Jess

“This is really why I made my daughters learn to garden—so they would always have a mother to love them, long after I am gone.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“I am tired of writing dainty little biographical things that pretend that I am a trim little housewife ... I live in a dank old place with a ghost.”
― Shirley Jackson, Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings

“When I first used to write stories and hide them away in my desk, I used to think that no one had ever been so lonely as I was. And I used to write about people all alone. Once I started a novel but never finished because I found out about insanity and I used to write about lunatics after that. I thought I was insane and would write about how the only sane people are the ones who are constantly condemned as mad, and how the whole world is cruel and foolish and afraid of people who are different.”
― Shirley Jackson

“I cling to the Milan women's understanding of these literary heroines as mothers. I wish I had learned to read them in this way years ago--with the same complicated, ambivalent, essential freedom that a daughter feels when she looks at her mother, understanding her as a figure that she simultaneously resists and depends on; a figure that she uses, cruelly and lovingly and gratefully, as the base from which to become something more.”
― Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion