Reading Women

celebrating women authors

[marthajefferson]

““Almost every women I have ever met has a secret belief that she is just on the edge of madness, that there is some deep, crazy part within her, that she must be on guard constantly against ‘losing control’ — of her temper, of her appetite, of her sexuality, of her feelings, of her ambition, of her secret fantasies, of her mind.”

— Elana Dykewomon, “Notes for a Magazine,” Sinister Wisdom #36 (Winter 1988/89). (via songsforgorgons)

[awed-frog]

Hey, do you know that feeling of hitching up a long skirt so you don’t fall on your face when walking upstairs, and then you immediately become a wretched yet resolute Jane Austen character? It’s a universal thing, right?

[reading-women]

Whoever knows you when you are young can look inside you and see the person you once were, and maybe still are at certain times.

Alice Hoffman, The Marriage of Opposites

[reading-women]

She was so much better at being alone; being alone came more naturally to her. She led a life of deliberate solitude, and if occasional loneliness crept in, she knew how to work her way out of that particular divot. Or even better, how to sink in and absorb its particular comforts.

Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, The Nest

[reading-women]

The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, if you can only see it.

Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies

[reading-women]

She had never been without a book for as long as she could remember.

Kate Atkinson, A God in Ruins

[reading-women]

Because it’s true: more than the highlights, the bright events, it was in the small and the daily where she’d found life.

Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

[reading-women]

Do all kids have to worry about their parents’ mental health? The way society is set up, parents are supposed to be the grown-up ones and look after the kids, but a lot of times it’s the other way around.

Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

[reading-women]

Beauty in its most completeness is never found in a single body but is something shared instead between more than one body.

Ali Smith, How to Be Both

[reading-women]

She was smart enough to want more but tired enough to accept the way things were

Roxane Gay, Difficult Women

[reading-women]

A truth was being revealed to me: that I had always tried to attach myself to the light of other people, that I had never had any light of my own. I experienced myself as a kind of shadow.

Zadie Smith, Swing Time

[reading-women]

If you don't understand, ask questions. If you're uncomfortable about asking questions, say you are uncomfortable about asking questions and then ask anyway. It's easy to tell when a question is coming from a good place. Then listen some more. Sometimes people just want to feel heard. Here's to possibilities of friendship and connection and understanding.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

[reading-women]

The feeling that she had never really lived in this world caught her by surprise. It was a fact. She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had done nothing but endure.

Han Kang, The Vegetarian

[reading-women]

I began to ask each time: "What's the worst that could happen to me if I tell this truth?" Unlike women in other countries, our breaking silence is unlikely to have us jailed, "disappeared" or run off the road at night. Our speaking out will irritate some people, get us called bitchy or hypersensitive and disrupt some dinner parties. And then our speaking out will permit other women to speak, until laws are changed and lives are saved and the world is altered forever. Next time, ask: What's the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare. Once you start to speak, people will yell at you. They will interrupt you, put you down and suggest it's personal. And the world won't end. And the speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don't miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And you will still flirt and paint your nails, dress up and party, because, as I think Emma Goldman said, "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution." And at last you'll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.

Audre Lorde

[reading-women]

Somehow, something always happens just before things get to the very worst. It is as if Magic did it. If I could only just remember that always. The worse thing never quite comes.

Frances Hodgson Burnett, A Little Princess

[reading-women]

I would ask if you miss me like I miss you, so that there is not another spot in all the world that seems to mean anything at all, but where you are.

Jo Baker, Longbourn

[reading-women]

Or was it, as everyone told her, and as she must believe, all in her head? And so what if it was - wasn’t everything in her head real too? What if there was no demonstrable reality? What if there was nothing beyond the mind?

Kate Atkinson, Life After Life