Alexis Bauer Kolak

“man brought nothing into this world and he’ll carry nothing out. Sometime we care about stuff too much. We worry when there’s nothing to worry about.”
― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

“I am unassailable. I intimidate. I am a polar icebreaker. I walk and climb and lift things, I can open your jar, I can absorb blows - literal and metaphorical - meant for other women, smaller women, breakable women, women who need me. My bones feel like iron - heavy, but strong.”
― Lindy West, Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman

“He was respectful, though—he wasn’t rude to people, he wasn’t an angry person, he didn’t live there. Some people full-on live in destruction, others buy some real estate and walk around in anger for a little while. My dad would just visit.”
― Lisa Marie Presley, From Here to the Great Unknown

“You light a fire early in your girlhood. You stoke it and tend it. You protect it at all costs. You don’t let it rage into a mountain of light, because that’s not becoming of a girl. You keep it secret. You let it burn. You look into the eyes of other girls and see their fires flickering there, offer conspiratorial nods, never speak aloud of a near-unbearable heat, a growing conflagration. You tend the flame because if you don’t you’re stuck, in the cold, on your own, doomed to seasonal layers, doomed to practicality, doomed to this is just the way things are, doomed to settling and understanding and reasoning and agreeing and seeing it another way and seeing it his way and seeing it from all the other ways but your own.”
― Rachel Yoder, Nightbitch