Kamila

“Sometimes, family isn’t just what you’re born into—it’s also what you build in the aftermath of loss.”
― Shari Franke, The House of My Mother: A Daughter's Quest for Freedom

“A vampire is a creature of total want, of pure appetite, an antithesis to our self-denial, and I find myself picking through the bones of the story about the tension between these two states. Appetite is a dirty word for women, a cardinal sin. For food and sex, yes, but also for power, for ambition, for violence. What is Carmilla but a woman unleashed on any limits on her appetites? Does it make her monstrous? Is what we celebrate in men always monstrous in women? Is it also not monstrous to starve ourselves, to kill our appetite until we embody a living death?”
― Kat Dunn, Hungerstone

“You can’t beg the world to do what you want. You can’t ask it nicely. You must force the world. You must bend it to your will.”
― Grady Hendrix, Witchcraft for Wayward Girls

“Realizing your own mother was incapable of truly seeing you—of loving you for who you are rather than as an extension of herself—is a bitter pill to swallow. It’s the death of a fundamental childhood hope, the one where if you just try hard enough, Mommy will love you unconditionally. But in a strange way, this understanding has also been incredibly liberating. I now know that I could never have been “good” enough or “perfect” enough to make Ruby truly happy or proud. The insatiable void I was trying to fill wasn’t created by me, and it wasn’t mine to fix. That realization, as painful as it is, is the first step on the path to healing—for me, if not for her.”
― Shari Franke, The House of My Mother: A Daughter's Quest for Freedom