#ms

... there had been the two little boys. Now they were gone, too. They loved her and called her and sent her e-mails and would still snuggle up to her to be petted when they were in the mood, but they were men, and though they would always be at the center of her life, she was no longer at the center of theirs. ↗

— Cathleen Schine

#moms #sons #life

[W]hen I see men callously and cheerfully denying women the full use of their bodies, while insisting with sobs and howls on the satisfaction of their own, I simply can't find it heroic, or kind, or anything but pretty rotten and feeble. ↗

— Dorothy L. Sayers

#double-standards #empowerment #feminism #gender #hypocrisy

Here to second lives. May we all be forgiven for the inapt missteps of our past, and presented with new opportunities to accomplish the things that we've dreamed of doing. ↗

— Thomas DePrima

#dreams

Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential — as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth. You’ll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you’re doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you’ll hear about them. To invent your own life’s meaning is not easy, but it’s still allowed, and I think you’ll be happier for the trouble. ↗

— Bill Watterson

#stay-at-home-moms #work #life

This pre-eminence is something [men] have unjustly arrogated to themselves. And when it's said that women must be subject to men, the phrase should be understood in the same sense as when we say we are subject to natural disasters, diseases, and all the other accidents of this life: it's not a case of being subjected in the sense of obeying, but rather of suffering an imposition, not a case of serving them fearfully, but rather of tolerating them in a spirit of Christian charity, since they have been given to us by God as a spiritual trial. ↗

— Moderata Fonte

#empowerment #feminism #gender #inequality #men

It's like tabloid news programs that talk about how horrible something is, while at the same time they're glorifying it as their top story. ↗

— Daisy Berkowitz

#glorifying #horrible #how #like #news

[T]he merciful adjustment which nature makes when what cannot be cured must be endured. ↗

— Margaret Mitchell

#life-and-living #pain #problems #scarlett-o-hara #life

There's no backward and no forward, no day other than this. You fill your cart as you go, and that's that. ↗

— John Burnham Schwartz

#philosophy #time #vision #whimsy #life

In fiction, the characters have their own lives. They may start as a gloss on the author’s life, but they move on from there. In poetry, especially confessional poetry but in other poetry as well, the poet is not writing characters so much as emotional truth wrapped in metaphor. Bam! Pow! A shot to the gut. ↗

— Jane Yolen

#emotion #fiction #poems #poetry #reading

Wives?" she asked, interrupting him. For a moment, he had assumed she was tuning to the novel. Then he saw her waiting, suspicious eyes, so he replied cautiously, "None active," as if wives were volcanoes. ↗

— John le Carré

#circumspection #husbands #marriage #married-life #separation