Pronouns Quotes

“I say "her," but the pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented; what came to Charles was not a pronoun, but eyes, looks, the line of the hair over a temple, a nimble step, a sleeping face.”
― John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman, The French Lieutenant’s Woman

“By claiming that our words are too hard to understand, the media perpetuates the idea that WE are too hard to understand, and suggests that there’s no point in trying.”
― C. N. Lester

“Getting Pretty Panties Ripped Requires Real Damn Initiative. Or--general, personal, possessive, reflexive, reciprocal, relative, demonstrative, and interrogative!”
― Christina Lauren, Josh and Hazel's Guide to Not Dating

“The point wasn't that if the outer world were schooled appropriately re: the characters' preferred pronouns, everything would be right as rain. Because if the outsiders called the characters "he", it would be a different kind of he. Words change depending on who speaks them; there is no cure.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

“Let me tell you what happened, the way it looked from inside my head. The world slowed down, like it does in the movies when someone is getting shot and the filmmaker wants you to feel every bullet enter your body. The words echoed in my ears over and over and over. Attached to that simple pronoun was the word failure, quickly followed by the word freak. All the joy sucked out of my life in that instant, and every moment I'd ever fucked up crashed down on my head. Here was someone who'd never known me as a man, referring to me as a man.”
― Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us

“I want the you no one else can see, the you so close the third person never need apply.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

“We wear masks not to be something different, but to deny the ‘something different’ that we are without the mask.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“If you claim something to be what it is not because you dislike what it is, you have forever forfeited what it could have been in a trade-off for what it will never be.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“That's an alien. I just saw an alien. Not just an alien ship. An alien being. I mean- just his claw- er... hand. But yeah.

Well, I say "his hand", but maybe it's her hand. Or some other pronoun I don't have a word for. They might have seventeen biological sexes, for all I know. Or none. No one ever talks about the really hard parts of first contact with intelligent alien life: pronouns. I'm going to go with "he" for now, because it just seems rude to call a thinking being "it."

Also, until I hear otherwise, his name is Rocky.”
― Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary

“You'll know, even as I use the word "Evan," that Evan had a name before this. It's a name I won't tell you. To utter it would be to disrespect all the work he has done to find his way to Evan. The more you get to know him, the more you'll see the pronouns, and the names, don't matter at all. Evan teaches me that there is an endless quality to truth; the external details constantly shift as we move closer to the emotional centers of our lives. And you can try to explain it, but it will be no easier than explaining infinity. Not everything can be explained. Some things must be accepted.”
― Jessi Hempel, The Family Outing: A Memoir

“We could paraphrase Frost and say that if you’re not at home in a pronoun, you are not at home anywhere in the world.”
― Matthew Zapruder

“I hate labels, hate pronouns. They're so confining. They like some bird cage, y'know? Or prescription medicine. Some days I feel one ole way and some days another. Ain't that natural? Just call me they, them, whatever you need to make your ma happy.”
― Kyle Labe, Butterflies Behind Glass & Other Stories

“No, no, not 'she,' he reminded himself. Cam lived as a boy, and though Merik wasn't used to that yet–to thinking of Cam as a 'he'–they had weeks of travel ahead, Plenty of time which Merik could retrain his mind.”
― Susan Dennard, Windwitch

“People also tend to refer to nonhuman animals as “it” or sometimes “he,” regardless of the individual’s sex. This one-sex-fits-all approach objectifies and
denies individuality. In fact, nonhuman animals who are exploited for food industries are usually females. Such unfortunate nonhumans are not only exploited for their flesh, but also for their nursing milk, reproductive eggs, and ability to produce young. When guessing the gender of a nonhuman animal forced through slaughterhouse gates, we would greatly increase odds of being correct if we referred to such unfortunate individuals as “she.”
― Lisa Kemmerer

“People also tend to refer to nonhuman animals as “it” or sometimes “he,” regardless of the individual’s sex. This one-sex-fits-all approach objectifies and denies individuality. In fact, nonhuman animals who are exploited for food industries are usually females. Such unfortunate nonhumans are not only exploited for their flesh, but also for their nursing milk, reproductive eggs, and ability to produce young. When guessing the gender of a nonhuman animal forced through slaughterhouse gates, we would greatly increase odds of being correct if we referred to such unfortunate individuals as 'she'.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Sister Species: Women, Animals and Social Justice

“The male pronoun (he, him, his) is used exclusively throughout the second edition of the AD&D game rules. We hope this won't be construed by anyone to be an attempt to exclude females from the game or imply their exclusion. Centuries of use have neutered the male pronoun. In written material it is clear, concise, and familiar. Nothing else is.”
― David Zeb Cook, Player's Handbook

“Whenever I get a free period, I set off to the college library and work systematically through the Dewey system, taking each book off the shelf one by one and adding, in black biro, ‘/she’ and ‘/woman’ to every ‘he’ and ‘man’. I do this for the whole three years but I never finish (and luckily I never get caught). I do it with righteous indignation; there is hardly one book in the whole library that doesn’t use only the generic male pronoun. As if only men think and feel and discover and read. We’ve been taught on this course that every single mark and sound on film or the page is important and laden with meaning, and yet every book in this library talks only to men. Language is important: it shapes minds, it can include, exclude, incite, hurt and destroy. If language isn’t powerful, why not call your teacher a cunt?”
― Viv Albertine, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys

“Gathering eir courage, e bowed and placed the basket of honey and fine handspun yarns at the witch's feet.
'I know who you are and what you seek,' the witch said in a deep melodious voice. 'It is inside my home. Take your cloak and go inside. When you find what you want, you will know the price you must pay.”
― Cedar McCloud, The Thread That Binds

“Giants in Jeans Sonnet 52

Humanhood isn't him, her or them,
Humanhood requires realization beyond sex.
Pronouns may be a step in the right direction,
But they are not passport for arrogance and disrespect.
The purpose is to erase hate from society,
And we ain't gonna do that by passing judgment.
If we want there to be equity and acceptance,
We must learn to trample first our own arrogance.
Rebelling for the sake of rebelling achieves nothing,
Arrogance only produces just another bitter creature.
In trying to fight against prejudice and oppression,
Be cautious that you don't end up as the new oppressor.
Revolution is the foundation of civilization's evolution,
But it must be rooted in gentleness, not cancellation.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Giants in Jeans: 100 Sonnets of United Earth

“You can’t change the hand that you were dealt. The fact is, there’s only one deck and only one dealer, and you are neither.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“The pronoun that identifies you is the one stitched through your DNA, not the one woven through your imagination.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Our conviction that God made a mistake is shaped by our inability to see the utterly ingenious purpose that lays behind His design. And we don’t see that purpose because our focus is riveted on the effort to correct something that was never wrong.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“নিরপেক্ষতার একটা মাপকাঠি হল সর্বনাম, খেয়াল করুন কেউ সেটি কিভাবে ব্যবহার করছে।”
― Aishik Rehman

“Orlando had become a woman—there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity. Their faces remained, as their portraits above, practically the same. His memory—but in future we must, for conventions sake, say 'her' for 'his,' and 'she' for 'he'—her memory then, went back through all the events of her past life without encountering any obstacle.”
― Virginia Wolf

“If saying a different pronoun is that difficult for us due to the cultural programming we've had around gender, we can start to get a picture of the power of the structures trapping our [trans] clients.”
― Sam Hope, Person-Centred Counselling for Trans and Gender Diverse People: A Practical Guide

“HAPPY TRANS AWARENESS WEEK! I'm trans and intersex people exist! MY PRONOUNS ARE THEY/THEM ZI ZIR ”
― Minna Nizam

“Pronouns aside, there are also some languages that are essentially gender-free, containing very few words that make reference to a person’s “natural” gender at all. Yoruba, a language spoken in Nigeria, has neither gendered pronouns nor the dozens of gendered nouns we have in English, including son, daughter, host, hostess, hero, heroine, etc. Instead, the most important distinction in Yoruba is the age of the person you’re talking about. So, instead of saying brother and sister, you would say older sibling and younger sibling, or egbun and aburo. The only Yoruba words that make reference to a person’s gender (or sex, as it were) are obirin and okorin, meaning “one who has a vagina” and “one who has a penis.” So if you really wanted to call someone your sister, you would have to say egbon mi obirin, or “my older sibling, the one with the vagina.” When you get that specific, it makes our English obsession with immediately identifying people’s sexes seem just plain creepy.”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

“You do not possess the power to make something what it is not. But you do have the power to believe the lie that you did, which makes it difficult to embrace the reality that you cannot and should not.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“The army of the disillusioned will not find themselves in retreat before those who confront them on the distortion of their identity. Rather, this army will find themselves in retreat before the person that they’ve always been that they betrayed in the attempt to become the person that they will never be.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Identifying myself as a fishing pole will not catch any fish.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough