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Is there a satisfaction in the effort of remembering that provides its own nourishment, and is what one recollects less important than the act of remembering?

“There was a great difference, I said, between the things I wanted and the things that I could apparently have, and until I had finally and forever made my peace with that fact, I had decided to want nothing at all.”

“It is interesting how keen people are for you to do something they would never dream of doing themselves, how enthusiastically they drive you to your own destruction: even the kindest ones, the ones that are most loving, can rarely have your interests truly at heart, because usually they are advising you from within lives of greater security and greater confinement.”

“One's existence as a wife and a mother, for example, is something often walked into without question, as though we are propelled by something outside ourselves; while a woman's creativity, the thing she doubts and is always sacrificing for the sake of these other things—when she wouldn't dream, for instance, of sacrificing the interests of her husband or son—has been her own idea, her own inner compulsion.”

“It seems success takes you away from what you know, he said, while failure condemns you to it.”

“Your failures keep returning to you, while your successes are something you always have to convince yourself of.”

There is tears, for his love ; joy, for his fortune ; honor, for his valor ; and death, for his ambition.

“Vicious cycles are common. Injustice and unfairness permeate every aspect of human life. But virtuous cycles are also possible.”

“We love a narrative of the great individual whose life is shot through with major events and who turns out to be either a villain or a hero, but the world is inherently more complex than the narratives we impose upon it, just as the reality of experience is inherently more complex than the language we use to describe that reality.”

"If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory? There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences.”

For these Bluestockings, friendships with other like-minded women were crucial to their success. These friendships operated outside the bounds of patriarchy. Women's relationships with men - be it a father or a husband - demanded a woman's time, a woman's duty, a woman's obedience. Friendships with other women did not make demands; rather they gave inspiration, comfort, support and joy.

There are worse things, I think, than leaving a task undone. The oak forests of the world would not exist if squirrels did not lose track of
acorns.

World, world, forgive our ignorance and our foolish fears. Absolve us of our anger and our error. In your boundless gift for renewal, disregard our undeserving. For no reason but the hope that one day we will know the beauty of unloved things, accept our unuttered thanks.

We try to convince ourselves that only the happy ending is possible, that any tragedies we fail to witness are tragedies that never happened. That kind of ignorance is a gift we give ourselves because we are made so uneasy by uncertainty.

The past comes in and out of existence as you think about it. When you sleep or eat or read the news—in those moments, the past vanishes. It only flickers back into existence when you think about it again.

Sometimes I think the hardest thing about being alive is that we can only really know ourselves.

It was necessary to be afraid in order to have courage.

You told me once you forget you are a woman, and I understand it now—you think to be a woman is to be weak—you think ours is a sisterhood of suffering! Perhaps so, but doesn't it take greater strength to walk a mile in pain than seven miles in none? You are a woman, and must begin to live like one. By which I mean: have courage.

And that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness. You can't have one without the other. Of course, they come in different degrees and quantities. But there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness for ever. And imagining there is just breeds more unhappiness in the life you're in.

To be part of nature was to be part of the will to live.
When you stay too long in a place, you forget just how big an expanse the world is. […]
But once you sense that vastness, once something reveals it, hope emerges, whether you want it to or not, and it clings to you as stubbornly as lichen clings to rock.

Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius.

But it only takes a crack in the foundation of the world to bring careful architecture, strong with centuries, crumbling down. A small blade cuts the water and ripples outward like an echo. And then the world beneath shows itself, first as green shoots in the dirt. And then comes a woman, a witch, tearing her way through the green matter with her teeth.

"Was it worth it, your vengeance?"
If she were a man, he would not ask her this. For men there is no debt of blood which goes unpaid. If the world tips in another's favor, it must be made to tip back again. But the world is never in a woman's favor. She cannot tip the scale. The only choice is: live the same mute, unjust life you have always lived, or tear apart the world itself.

Roscille will never stop marveling at the stupidness of men when the order of their world is disrupted.

“I have seen what mortal men can do. I prefer a monster that shows itself openly.”

"All your life you have been muzzled," he says. "So as not to disturb the architecture of the world. But a muzzled dog thinks only of its misery and its shackles. They may rob your body of its power, but they cannot take your mind."

Perhaps it is not cleverness that seeps through the generations but cruelty. One cold creature weaning another.

Loneliness and idleness excite the imagination.

And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky —so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.