Hannah Gersh

“The physician spoke with confidence. He was a man, after all. He had no reason to think he would not be believed.”
― Emilia Hart, Weyward

“Until you got here,” he rasps, “all this place had ever been was a reminder of the ways I was a disappointment, and now you’re here, and—I don’t know. I feel like I’m okay. So if you’re the ‘wrong kind of woman,’ then I’m the wrong kind of man.”

I can see all of the shades of him at once. Quiet, unfocused boy. Precocious, resentful preteen. Broody high schooler desperate to get out. Sharp-edged man trying to fit himself back into a place he never belonged to begin with.

That’s the thing about being an adult standing beside your childhood race car bed. Time collapses, and instead of the version of you you’ve built from scratch, you’re all the hackneyed drafts that came before, all at once.”
― Emily Henry, Book Lovers

“I went to look for Love among the roses, the roses,
The pretty winged boy with the arrow and the bow;
In the fair and fragrant places,
'Mid the Muses and the Graces,
At the feet of Aphrodite, with the roses all aglow.

Then I sought among the shrines where the rosy flames were leaping-
the rose and golden flames, never ceasing, never still-
For the boy so fair and slender,
The imperious, the tender,
With the whole world moving slowly to make the music of his will.

Sought, and found not for my seeking, till the sweet quest led me further,
And before me rose the temple, marble-based and gold above,
Where the long procession marches
'Neath the incense-clouded arches
In the world-compelling worship of the mighty God of Love.

Yea, I passed with bated breath to the holiest of holies,
And I lifted the great curtain from the Inmost, - the Most Fair, -
Eager for the joy of finding,
For the glory, beating, blinding,
Meeting but an empty darkness; darkness, silence- nothing there.

Where is Love? I cried in anguish, while the temple reeled and faded;
Where is Love? - for I must find him, I must know and understand!
Died the music and the laughter,
Flames and roses dying after,
And the curtain I was holding fell to ashes in my hand.”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman, NEW-The Yellow Wall-Paper and Selected Writings

“Witch. The word slithers from the mouth like a serpent, drips from the tongue as thick and black as tar. We never thought of ourselves as witches, my mother and I. For this was a word invented by men, a word that brings power to those that speak it, not those that it describes. A word that builds gallows and pyres, turns breathing women into corpses.”
― Emilia Hart, Weyward