Maeve Hayes

and for the record, I made my own hell

[maivhayes]

I want auroras and sad prose

I want to watch wisteria grow right over my bare feet 'cause I haven't moved in years

And I want you right here

[maivhayes]

“Please picture me

In the weeds

Before I learned civility

I used to scream

Ferociously

Any time I wanted”

[maivhayes]

"Men aren’t born destroyers. Many men imbibe scripts of toxic masculinity almost from birth. And on their way to becoming men, they enact those toxic scripts in the lives of the women around them."

— Brittney Cooper, Eloquent Rage

[maivhayes]

"The angst I felt over being deemed simultaneously too good and not good enough set me on the path to feminism."

— Brittney Cooper, Eloquent Rage

[maivhayes]

"Do you ask the disposition I would have you possess?… Sue for your rights and privileges. Know the reason you cannot attain them. Weary them with your importunities. You can but die if you make the attempt; and we shall certainly die if you do not."

— Brittney Cooper, Eloquent Rage

[maivhayes]

"I always had this idea that you should never give up a happy middle in the hopes of a happy ending, because there is no such thing as a happy ending. Do you know what I mean? There is so much to lose."

— John Green, Let It Snow

[maivhayes]

"All I had imagined for my personal life at age twenty was that I would get married, have three kids, and enjoy taking care of a family. It’s laughable now since I don’t particularly like children, unless they belong to people I love. I had nuclear-family dreams because I had bought into the notion that the way I grew up—in a single-parent home, with a mismatched family of aunties and uncles and cousins and grandparents bringing up the rear—was not optimal. So part of my success story involved having it all—the house, the car, the career, the pretty man, and the kids. It’s fine to want all those things. But it’s dangerous to get them in a context where you have no analysis of how and why those are your desires."

— Eloquent Rage, Brittney Cooper

[maivhayes]

“He was swimming in a sea of other people’s expectations. Men had drowned in seas like that.”

— Robert Jordan

[maivhayes]

“Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow, it empties today of its strength.”

— Corrie Ten Boom

[maivhayes]

"If you say fuck the patriarchy but you don’t ride for other women, then it might be more true that the patriarchy has fucked you, seducing you with the belief that men care more about your well-being than women do."

— Brittney Cooper, Eloquent Rage

[maivhayes]

"We know what it means to face horrific violence and trauma from both our communities and our nation-state and carry on anyway. But we also scream, and cry, and hurt, and mourn, and struggle. We get heartbroken, our feelings get stepped on, our dreams get crushed. We get angry, and we express that anger. We know what it means to feel invisible."

— Brittney Cooper, Eloquent Rage

[maivhayes]

"Maybe it was actually an unspoken instant agreement between the four women on the balcony: No woman should pay for the accidental death of that particular man. Maybe it was an involuntary, atavistic response to thousands of years of violence against women. Maybe it was for every rape, every brutal backhanded slap, every other Perry that had come before this one."

— Liane Moriarty, Big Little Lies

[maivhayes]

"How do you keep safe when your whole day is as wide and empty as the sky?"

— Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

[maivhayes]

"I read once about a kind of fungus that grows in trees. The fungus begins to encroach on the systems that carry water and nutrients up from the roots to the branches. It disables them one by one—it crowds them out. Soon, the fungus—and only the fungus—is carrying the water, and the chemicals, and everything else the tree needs to survive. At the same time it is decaying the tree slowly from within, turning it minute by minute to rot."

"That is what hatred is. It will feed you and at the same time turn you to rot."

— Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium

[maivhayes]

“All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.”

— George Orwell, Animal Farm

[maivhayes]

‘More than friends, eh? More than friends . . . You know, my mother once told me that half of the hatred that springs up between people is rooted in this mistaken belief that there’s any human relationship more sacred than friendship.’

— Helen Oyeyemi, Gingerbread

[maivhayes]

"I love my home.

But it might be a sinkhole

trying to feast

quicksand

mouth pried open;

I hunger for stable ground,

somewhere else."

— Elizabeth Acevedo, Clap When You Land