Hoda Marmar

“Dear god is there not more to life than this? I sit and I watch others living their silly little lives, and I am ashamed to be a woman sometimes, though it is no wonder this is all we have: a desire to be small, to stay small. I know it well, from looking, from scorning, from wishing it were me. Berry-pickers, baby-raisers. Chaste and childlike. Burned at the stake. Ducked in the pond. Hanged by the neck. Stays, stomachers, corsets, girdles, Spanx, SKIMS; whalebone then steel then rubber then spandex, bodies winched into letters V and S, or numbers 1 and 8, gaining and losing value through body weight, beauty, and biological clocks. Mysterious, veering, treacherous codes: long, loose hair is innocent, until it’s whoreish; tanned flesh is lowly, until it’s exotic; cleverness is charming, until it’s embarrassing. With everything we give, we get smaller – and if we don’t, men take it anyway, pinching and nipping and penetrating. We pat creams around our eyes, cover upper arms, as men coarsen and grey good-naturedly.”
― Emma van Straaten, Creep

“This is women’s way of feeling time pass, that sinister clockwork inching round the roundness of the body; the slow gathering of endometrial cells, a nesting, a fluffing of pillows ready to receive guests, the ripeness of the womb, fleshy and welcoming, all neat and tidy and, yes, ready to receive guests, even one, just a casual visitor, anything. And then realisation that the arrival time has been and gone, and no one is coming; the tearing of the wallpaper, great swathes of it, and tears of disappointment, of ageing, of loneliness. The womb revolts and shudders. The painters are in.”
― Emma van Straaten, Creep

“Aah, the books! The thought of the enormous pleasure of books quickened Asma’s pace. It was a good moment to lose herself in their joys.”
― Jokha Alharthi, Celestial Bodies

“What do you want from us? The dumb girls are too dumb, the smart girls are too smart, and the average girls are too unexceptional?”
― Cho Nam-Joo, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982