Bastonikov

“I wonder for what you hunger and whether you allow yourself to feel it.”
― Kat Dunn, Hungerstone

“I used to think it was vital to know things, to feel safe in the learning and recounting of facts. I used to think it was possible to know enough to escape from the panic of not knowing, but I realise now that you can never learn enough to protect yourself, not really.”
― Julia Armfield, Our Wives Under the Sea

“There will always be men in the world who want to control and hurt and kill us. Men who drug us and drive us off roads and hit us with their fists. Men who take girls and make them their toys. Men who gain pleasure from our pain. […] They will walk through this world until it comes unraveled. They will keep on doing what they’ve been doing for thousands and thousands of years until the earth has had enough and ends us all. […] But today I refuse to fear them, not a single one. They have strength and cruelty and endless complicity. They walk tall and almost always win. But not here, not on the Bend, where owls that were once girls fly free. Not here, where magic rides up to meet my will. […] Here, we are witches and men are nothing. Here, the river has teeth.”
― Erica Waters, The River Has Teeth

“She thought survival was a selfish thing, a circle drawn tight around your heart. She thought the more people you let inside that circle the more ways the world had to hurt you, the more ways you could fail them and be failed in turn. But what if it’s the opposite, and there are more people to catch you when you fall? What if there’s an invisible tipping point somewhere along the way when one becomes three becomes infinite, when there are so many of you inside that circle that you become hydra-headed, invincible?”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Once and Future Witches