Alice

“Puberty in the 2000s was Paris Hilton’s sex tape and Britney Spears’s crotch shots and Amy Winehouse drunk on Never Mind the Buzzcocks, and if any of that happened now we would have found a way to celebrate it, but then it was disgusting.”
― Caroline O'Donoghue, The Rachel Incident

“We have been trained for goodness. Men, meanwhile, have been trained for power.”
― Elise Loehnen, On Our Best Behavior: The Price Women Pay to Be Good

“That question is one you're going to be asking yourself for the rest of your life. It's not just going to answer itself with old age. Loneliness, self-doubt, the purpose of life. Whenever you think about these things, you'll feel tormented and terrified that there are no answers, that you'll never figure it out. But there's something even scarier than not knowing. And that's going through life without ever asking.”
― Sohn Won-Pyung, Counterattacks at Thirty

“Intellectually, I knew her criticisms of my body said more about her than they did about me; I knew they reflected the wider cultural values we’d both been steeped in all our lives that equated thinness with female beauty and, indeed, value. But they cut me to the core anyway. They heightened my sense of loss and longing for my mom, which was particularly acute in the years when I was becoming a mother myself. She would’ve said I was beautiful. She would’ve commiserated and assured me I was doing great. She would’ve told me everything was going to be okay, regardless of my weight. She would’ve been everything that Joan was not.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Two Women Walk into a Bar