Ming

“I am always amazed, in myself and in other women, at the strength of our need to bolster men up. This is ironical, living as we do in a time of men’s criticizing us for being ‘castrating’, etc., — all the other words and phrases of the same kind. (Nelson says his wife is ‘castrating’ — this makes me angry, thinking of the misery she must have lived through.) For the truth is, women have this deep instinctive need to build a man up as a man. Molly for instance. I suppose this is because real men become fewer and fewer, and we are frightened, trying to create men.”
― Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

“Be completely fearless. [...]Write without constraints, or worrying about who you represent, or whether you should represent anyone, or who your audience is, or what you can or can't do with a female character, or a black character, or someone of restricted growth, or someone who's hugely fat. You must write total confidence that the fiction is its own justification.”
― Zadie Smith

“In the confusions of the next hours the Earth’s population was substantially reduced, the biosphere was altered, and the Earth itself was marked with numbers of more conventional craters. For some years thereafter the survivors were existentially preoccupied and the peculiar dustbowl at Bonneville was left to weather by itself in the changing climatic cycles.

"The Man Who Walked Home”
― James Tiptree, Jr.

“This crisp September morning, Georgina was looking equally crisp: she had an apple-green scarf knotted at her white swan throat and a short swingy patterned dress that served to highlight her long long legs that didn’t appear to get any wider as they went up. Over the top she was wearing a navy frock coat that clung to her waist and flared out in folds around her violin-shaped hips. All in all, she looked like she should be striding down Carnaby Street a few decades ago with men who looked like a young Michael Caine lowering their spectacles and wolf-whistling.

She was clearly a bitch. I just had to find hard evidence.”
― Mhairi McFarlane, You Had Me At Hello