, how to exchange his virgin daughter for a dowry when there was still time, how to be quicker than his neighbour in stealing from the fields once the crop was ripe. How to bend over the headman’s hand and pretend to kiss it, how to beat his wife and make her bite the dust each night.