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“I wash her body, it feels like I'm praying. My hands tremble and my breath short.”
― Alice Walker, The Color Purple

“It’s my own little joke, even though the punchline is sadness. I think a joke like that is a present you make to yourself, so every time you say it, even if it hurts, you get a very cohesive feeling out of it, because the past you and the present you are talking to each other, and it’s nice to have friends.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Past Is Red

“But I didn’t and still don’t like making a cult of women’s knowledge, preening ourselves on knowing things men don’t know, women’s deep irrational wisdom, women’s instinctive knowledge of Nature, and so on. All that all too often merely reinforces the masculinist idea of women as primitive and inferior – women’s knowledge as elementary, primitive, always down below at the dark roots, while men get to cultivate and own the flowers and crops that come up into the light. But why should women keep talking baby talk while men get to grow up? Why should women feel blindly while men get to think?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“All the hair dye diluted itself into the sea a long time ago and I hope the jellyfish enjoyed their time as platinum blondes, I really and honestly do.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Past Is Red