Erica

“If you look at most female archetypes—the mother, the virgin, the whore—their power comes from their relation to men. But not the Witch. The Witch derives her power from nature. She calls forth her dreams with spells and incantations. With poetry. And I think that’s why we are frightened of them. What’s scarier to the world of men than a woman limited only by her imagination?”
― Ryan La Sala, Reverie

“But first you got to get out of the library sometimes and meet somebody, 'cause it ain't legal to marry books.”
― Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

“I carried the books to my room and read through the night. I loved the fiery pages of Mary Wollstonecraft, but there was a single line written by John Stuart Mill that, when I read it, moved the world: "It is a subject on which nothing final can be known." The subject Mill had in mind was the nature of women. Mill claimed that women have been coaxed, cajoled, shoved and squashed into a series of feminine contortions for so many centuries, that it is now quite impossible to define their natural abilities or aspirations.

Blood rushed to my brain; I felt an animating surge of adrenaline, of possibility, of a frontier being pushed outward. Of the nature of women, nothing final can be known. Never had I found such comfort in a void, in the black absence of knowledge. It seemed to say: whatever you are, you are woman.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“Time passes by, I do not care. “A breath of music or of a dream, of something that would make me almost feel, something that would make me not think. —Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (Penguin Classics, 2002) Originally published January 1, 1982.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet