jo

“He listened to the next stream of invective and then voiced his doubt as to the likelihood of St. Colman actually putting boils on the arse of the man who’d been unfortunate enough to deliver warped beams to Casey Riordan, being that the saint in question was responsible for hanged men, horned cattle and horses.”
― Cindy Brandner, Where Butterflies Dream

“The accounts of rape, wife beating, forced childbearing, medical butchering, sex-motivated murder, forced prostitution, physical mutilation, sadistic psychological abuse, and other commonplaces of female experience that are excavated from the past or given by contemporary survivors should leave the heart seared, the mind in anguish, the conscience in upheaval. But they do not. No matter how often these stories are told, with whatever clarity or eloquence, bitterness or sorrow, they might as well have been whispered in wind or written in sand: they disappear, as if they were nothing. The tellers and the stories are ignored or ridiculed, threatened back into silence or destroyed, and the experience of female suffering is buried in cultural invisibility and contempt… the very reality of abuse sustained by women, despite its overwhelming pervasiveness and constancy, is negated. It is negated in the transactions of everyday life, and it is negated in the history books, left out, and it is negated by those who claim to care about suffering but are blind to this suffering.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women

“But was not a theory of which all the elements were provably true a simple tautology? In the region of the unprovable, or even the disprovable, lay the only chance for breaking out of the circle and going ahead.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“I could not bear his expression. That look said, this is a long good-bye, yet not time enough. I have no aptitude for this. I cannot learn this. I would hold on, and hold on, until my hands clutch at emptiness.”
― Juliet Marillier, Son of the Shadows