Women Talking (2022) - Quotes

Unconditional Love and Mutual Affection

August: Ona! I will always love you.

Woman on the Path: She loves you too, August.

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Navigating the Risks of Young Masculinity

Salome: Why would boys of 13 and 14 be left behind? Why wouldn't they leave with us?

Agata: Surely, we don't have to be afraid of the boys of this age.

Ona: August, you're the boys teacher. What is your feeling about this? Do boys of that age pose a risk to our girls and women?

August: Yes. Possibly. Boys of 13 or 14 are capable of causing great damage to girls and women. And to each other. It is a brash age. They are possessed of reckless urges, physical exuberance, intense curiosity that often results in injury. Unbridled emotion, including deep tenderness and empathy, and not quite enough experience or brain development to fully understand or appreciate the consequences of their words or actions. They are like the yearlings. Young, awkward, gleeful, powerful. They're tall, muscular, sexually inquisitive creatures, with little impulse control, but they are children. They are children and they can be taught. I'm a two-bit schoolteacher, a failed farmer, and above all a believer. And I believe that with guidance, firm love and patience, these boys are capable of relearning their roles as males in the colony. I believe in what the great poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge thought were the cardinal rules of early education. To work by love and so generate love. To habituate the mind to intellectual accuracy and truth. To excite imaginative power. He said, Little is taught by contest or dispute, everything by sympathy and love. I believe the boys should be allowed to leave with the women... Providing the women choose to leave.

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Desires and Contentment in Conflict

Scarface Janz: We have everything we want here.

Mariche: No.

Scarface Janz: Want less!

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Misunderstanding in Expressing Frustration

Salome: Fuck it off!

Autje: I think it's "Fuck off," actually.

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Forgiveness and Its Consequences in Faith

Scarface Janz: If we do not forgive these men, we give up our place in Heaven.

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Faith Beyond Rules and Life

Greta: Leaving is how we demonstrate our faith. We are leaving because our faith is stronger than the rules. Bigger than our life.

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Responding to Prey with Instincts

Greta: We have been preyed upon like animals. Maybe we should respond like animals.

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Women Talking - Greta

Greta: Forgiveness can look like permission.

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Individual Journeys Shape Unique Narratives

Autje: [to Ona's baby] Your story will be different from ours.

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The Weight of a Life in Hours

Autje: They said later, it should have taken longer to pack up a whole life. It was disappointing to realize that everything that ever mattered to you could be gathered up in a few short hours.

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Misunderstood Suffering and Accusations of Guilt

Autje: The attacks were originally attributed to ghosts and demons. When the women woke up feeling drowsy and in pain, their bodies bruised and bleeding, many believed they were being made to suffer as punishment for their sins. Many accused the women of lying for attention or to cover up adultery.

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Contemplating Perception of Self and Divinity

Autje: We saw our bodies from above, not knowing if this was how God saw us, or because we didn't want to be in them.

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The Duality of Laughter and Tears

Autje: Sometimes I think people laugh as hard as they'd like to cry.

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The Silence Surrounding Our Bodies' Trauma

Autje: [narrating] We didn't talk about our bodies. So when something like this happened there was no language for it. And without language for it, there was a gaping silence. And in that gaping silence was the real horror.

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Confronting Hypocrisy in Communication

Mariche: It was a yes or no question. You shit like any other man, why don't you talk like one?

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Defending Children Without Seeking Forgiveness

Salome: We do not need to be forgiven by the men of God for protecting our children from the depraved actions of vicious men, who are often the very same men we're meant to ask for forgiveness.

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Desperation Leads to Dark Thoughts

Salome: I will become a murderer if I stay.

Questioning the Nature of Their Existence

Salome: We know we were made to sleep with cow tranquilizer!

Unforgivable Actions and Lasting Pain

Salome: I cannot forgive them. I will never forgive them.

A Mother's Vow to Protect Her Child

Salome: I will destroy any living thing that harms my child. I will tear it limb from limb. I will desecrate its body and I will bury it alive. I will challenge God on the spot to strike me dead if I have sinned by protecting my child from evil, and my destroying that evil that it may not harm another. I will lie, I will hunt, I will kill. I will dance on graves and I will burn forever in hell before I allow another man to satisfy his violent urges with the body of my four year old child.