Althea

“I don’t know why people try not to cry, why we hold it in. I have decided to cry as much and as hard as I need to. Sometimes it is a snotty nose sob, the kind that bellows out, echoing off the high ceilings. An earthquake cry that shakes my insides and makes my shoulders tremble. And sometimes, it comes in silence. Just tears bubbling up in the corners of my eyes, sometimes falling, but sometimes just swaying in the ebb and flow of sorrow. Sometimes the cry comes without tears, comes in the shake of my voice, the hoarseness. Sometimes it comes camouflaged as laughter. (See number 2 to know what I’m laughing about.) I laugh to keep from crying. A belly laugh, even. But still, the tears are there. And the afternoon goes on, crying and laughing, crying and laughing. And that saying I laughed so hard I cried takes on a whole new meaning.”
― Renée Watson, Love Is a Revolution

“Alex saw very clearly how dangerous a book like Mary’s could become in the hands of such impressionable girls, such privileged girls: girls who kissed and fondled and laughed as they read each other passages out in the woods; girls whose parents' social standing had taught them that there was nothing at all in the world they could not subjugate, purchase, or ignore; girls who set fires only to watch as others tried, and failed, to put them out.”
― Emily M. Danforth, Plain Bad Heroines

“I've never really thought about having a type. I guess my type is....beautiful girl. Which is a lot of them. Most of them? Pretty much all girls.”
― Adiba Jaigirdar, The Henna Wars

“I have become something wonderful, she thought. I have become something terrible. Was she now a goddess or a monster? Perhaps neither. Perhaps both.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War