Daring to drive Quotes

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“My scars teach me that I am stronger than what caused them.”

“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 odd it is that we judge a woman by her clothes and the place she eats lunch and the subjects she talks about with her colleagueson her coffee break, yet we don’t judge a man if he doesn’t grow his beard or if he works with women or speaks to them. Why do Saudi women allow subjugation to a man and adhere to men’s rules and conditions? Why did I?”

“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.”