readingwithtv

[readingwithtv]

For there are two kinds of forgiveness in the world: the one you practice because everything really is all right, and what went before is mended. The other kind of forgiveness you practice because someone needs desperately to be forgiven, or because you need just as badly to forgive them, for a heart can grab hold of old wounds and go sour as milk over them.

The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There by Catherynne M. Valente

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Walk the same tale over and over, until you wear a groove in the world, until even if you vanished, the tale would keep turning, keep playing, like a phonograph, and you'd have to get up again, even with a bullet through your eye, to play your part and say your lines.

Deathless by Catherynne M. Valente

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She knew herself, how she had slowly, over years, become a cat, a wolf, a snake, anything but a girl. How she had wrung out her girlhood like death.

Deathless by Catherynne M. Valente

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The moral of the story is, I will gut you if I need to. I will carve my way out with only my teeth.

Swallowtail by Brenna Twohy

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The work is never pretty, but it’s the only way the house gets built; I know you don’t want to look at my wreckage, but I have carpentry in my mouth. I have a hammer in my hands— you cannot stop me from building.

Swallowtail by Brenna Twohy

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Peach pits are poisonous. This is not a mistake. Girlhood is growing fruit around cyanide.

Swallowtail by Brenna Twohy

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When I say I forgive you, know this, I did not bury the hatchet. I have the hatchet in my hands. I am building myself a new house.

Forgive Me My Salt by Brenna Twohy

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Grief is not a feeling but a neighborhood. This is where I came from. Everyone I love still lives there.

Swallowtail by Brenna Twohy

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Trauma sends you letters, without warning, for the rest of your life, usually disguised as something else.

Swallowtail by Brenna Twohy

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There's no such thing as an unhaunted house.

Swallowtail by Brenna Twohy

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We have built cathedrals out of spite and splintered bone, of course they aren't pretty, nothing holy ever is--

Forgive Me My Salt by Brenna Twohy

[readingwithtv]

I did not know the bodies of women were meant to be a museum of tragedies, as if we were meant to carry the ocean without drowning.

Questions for Ada by Ijeoma Umebinyuo

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Your mother was your first mirror. Tell me, didn't she carry herself well enough to make you feel like a God?

Questions for Ada by Ijeoma Umebinyuo

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Do not believe that your anger has to be polite. That you need to be liked. They tell you how “proper” women should interact & react. That anger is mere emotion. As if anger has not changed laws, as if anger is not needed to disrupt what hurts us. As if anger cannot be righteous.

Ijeoma Umebinyuo

[readingwithtv]

The way women are told to carry pain in their bones frightens me.

Questions for Ada by Ijeoma Umebinyuo

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Bless the daughters who sat, carrying the trauma of mothers. Who sat asking for more love, and not getting any, carrying themselves into morning. Bless the daughters who were given the role of motherhood before they became women. Bless the daughters who raised themselves.

Ijeoma Umebinyuo

[readingwithtv]

Many women do not choose to be silent, they are forced into being silence and it looks like a choice.

Ijeoma Umebinyuo