Linda

“She had played too long a part unworthy of her. She had consented to be the Dona her world had demanded – a superficial, lovely creature, who walked, and talked, and laughed, accepting praise and admiration with a shrug of the shoulder as natural homage to her beauty, careless, insolent, deliberately indifferent, and all the while another Dona, a strange, phantom Dona, peered at her from a dark mirror and was ashamed. This other self knew that life need not be bitter, nor worthless, nor bounded by a narrow casement, but could be limitless, infinite – that it meant suffering, and love, and danger, and sweetness, and more than this even, much more.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Frenchman's Creek

“Christianity has made fools of women,’ she said. ‘Such a worship of weakness, such snivelling humiliation! Pagan women had strength. They rejoiced and conquered! And in order to conquer, no discomfort is unbearable. Nothing is too much to suffer.”
― Agatha Christie, Destination Unknown

“Life would be tedious without a vendetta or two.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Ultimate Collection: 20 Novels & 170+ Short Stories, Poetry, Letters and Autobiography

“I was glad to be beneath the notice of the tsar, who was young and handsome and cruel, but I would have liked to be pretty enough or charming enough that at least someone might want to marry me, instead of only taking me as a codicil to whatever begrudging dowry they could wring out of my father.”
― Naomi Novik, Spinning Silver