“This is what happens when the state intervenes in a person’s private life; it creates two separate personas. It compels you either to lead two separate lives, or to violate what’s imposed on youwhen the state isn’t looking.”

“This is what happens when the state intervenes in a person’s private life; it creates two separate personas. It compels you either to lead two separate lives, or to violate what’s imposed on youwhen the state isn’t looking.”

“So you’re the infamous Manal al-Sharif,” he said, eyeing me from behind his desk. “Aren’t you ashamed of what you did?”“Is driving a car something shameful?” I answered back.”

“Because my mother couldn't change my present, I decided to change my daughter's future”

“The rain begins with a single drop”

“Freedom is to live with dignity”

“We were like captive animals that had lost the will to fight. We even went so far as to defend the very constraints that they hadimposed upon us.”

“She took my papers, the papers that had followed me from the Khobar police station to jail, and pointed at a place where I was supposed to sign. On the paper there was a line for charges. In the blank space, someone had written “driving while female.”

“I got a text from my husband. “Manal, you are divorced,” it read. “Your papers are in the court of Khobar.” I was divorced in my absence, just as I had been married.”

“How beautiful it is to live in a world with no walls.”

“It is an amazing contradiction: a society that frowns on a woman going out without a man; that forces you to use separate entrances for universities, banks, restaurants, and mosques; that divides restaurants with partitions so that unrelated males and females cannot sit together; that same society expects you to get into a car with a man who is not your relative, with a man who is a complete stranger, by yourself and have him take you somewhere inside a locked car, alone.”

“Gradually, I realized that the ideas I had embraced and defended blindly all my life represented a singular, and highly radical, point of view. I began to question everything.”