Serena

“Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.

And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time.

There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“*​As the legendary Betty White once said, “Why do people say ‘grow some balls?’ Balls are weak and sensitive. If you wanna be tough, grow a vagina. Those things can take a pounding.”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

“Was it my idea to have him hurt me, or did he just let me think it was?”
― Eliza Clark, Boy Parts

“Do I have to smash a glass over the head of every single man I come into contact with, just so I leave a fucking mark?”
― Eliza Clark, Boy Parts