Lauren Moye

“SWEET: granular, powdered, brown, slow like honey or molasses. The mouth-coating sugars in milk. Once, when we were wild, sugar intoxicated us, the first narcotic we craved and languished in. We’ve tamed, refined it, but the juice from a peach still runs like a flash flood.”
― Stephanie Danler, Sweetbitter

“I cling to the Milan women's understanding of these literary heroines as mothers. I wish I had learned to read them in this way years ago--with the same complicated, ambivalent, essential freedom that a daughter feels when she looks at her mother, understanding her as a figure that she simultaneously resists and depends on; a figure that she uses, cruelly and lovingly and gratefully, as the base from which to become something more.”
― Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

“It’s an epidemic with women your age. A gross disparity between the way that they speak and the quality of thoughts that they’re having about the world. They are taught to express themselves in slang, in clichés, sarcasm—all of which is weak language. The superficiality of the language colors the experiences, rendering them disposable instead of assimilated. And then to top it all, you call yourselves ‘girls.’ ”
― Stephanie Danler, Sweetbitter

“I hope you summon your courage and you invite your demons to tea, and you learn to listen to all their stories.”
― Nikita Gill, Fierce Fairytales: Poems and Stories to Stir Your Soul