val > val's Quotes

“In the darkness, two shadows, reaching through the hopeless, heavy dusk. Their hands meet, and light spills in a flood like a hundred golden urns pouring out of the sun.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“What was it like for the sirens on their lonely rock, watching everyone who tried to love them drown?”
― Jess Zimmerman, Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology

“Women have been monsters, and monsters have been women.”
― Jess Zimmerman, Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology

“As always in myth, women win their fame by dying.”
― Jess Zimmerman, Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology

“Beauty is demonstrably a cheat code for a slightly easier life. People just a little more likely to do you a favor, love just a little easier to access, the world just a little more welcoming.”
― Jess Zimmerman, Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology

“You can tell a lot about what a culture considers deformed by looking at its villains. They're more likely to be disabled in some way, but also more likely to be dark, old, fat, or fey.”
― Jess Zimmerman, Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology

“I never go to the doctor, though, because the only thing more embarrassing than having a body is having to admit that you have one.”
― Jess Zimmerman, Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology

“The harpy wants to win, which means a man must lose. She wants justice, which means a man must be punished. She wants space that could be taken by a man. Are we really willing to make that sacrifice?

What makes a woman's ambition predatory, we are told, is that it overflows its natural bounds. It treads on the lands that men have marked as theirs.”
― Jess Zimmerman, Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology

“For double X humans, our motley nature is usually less obvious, but we are genetic calicos. Every cell hosting a dormant sister. Every cell with the echo of what it could've been.

Inside each of us, another animal, sleeping.”
― Jess Zimmerman, Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology

“Before Lamia killed children, her children were killed. The root of her violence, like the root of so much violence, is grief.”
― Jess Zimmerman, Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology

“...and Athena, it must be admitted, has never been much of a friend to her fellow women. The war-like goddess of wisdom, who wasn't even gestated by a woman (she sprang fully grown from her father's head), is the original "not-like-the-other-girls" girl.”
― Jess Zimmerman, Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology