Porscha

“You don’t know what it really means to crawl into someone else’s life and stay there. You can’t see all the ways you’re going to get tangled, how you’re going to bond skin to skin. How the idea of separating will feel in five years, in ten—in fifteen. When Georgie thought about divorce now, she imagined lying side by side with Neal on two operating tables while a team of doctors tried to unthread their vascular systems.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Landline

“Her questions about whether Palmer would have raped her if she hadn’t been taking a forbidden bath on the job, if she’d remembered to lock the bathroom door, if she had tried to fight despite his knife—all her secret worry that it was these mistakes, her mistakes, that had caused her rape—were revealed to her as utter and total bullshit. If she’d been strutting down the street buck-naked, he didn’t have a right to touch her. No. If that woman across the street told her husband he was the worst fuck in history and gave him dog food for dinner, he didn’t have a right to hit her. No. Just because women were blamed for everything but good luck didn’t give nobody a right to do them wrong. And it didn’t mean they were supposed to take it when they were done wrong. All this woman-hurting shit had to stop. “Stop!”
― Barbara Neely, Blanche Passes Go

“The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us — the poet — whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free. Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary demand, the implementation of that freedom. However,”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“in an interview Butler has stated that the meaning of the amputation is clear enough: “I couldn’t really let her come all the way back. I couldn’t let her return to what she was, I couldn’t let her come back whole and that, I think, really symbolizes her not coming back whole. Antebellum slavery didn’t leave people quite whole.”1 Time”
― Octavia E. Butler, Kindred