Taylor Berry

“Enforcing silence is easy. All you have to do is make it feel like the safest option. You can, for example, make speaking as unpleasant as possible, by creating an anonymous social media account to flood women with virulent personal criticism, sexual harassment, and threats. You can talk over women, or talk down to them, until they begin to doubt that they have anything worthwhile to say. You can encourage men's speech, and ignore women's, so that women will get the message that they are taking up too much room, and contributing too little value. You can nitpick a woman's actual voice—the way she writes, her grammar, her tone, her register, her accent—until she honestly believes she's bad at talking, and spends more time trying to sound 'better' than thinking about what she wants to say.

And if a woman somehow makes it past all this, you can humiliate her anyway.”
― Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why

“When Enebeli Okwara sent his girl out in the world, he did not know what the world did to daughters. He did not know how quickly it would wick the dew off her, how she would be returned to him hollowed out, relieved of her better parts.”
― Lesley Nneka Arimah, What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky

“They were like an iceberg, it occurred to me, my father the seven-eighths that was under the water and my mother the luminous portion riding the waves. But no, they were two icebergs: solitary phenomena, impressive, independent, known only to themselves. I felt their hidden seven-eighths inside me as a dark bulkiness whose outlines I was always trying to map.”
― Elizabeth Hay, All Things Consoled: A Daughter's Memoir

“Our repartee would be rich with subtlety and sarcasm, as smart and funny as midcareer Woody Allen. Our fucking, like Werner Herzog, serious and perplexing.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Homesick for Another World