Beth

“Sara is still a little in her dream--something about her mother, the idea of her, anyway. She is wearing the green cardigan from the picture of her that Sara has in her drawer. And the kitchen. They were sitting together in the kitchen. But matching the words to the dream only dissolves what is left of it, the way certain stars vanish from the sky if you look directly at them.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers

“Remember, be a good person, not a good girl. Good girls suffer a lot in this life.”
― Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, A Girl Is a Body of Water

“This is how the sickness travels best: through all the same channels as do fondness and friendship and love.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers

“They didn't have very far to fall--I knew just being a girl in the world handicapped your ability to believe yourself. Feelings seemed completely unreliable, like faulty gibberish scraped from a Ouija board. My childhood visits to the family doctor were stressful events for that reason. He'd ask me gentle questions: How was I feeling? How would I describe the pain? Was it more sharp or more spread out? I'd just look at him with desperation. I needed to be told, that was the whole point of going to the doctor. To take a test, be put through a machine that would comb my insides with radiated precision and tell me what the truth was.”
― Emma Cline, The Girls