womanhood

Now I understand that it’s how boys are raised to think, how they are lured into adulthood. I’ve met ambitious women, driven women, but no woman has ever told me that greatness was her destiny.

-Lily King, Writers & Lovers

I squat there are think about how you get trained early on as a woman to perceive how others are perceiving you, at the great expense of what you yourself are feeling about them. Sometimes you mix the two up in a terrible tangle that’s hard to unravel.

-Lily King, Writers & Lovers

Every day, for months now, I have dreamed of running away with Hippolytus. Why did I, Phaedra of Knossos and Athens, put my faith in a man? When I should have seen that what I truly wanted was simply to run away.

-Jennifer Saint, Ariadne

So Medusa had to pay for Poseidon’s act. It made no sense at all, and then I tilted my head and saw it with the logic of the gods. The pieces slid into place: a terrible picture when viewed from our mortal perspective, like the beauty of a spider’s web that must look so horrifying to the fly.

-Jennifer Saint, Ariadne

My tears had stilled now and I listened intently. I only knew Medusa as a monster. I had not thought she had ever been anything else. The stories of Perseus did not allow for Medusa with a story of her own.

-Jennifer Saint, Ariadne

I had hit upon a truth of womanhood: however blameless a life we led, the passions and the greed of men could bring us to ruin, and there was nothing we could do.

-Jennifer Saint, Ariadne