Melissa

“Listening to the two of them, she had felt something unpleasant and familiar: the sense that chess was a thing between men, and she was an outsider. She hated the feeling.”
― Walter Tevis, The Queen's Gambit

“I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“Her mind was luminous, and her soul sang to her in the sweet moves of chess.”
― Walter Tevis, The Queen's Gambit

“And what did being women have to do with it? She was better than any male player in America. She remembered the Life interviewer and the questions about her being a woman in a man's world. To hell with her; it wouldn't be a man's world when she finished with it.”
― Walter Tevis, The Queen's Gambit