Lauren

“Hate ricochets, but kindness does too.”
― Robin Roe, A List of Cages

“When he catches me, and we roll on our backs toward the star-filled sky, I do not see the diamonds, the glittering shards that have shone there for billions of years, but the blue-black canopy between them. I see it and think of my watercolors, of carving Bristol from linoleum, of Polaris-with a twang, of Camie's hand in them all, of the thousand ways she'll never see her touch unfold-and somehow recognize it's this very darkness, the cutouts, the envelope of holes that makes the stars so sharp and beautiful. All that absence isn't negative space.”
― Julie Israel, Juniper Lemon's Happiness Index

“We teach our girls how not to get raped with a sense of doom, a sense that we are fighting a losing battle. When I was writing this novel, friend after friend came to me telling me of something that had happened to them. A hand up their skirt, a boy who wouldn’t take no for an answer, a night where they were too drunk to give consent but they think it was taken from them anyway. We shared these stories with one another and it was as if we were discussing some essential part of being a woman, like period cramps or contraceptives. Every woman or girl who told me these stories had one thing in common: shame. ‘I was drunk . . . I brought him back to my house . . . I fell asleep at that party . . . I froze and I didn’t tell him to stop . . .’ My fault. My fault. My fault. When I asked these women if they had reported what had happened to the police, only one out of twenty women said yes. The others looked at me and said, ‘No. How could I have proved it? Who would have believed me?’ And I didn’t have any answer for that.”
― Louise O'Neill, Asking For It

“That the battles are usually in her head does not lessen the bravery of it. The hardest ones always are.”
― William Ritter, Jackaby