t4stier

“Sometimes there’s nothing better on earth than someone asking you a question.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“A golden cage is still a cage.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“I wake sometimes in the dark terrified by my life's precariousness, its thready breath. Beside me, my husband's pulse beats at his throat; in their beds, my children's skin shows every faintest scratch. A breeze would blow them over, and the world is filled with more than breezes: diseases and disasters, monsters and pain in a thousand variations. I do not forget either my father and his kind hanging over us, bright and sharp as swords, aimed at our tearing flesh. If they do not fall on us in spite and malice, then they will fall by accident or whim. My breath fights in my throat. How can I live on beneath such a burden of doom? I rise then and go to my herbs. I create something, I transform something. My witchcraft is as strong as ever, stronger. This too is good fortune. How many have such power and leisure and defense as I do? Telemachus comes from our bed to find me. He sits with me in the greensmelling darkness, holding my hand. Our faces are both lined now, marked with our years. Circe, he says, it will be all right. It is not the saying of an oracle or a prophet. They are words you might speak to a child. I have heard him say them to our daughters, when he rocked them back to sleep from a nightmare, when he dressed their small cuts, soothed whatever stung. His skin is familiar as my own beneath my fingers. I listen to his breath, warm upon the night air, and somehow I am comforted. He does not mean it does not hurt. He does not mean we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“1. Men are easy to please but are not pleased for long before some new novelty must delight them.

2. Men are easy to make passionate but are unable to sustain it.

3. Men are always seeking soft women but find their lives in ruins without strong women.

4. Men must be occupied at all times otherwise they make mischief.

5. Men deem themselves weighty and women light. Therefore it is simple to tie a stone round their necks and drown them should they become too troublesome.

6. Men are best left in groups by themselves where they will entirely wear themselves out in drunkenness and competition. While this is taking place a woman may carry on with her own life unhindered.

7. Men are never never to be trusted with what is closest to your heart, and if it is they who are closest to your heart, do not tell them.

8. If a man asks you for money, do not give it to him.

9. If you ask a man for money and he does not give it to you, sell his richest possession and leave at once.

10. Your greatest strength is that every man believes he knows the sum and possibility of every woman.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry