#pen

There are certain phrases potent to make my blood boil -- improper influence! What old woman's cackle is that?" "Are you a young lady?" "I am a thousand times better: I am an honest woman, and as such I will be treated. ↗

— Charlotte Brontë

#expectations #gender #honesty #independence #influence

LEONATO Well, then, go you into hell? BEATRICE No, but to the gate; and there will the devil meet me, like an old cuckold, with horns on his head, and say 'Get you to heaven, Beatrice, get you to heaven; here's no place for you maids:' so deliver I up my apes, and away to Saint Peter for the heavens; he shows me where the bachelors sit, and there live we as merry as the day is long. ↗

— William Shakespeare

#empowerment #freedom #happiness #heaven #husbands

I am anchored on a resolve you cannot shake. My heart, my conscience shall dispose of my hand -- they only. Know this at last. ↗

— Charlotte Brontë

#conscience #courtship #dignity #empowerment #feminism

It is a pity he did not write in pencil. As you have no doubt frequently observed, the impression usually goes through -- a fact which has dissolved many a happy marriage. ↗

— Arthur Conan Doyle

#divorce #evidence #infidelity #marriage #pencils

College feminists made fun of skyscrapers, saying they were phallic symbols. They said the same thing about space rockets, even though, if you stopped to think about it, rockets were shaped the way they were not because of phallocentrism but because of aerodynamics. Would a vagina-shaped Apollo 11 have made it to the moon? Evolution had created the penis. It was a useful structure for getting certain things done. And if it worked for the pistils of flowers as well as the inseminatory organs of Homo sapiens, whose fault was that but Biology's? But no--anything large or grand in design, any long novel, big sculpture, or towering building, became, in the opinion of the "women" Mitchell knew at college, manifestations of male insecurity about the size of their penises. ↗

— Jeffrey Eugenides

#penises #phallocentrism #marriage

This is the story of a man named Eddie and it starts at the end, with Eddie dying in the sun. It may seem strange to start a story with and ending, but all endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time. ↗

— Mitch Albom

#inspirational #opening-lines #philosophical #inspirational

Children have neither a past nor a future. Thus they enjoy the present, which seldom happens to us. ↗

— Jean de la Bruyere

#enjoy #future #happens #neither #nor

Gus: There are still bears out here. Black bears who feel no kinship to black men. ↗

— Burton Guster

#gus #psych #shawn-spencer #men

The best luck always happens to people who don't need it. ↗

— Robert Penn Warren

#happenstance #luck #need #privilege #men

We let ourselves loose on that simple blank piece of paper, and our bodies spill. The terror, the love…embodying our stories page after page. In a sense, the pen was our tongue, it is how we delineate the world. ↗

— Coco J. Ginger

#jamie-weise #journaling #love #overcoming #pages