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“She knew how to swing her legs on that hyphen that defined and denied who she was: Iranian-American. Neither the first word nor the second really belonged to her. Her place was on the hyphen, and on the hyphen she would stay, carrying memories of the one place from which she had come and the other place in which she must succeed. The hyphen was hers—a space small, potentially precarious. On the hyphen she would sit and on the hyphen she would stand and soon, like a seasoned acrobat, she would balance there perfectly, never falling, never choosing either side over the other, content with walking that thin line.”
― Marjan Kamali, Together Tea

“current sociobiologists and primatologists, such as Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, maintain that loving motherhood is not automatically programmed into the female of our species but is an extremely complex equation of genetic, evolutionary, emotional, and social factors aided by powerful hormonal influences.”
― Barbara Almond, The Monster Within: The Hidden Side of Motherhood

“Aster, occasionally, through no will of her own, worried she wasn’t pretty enough, and why? Pretty was a strange thing to concern oneself over. Pretty was subjective and fallacious. Pretty couldn’t be replicated in a lab. She, as much as anyone, enjoyed the prismatic sweep of amaranth in bloom and the geography of animalian bodies. Yet when applied to people, it didn’t jive with her that pretty was meant for some and not others. More pressingly, it didn’t jive with Aster that some days she wanted to be one of those folks who was prettier than the other folks. It was like wanting to be more vanadium-based, or wanting to have orange-pigmented skin—arbitrary, bizarre, pointless. Still, she wanted it, and Theo made her feel like it was already so.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“I’m not the maternal type. Lullabies bore me. The idea of a child hanging off my breast, using me for sustenance, makes me very angry for some reason. Probably because I am always angry about everything. I am like a gramophone and the volume’s too loud, and you can’t find the off button, and all you can do is cover your ears until the end of the record.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts