Taylor Berry

“Sometimes I felt that growing up and being a girl was about learning to be afraid. Not paranoid, exactly, but always alert and aware, like checking out the exits in the movie theatre or the fire escape in a hotel. You came to know, in a way you hadn't as a kid, that the body you inhabited was vulnerable, imperfectly fortified. On TV, in the papers, in books and movies, it isn't ever men being raped or kidnapped or bludgeoned or dismembered or burned with acid. But in stories and crime shows and TV series and movies and in life too, it's going on all the time, all around you. So you learn, in your mind, that your body needs to be protected. It's both precious and totally dispensable, depending on whom you encounter.”
― Claire Messud, The Burning Girl

“You asked me earlier,' she said to me, 'whether I believed that justice was merely a personal illusion. I don't have the answer to that,' she said, 'but I know that it is to be feared, feared in every part of you, even as it fells your enemies and crowns you the winner.”
― Rachel Cusk, Kudos

“She was always threatening rain; he had been born with an umbrella in his hand.”
― Michael Chabon, Moonglow

“I had a kind of idea if you controlled your mind and said, 'I won't have any babies' very hard, they most likely wouldn't come. I thought that was what was meant by birth-control, but by this time I knew that idea was quite wrong.”
― Barbara Comyns, Our Spoons Came from Woolworths