Neo

“It's hazy but she remembers Jane telling her about drag shows she used to go to in the '70s, the balls, how queens would go hungry for weeks to buy gowns, the shimmering nightclubs that sometimes felt like the only safe places.
She lets Jane's memories transpose over here, now, like double exposed film, two different generations of messy, loud, brave and scared and brave again people stomping their feet and waving hands with bitten nails, all the things they share and all the things they don't, the things she has that people like Jane smashed windows and spat blood for.”
― Casey McQuiston, One Last Stop

“It reminded me of the anxiety I feel whenever I set a boundary with a friend or colleague. If they receive it gracefully or demonstrate their respect for it, I often fight an urge to express my “gratitude” by erasing the boundary.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood

“I want to be a body for you. I want to chase you, find you, I want to be eluded and teased and adored; I want to be defeated and victorious—I want you to cut me, sharpen me. I want to drink tea beside you in ten years or a thousand. Flowers grow far away on a planet they’ll call Cephalus, and these flowers bloom once a century, when the living star and its black-hole binary enter conjunction.I want to fix you a bouquet of them, gathered across eight hundred thousand years, so you can draw our whole engagement in a single breath, all the ages we’ve shaped together.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“The more I think about it, the more amazed I am that anyone realistically expects young women to easily say no to anything, least of all the sexual desires of men. If I struggle to say no to a lunch invitation, a work request, any number of less fraught entreaties, when I have some pressing personal reason, how can a teenager be expected to stop a man’s hand as it reaches under her clothes? Some do, of course, which seems miraculous.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood