Beth Chambers

“We spend too much time teaching girls to worry about what boys think of them. But the reverse is not the case. We don’t teach boys to care about being likable. We spend too much time telling girls that they cannot be angry or aggressive or tough, which is bad enough, but then we turn around and either praise or excuse men for the same reasons.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists

“Life for both sexes--and I looked at them, shouldering their way along the pavement--is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion as we are, it calls for confidence in oneself. Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself. By feeling that one has some innate superiority-- it may be wealth, or rank, a straight nose, or the portrait of a grandfather by Romney-- for there is no end to the pathetic devices of the human imagination-- over other people.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“Makes sense,” the young woman remarked. “Down here you live life to the fullest, while up there your life is empty, worthless. You need a lot of real time to buy just a minute of dreams.”
― Serge Brussolo, The Deep Sea Diver's Syndrome

“...explaining men still assume I am, in some sort of obscene impregnation metaphor, an empty vessel to be filled with their wisdom and knowledge.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me