"I read Doris Lessing in literature class and that depressed the shit out of me too. I just hated reading work by women or about women because it always added up the same. Loss of self, endless self-abnegation, even as the female was trying to be an artist, she wound up pregnant, desperate, waiting on some man." -Eileen Myles

we liked the idea of powerful women, but we don't like powerful women themselves

Is there a particular kind of abjection that some of us are drawn to, participate in, possibly romanticize, even though nothing about our external lives necessarily suggests it?... How to be someone who has to win every argument with a man and also sometimes likes the idea of being overpowered.

I was afraid I was trading important things for the baby, trading my body itself

Hemingway if Hemingway had taken women's studies classes

He liked to map out his books on the walls, which struck me as a very male impulse, wanting your whole thought process made manifest, inflicting it on a room.

One night we spent three hours talking about John Berryman's Dream Songs

It's like sleeping with a sparrow.

it was like being suddenly tumbled by a wave: I am alone.

He was also the most beautiful man I knew, and I never became immune or even habituated to his looks.

When we see each other, it's always the last night on earth: there is too much wine, a frantic, addict-y ardor.

Whenever you represent anyone, you are misrepresenting them: you will never capture them exactly as they see themselves.

There's no magic shield in being middle class that can completely insulate you from the consequences of being in a body that's already been criminalized for existing.

One of the biggest issues with mainstream feminist writing has been the way the idea of what constitutes a feminist issue is framed. We rarely talk about basic needs as a feminist issue. Food insecurity and access to quality education, safe neighborhoods, a living wage, and medical care are all feminist issues. Instead of a framework that focuses on helping women get basic needs met, all too often the focus is not on survival but on increasing privilege. For a movement that is meant to represent all women, it often centers on those who already have most of their needs met. 

No one can live up to the standards set by racist stereotypes like this that position Black women as so strong they don't need help, protection, care, or concern.

Girls like me seemed to be the object of the conversations and not full participants, because we were a problem to be solved, not people in our own right.

For women of color, the expectation that we prioritize gender over race, that we treat the patriarchy as something that gives all men the same power, leaves man of us feeling isolated.

No woman has to be respectable to be valuable.

The sad reality is that while white women are an oppressed group, they still wield more power than any other group of women--including the power to oppress both men and women of color.

When Jim Donell thought of something to say he said it as often and in as many ways as possible, perhaps because he had very few ideas and had to wring each one dry.

When I was small I thought Constance was a fairy princess.

She was the most precious person in my world, always.

On Sunday mornings I examined my safeguards, the box of silver dollars I had buried by the creek, and the doll buried in the long field, and the book nailed to the tree in the pine woods; so long as they were where I had put them nothing could get in to harm us. I had always buried things, even when I was small; I remember that once I quartered the long field and buried something in each quarter to make the grass grow higher as I grew taller, so I would always be able to hide there. I once buried six blue marbles in the creek bed to make the river beyond run dry. "Here is treasure for you to bury," Constance used to say to me when I was small, giving me a penny, or a bright ribbon; I had buried all my baby teeth as they came out one by one and perhaps someday they would grow as dragons. All our land was enriched with my treasures buried in it, thickly inhabited just below the surface with my marbles and my teeth and my colored stones, all perhaps turned to jewels by now, held together under the ground in a powerful taut web which never loosened, but held fast to guard us.

Every woman draws a circle around herself. Sometimes she has to be the only thing inside it.

Why do men always want to give you some smaller, sweeter name than the one your mama gave you?

Bella produces a stiff woolen dress from her office closet. It's one of those respectable, pocketless affairs that obliges ladies to carry stupid little handbags, so Juniper can't take so much as a melted candle-stub or a single snake tooth with her. Bella informs her that this is the precise reason why women's dresses no longer have pockets, to show they bear no witch-ways or ill intentions, and Juniper responds that she has both, thank you very damn much. 

They stand above her like a matched pair of Old Testament angels, the kind with flaming swords and vengeful hearts. Stories spin through Agnes' head again, except this time she isn't thinking of the dead mothers or their lost daughters. She's thinking about the witches--the women who dispensed the glass slippers and curses and poison apples, who wreaked their wills on the world and damned the consequences.