Jessie

“Perhaps Louisa didn't need to detail what Marmee is so angry about nearly every day of her life. To be a woman is to know anger. To be underestimated, treated as inferior, have one's concerns classified as minor, to do all the work and receive none of the glory--how could one not feel angry? And yet in order to be a good woman who stands a chance at being loved and accepted, back then and still very much so now, one has to learn, as Marmee advises Jo, not to show it, even better not to feel it. Anger in a woman runs the risk of being pathologized, penalized, criminalized. A woman is supposed to bear the violence of patriarchy--both the bloody and the bloodless forms--with unflappable cheeriness (p.66)”
― Jenny Zhang, March Sisters: On Life, Death, and Little Women

“All my friends are changing religions and getting laid. I have been too patient.”
― Morgan Parker, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce

“...No one wants to listen to our sad stories unless they are smoothed over with a joke or nice melody. And even then, not always. No one wants to hear a woman talking or writing about pain in a way that suggests that it doesn't end. Without a pat solution, silver lining, or happy ending we're just complainers--downers who don't realize how good we actually have it.

Men's pain and existential angst are the stuff of myth and legends and narratives that shape everything we do, but women's pain is a backdrop--a plot development to push the story along for the real protagonists. Disrupting that story means we're needy or selfish, or worst of all, man-haters--as if after all men have done to women over the ages the mere act of not liking them for it is most offensive.”
― Jessica Valenti, Sex Object: A Memoir

“I cannot conceive of an enlightenment as a sustained state, static once achieved. But I have had moments of illumination as bright and flashing as fish. They arrive unannounced, without fanfare--say, stepping off the Sixth Avenue bus or walking the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The sky turns lavender in the evening. Is that divine? I know it is the beauty of the material world, that I feel it in my body, and that it means something to me--that my breath will catch in my throat, that it fades almost as soon as it arrives, that I will be stunned again at its sudden reappearance.”
― Sarah McColl, Joy Enough: A Memoir