Lydia

“I ask my father to read an article about male entitlement and emotional labor.
"Can you just tell me what it says?" he says.”
― Martha Grover, The End of My Career

“Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only self-reliant women love when they abandon their self-reliance. When a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength she is worse than a weak woman who has never any strength to throw away. One source of her inadequacy is the novelty of the occasion. She has never had practice in making the best of such a condition. Weakness is doubly weak by being new.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“When a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“George's son had done his work so thoroughly that he was considered too good a workman to live, and was, in fact, taken and tragically shot at twelve o'clock that same day—another instance of the untoward fate which so often attends dogs and other philosophers who follow out a train of reasoning to its logical conclusion, and attempt perfectly consistent conduct in a world made up so largely of compromise.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd