Allison

“Once when I visited Buddy I found Mrs. Willard braiding a rug out of strips of wool from Mr. Willard’s old suits. She’d spent weeks on that rug, and I had admired the tweedy browns and greens and blues patterning the braid, but after Mrs. Willard was through, instead of hanging the rug on the wall the way I would have done, she put it down in place of her kitchen mat, and in a few days it was soiled and dull and indistinguishable from any mat you could buy for under a dollar in the five and ten. And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs. Willard’s kitchen mat.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“There may be a serial killer out there, Jewel. Someone murdering women and slicing them up.” Her expression never changed. She just looked at me, a stony gargoyle. Either she hadn’t understood, or she was dulled to thoughts of violence and pain, even death. Or perhaps she’d thrown on a mask, a facade to conceal a fear too real to validate by speech. I suspected the latter. “Jewel, is my friend in danger?” Our eyes locked. “She female, chère?”
― Kathy Reichs, Déjà Dead

“An indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness, filled her whole being with a vague anguish.”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening

“We brought up issues that concerned us as young feminists and womanists. Was Janie Crawford a good female role model or was she solely defined by the men in her life? Many of us argued that Janie did not have to be a role model at all. She simply had to be a fully realized and complex character, which she was.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God