Elise

“I sometimes watch the evening news on television and think all the world’s problems can be boiled down to one thing: the behavior of people with a Y chromosome.”
― Grayson Perry, The Descent of Man

“What were you before you met me?"
"I think I was drowning"
"And what are you now?"
"Water”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Is it why you feel everything and love harder and fight more ferociously than anyone else? Is it why you are the love of your sister’s life? Why you’ll be a writer of much more, one day, than a small supermarket column? How you can be my fiercest bloody critic, and someone with so much compassion she’ll buy glasses she doesn’t need because the man fell off his stool. Martha, when you are in a room, nobody wants to talk to anybody else. Why is that, if not for the life you have lived, as someone who has been refined by fire? And you have been loved for all your adult life by one man. That is a gift not many people get, and his stubborn, persistent love isn’t in spite of you and your pain. It is because of who you are, which is, in part, a product of your pain. You do not have to believe me about that but I know—I do know, Martha—that your pain has made you brave enough to carry on. If you want to, you can put all of this right. Start with your sister.”
― Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss

“We should not deny males the opportunity to nurture and care, just as we should not deny females the opportunity to kill and maim in the name of Western democracy, if they fancy it.”
― Grayson Perry, The Descent of Man