Dora

“Were there once only women warriors, Mother?” “Don’t know.” “Oh.” I started to get up. “Makes sense,” she said. “Why?” “Who else should take a life? No man ever brought a child out of his body.”
― Catherine M. Wilson, The Warrior's Path

“I think virginity is fine, just as I think having sex is fine. I don't really care what women do sexually, and neither should you. In fact, that's the point. I believe that a young woman's decision to have sex, or not, shouldn't impact how she's seen as a moral actor.”
― Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women

“Those who did not know the ocean well forgot its solidity, its brutality.”
― Robert Galbraith, Career of Evil

“At thirteen desperately watching TV, curling my long legs under me, desperately reading books, callow adolescent that I was, trying (desperately!) to find someone in books, in movies, in life, in history, to tell me it was O.K. to be ambitious, O.K. to be loud, O.K. to be Humphrey Bogart (smart and rudeness), O.K. to be James Bond (arrogance), O.K. to be Superman (power), O.K. to be Douglas Fairbanks (swashbuckling), to tell me self-love was all right, to tell me I could love God and Art and Myself better than anything on earth and still have orgasms.”
― Joanna Russ, The Female Man