Val

“She screamed, long and feral, that savage beast rising up in her chest like it would break her in half -tear her meat apart and emerge, blood-soaked and grief-starved, ready to die, ready to burn, ready to do whatever it took as long as she died with her enemies howling beneath her claws.”
― Hope Cook, House of Ash

“Later, years later, I would hear a song made of our meeting. [...] I was not surprised by the portrait of myself: the proud witch undone before the hero's sword, kneeling and begging for mercy. Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“Endings are beginnings in disguise, dear Tru. They signify one door closing and another one opening. They mark the point where the heroine transforms from a person who's been beaten and badgered and bolstered by life into someone who's about to shed her past and metamorphose into an entirely new creature.”
― Cat Winters, Odd & True

“The thought that babies would become children, and children would become people, never occurred to them. The concept that perhaps biology was not destiny, and that not all little girls would be pretty princesses, and not all little boys would be brave soldiers, also never occurred to them. Things might have been easier if those ideas had never slithered into their heads, unwanted but undeniably important. Alas, their minds were made up, and left no room for such revolutionary opinions.”
― Seanan McGuire, Down Among the Sticks and Bones