Taja

“We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls, you can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful. Otherwise, you would threaten the man. Because I am female, I am expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. Now marriage can be a source of joy and love and mutual support but why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don’t teach boys the same? We raise girls to see each other as competitors not for jobs or accomplishments, which I think can be a good thing, but for the attention of men. We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists

“Never trust a survivor,” my father used to warn me, with Vartan Mamigonian in mind, “until you find out what he did to stay alive.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Bluebeard

“The farther you go...the harder it is to return. The world has many edges and it's easy to fall off.”
― Anderson Cooper, Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival

“Wounds turn into scars and scars make you tough.”
― Aisha Tyler