The Book Maven

“You are a single woman; you intend to remain one. You’ve acquired enough sexual experience to feel you belong to your times. You do not have children; you never intended to. Sustained romantic intensities have not been for you. Your explanation (not an untrue one,though not quite sufficient) is that you have let yourself be shaped by so many conventions, expectations, and requirements (institution’s, people’s), by so much dread of disapproval, that the discipline of solitude—severe solitude—has been required to give you the sense of an independent selfhood. The intensities of friendship suit you better. Friendship’s choreography is for multiple partners: for varied groups and surprisingly sustained duets.”
― Margo Jefferson, Negroland

“Not that I bother much with dress myself. Women just dress to please the men, and I'd never stoop to that. I have had a real placid, comfortable life, dearie, and it's just because I never cared a cent what the men thought.”
― L.M. Montgomery

“These oldest pictures have been in the album so long that they are stuck to the pages. To try and remove the pictures would ruin them.”
― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

“I had (and have?) this void, this cavern of loneliness inside me that I have spent my whole life trying to fill. I was willing to do most anything if that boy would ease my loneliness, I wanted to feel like he and I belonged to each other, but each time we were together and then after, I felt quite the opposite. And still, I was drawn to him.”
― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body