Ketutar Jensen

“Lewis! Stop throwing stones! I don't believe you've listened to a single word I've been saying!"
"Yes, I have. You were talking about jugs. I'm listening. I'm listening to you and a dozen other things as well."
"There aren't a dozen other things. There's only the chapel bell, and some men shouting in the boats down on the quay... and a dog barking, and some ducks in the garden below."
"Not bad! You've missed about fifty larks in the sky, and the grasshoppers all round us, and a car changing gear on the hill, and the oars in the rowlocks of that boat putting out, and the children playing, and the goat bells away on the hill behind us, and I think I can hear a smity."
"What a babel it sounds! I'd have said it was a quiet evening."
"So it is. It's so quiet that you can hear every sound in it.”
― Margaret Kennedy, The Constant Nymph

“It’s gone, you know.” Bella’s voice is hoarse from swallowed smoke. “All of it. The hoarded magic of witches, lost in a single night. It would have been safe if we’d just left it hidden where the Last Three put it, but we didn’t. I didn’t. And now it’s gone and all our hope with it.”
Bella thinks of all the women who followed them down this dangerous rabbit hole, all the Sisters hoping for the ways and words to change the bitter stories they were handed. “What have I done?” It comes out tear-thick, warbling.
“What have we done, I think you mean,” Quinn says dryly. “Who found the spell in Old Salem, again?”
“You did, of course, I didn’t mean—”
“So is it my fault, as well?”
“No!”
“And who got herself locked in jail and needed saving in the first place? And who had the baby early and kept you all distracted at the worst possible moment? Is it your sisters’ fault, too?” Quinn shakes her head. “If you want to blame someone for a fire, look for the men holding matches.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Once and Future Witches

“Now all the candles were lit, and the faces on both sides of the table were brought nearer by the candle light, and composed, as they had not been in the twilight, into a party round a table”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“Well, she was weak, as weak as you must expect women to be after centuries of custom have bred weakness into their very nature. Why are women weak? Because men have made them so. Because the law that was framed by men, and the public opinion which it has been their privilege to direct, have from age to age drilled into women the belief that they are chattels, to be owned and played with, existing for the male pleasure and passion. Because men have systematically stunted their mental growth and denied them their natural rights, and that equality which is theirs. Weak! Women have become weak because weakness is the passport to the favour of our sex. They have become foolish because education has been withheld from them and ability discouraged; they have become frivolous because frivolity has been declared to be the natural mission of woman. There is no male simpleton who does not like to find a bigger simpleton than he is to lord it over. Truly, the triumph of the stronger sex has been complete, for it has even succeeded in enlisting its victims in its service. The great instruments in the suppression of women, and in their retention at their present level, are women themselves.”
― H. Rider Haggard, The Witch's Head. Vol. II