Fragile

She battered her tiny fists to Feel Something

[quotefeeling]

“A book can teach you, a conversation can assure you, a poem can seduce you, a genius can inspire you but only you can save yourself.”

— Anthony Anaxagorou

[remanence-of-love]

[remanence-of-love]

[thepersonalquotes]

[quotefeeling]

“Forgive yourself for the blindness that put you in the path of those who betrayed you. Sometimes a good heart doesn’t see the bad.”

— Unknown

[perfectquote]

“Today is the oldest you’ve ever been and the youngest you’ll ever be again.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

[perfectquote]

“Don’t allow yourself to be a victim. Take control of your life. Let go of people who serve you no good. Start doing things to make you happy.”

— Reyna Biddy

[gatheringbones]

there was this whole wave during early cis lesbian feminist writing where they grappled with the same topics….. how can you hold a victimized person accountable? is an oppressed adult responsible for the quality of their relationships? how do the limitations of different people overlap and cancel each other out and when does it become toxic? how much can you really judge and blame a scared broke beaten-down woman who was raised her whole life to be a shrinking stuffed animal?

now new generations of women who were locked out of/weren’t born in time for the last round are picking up the same threads 🥰

[thoughtkick]

“The worst mistake that you can make, is to walk away from the person who actually stood there and waited for you.”

— Unknown

[perfectquote]

“If we wait until we’re ready, we’ll be waiting the rest of our lives.”

— Lemony Snicket; The Ersatz Elevator

[lovingsylvia]

PSA!

I keep seeing this quote shared again and again all over the internet labeled as coming from Sylvia Plath's novel The Bell Jar (1963)!

No clue when or how or even why it happened, but it has been wrongly attributed to Plath a very long time ago!

And yet, you won't find it in The Bell Jar, because it's coming from Oscar Wilde's short story "The Canterville Ghost", written in 1887!

The whole paragraph reads:

"Virginia's eyes grew dim with tears, and she hid her face in her hands.

"You mean the Garden of Death," she whispered.

"Yes, death. Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no to-morrow. To forget time, to forget life, to be at peace. You can help me. You can open for me the portals of death's house, for love is always with you, and love is stronger than death is."

Virginia trembled, a cold shudder ran through her, and for a few moments there was silence. She felt as if she was in a terrible dream."

You can check both texts for yourself here:

&

[quotefeeling]

“I’m going to tell you a secret: You don’t have to believe every thought that pops into your head.”

— B. Dave Walters

[gatheringbones]

["The next Alabama flash point came in Selma in 1965, when police went on well-publicized rampages against demonstrators, and Jimmy Lee Jackson, a young Black man, and James Reeb, a white minister, died at the hands of racist whites. People from all across the country flocked to Selma to join the march to Montgomery. Then Klansmen shot to death Viola Luizo, a white volunteer who was driving participants back to Selma.

My brother said Luizo was a whore and deserved to die. "Nobody deserves to die," I yelled, picking up whatever was nearest my hand (keys? a fork?) and throwing it at his head. Sometimes my mother would follow me to the kitchen and tell me she agreed with me, but at the dinner table I was on my own. After a while, I just stopped talking and plotted to get out of Alabama. Years later, my youngest sister reduced me to tears in the middle of the kind of white southern family arguments where politics mixes with inchoate currents of emotion: "You were always crazy."

"Race was always somewhere inside southern whites' family arguments," a white woman observed to me years later in a comment I recognized immediately as true. A Black lesbian at an anti-racist workshop provided elaboration. White people use Black people to draw boundaries in homes where family members' identities are enmeshed, she explained, in response to a white woman's pleased story of how upset she had made her parents in adolescence by dating Black men."]

Mab Segrest, Memoir of a Race Traitor, The New Press, 1994

[quotespile]

“Let ’im hear me, I say. If he ever listened to poor colored women the world would be a different place, I can tell you.”

— Alice Walker, The Color Purple

[perfectquote]

“Your peace is more important than driving yourself crazy trying to understand why something happened the way it did. Let it go.”

— Mandy Hale

[solarmorrigan]

*hitting my brain with a rolled up newspaper* I am allowed to be annoying! I am allowed to be wrong! I am allowed to take up space! Not! Everyone! Has! To! Like! Me!

[quotefeeling]

“Please don’t expect me to always be good and kind and loving. There are times when I will be cold and thoughtless and hard to understand.”

— Sylvia Plath