costitanza (onetoomanybooks)

“We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls, you can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful. Otherwise, you would threaten the man. Because I am female, I am expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. Now marriage can be a source of joy and love and mutual support but why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don’t teach boys the same? We raise girls to see each other as competitors not for jobs or accomplishments, which I think can be a good thing, but for the attention of men. We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists

“Grief suffocated. Grief paralysed. Grief was a cruel, heavy boot pressed so hard against his chest that he could not breathe.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“In every story, there’s a hero and villain. Sometimes one person can be both.”
― Jennifer Hillier, Jar of Hearts

“All of both (Native American) sexes go about naked…They (women) have another custom, very shameful
and beyond all human belief. For their women, being very lustful, cause the private parts
of their husbands to swell up to such a huge size that they appear deformed…They (men)
marry as many wives as they please; and son cohabits with mother, male cousin with
female, and any man with the first woman he meets. They dissolve their marriages as
often as they please…The women as I have said go about naked and are very libidinous,
yet they have tolerably beautiful bodies and cleanly…When they had the opportunity of
copulating with Christians, urged by excessive lust, they defiled and prostituted
themselves.”
― Amerigo Vespucci