lola

“Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it's all a male fantasy: that you're strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride

“There's a bottom of good sense, Mr Franklin, in our conduct to our mothers, when they first start us on the journey of life. We are all of us more or less unwilling to be brought into the world. And we are all of us right.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone

“A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river
                    but then he’s still left
with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away
                                                                        but then he’s still left with his hands.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“Thus to get the princess, to live
with her joyfully and happily day in and day out (for it is also conceivable that
the knight of resignation might get the princess, but that his soul had discerned the
impossibility of their future happiness), thus to live joyfully and happily every
instant by virtue of the absurd, every instant to see the sword hanging over the
head of the beloved, and yet to find repose in the pain of resignation, but joy by
virtue of the absurd—this is marvellous.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling