lily

“But I didn’t and still don’t like making a cult of women’s knowledge, preening ourselves on knowing things men don’t know, women’s deep irrational wisdom, women’s instinctive knowledge of Nature, and so on. All that all too often merely reinforces the masculinist idea of women as primitive and inferior – women’s knowledge as elementary, primitive, always down below at the dark roots, while men get to cultivate and own the flowers and crops that come up into the light. But why should women keep talking baby talk while men get to grow up? Why should women feel blindly while men get to think?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“That's the point of a promise, he thinks. It wouldn't have any value, if you could see what it would cost you when you made it.”
― Hilary Mantel, The Mirror & the Light

“Часом мені видається, що головне наше непорозуміння з цивільними полягає в тому, що вони вважають війну подією, чітко позначеною датами початку і кінця. А всі, хто побували на війні, скажуть вам, що це насправді місце. Ви приходите і йдете, але місця не припиняють існувати лише тому, що ви на них не дивитеся.”
― T. Kingfisher, What Feasts at Night

“The trouble with England, he thinks, is that it's so poor in gesture. We shall have to develop a hand signal for ‘Back off, our prince is fucking this man's daughter.’ He is surprised that the Italians have not done it. Though perhaps they have, and he just never caught on.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall