mari

“Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it's all a male fantasy: that you're strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride

“Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“From this new and intimate perspective, she learned a simple, obvious thing she had always known, and everyone knew; that a person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended.”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement

“One flesh, one end, bitch.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Gideon the Ninth