Avi

“I have existed for twenty-one years. I didn’t live them all, but from now on I am hoping to.”
― Lily Bailey, Because We Are Bad: OCD and a Girl Lost in Thought

“Women with consumption during the nineteenth century were thought to be the epitome of beauty. They are described in books and depicted in paintings as being luminescent with their milk-white skin and red lips. This is how men saw them, anyway. The perfect woman—impossibly pale, impossibly thin, lips tinted red (from coughing up blood), too tired to speak, too weak to move. All she can do is sit and stare out the window, incandescent as life leaves her body. A woman was thought by many to have contracted consumption due to some moral failing, so while her beauty was fetishized, her character was denigrated. Fucking men.”
― Anna Marie Tendler, Men Have Called Her Crazy: A Memoir

“Other people would call him sensitive, but it is more than that. The dial is broken, the volume turned all the way up. Moments of joy registered as brief, but ecstatic. Moments of pain stretched long and unbearably loud.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“Instead, I cemented my role in relationships as a pleaser, a convincer, a girl who, well into adulthood, would contort and conform to the desires of a man, overlooking his easy dismissal, and dampening her self-worth, all to be loved.”
― Anna Marie Tendler, Men Have Called Her Crazy: A Memoir