“I know how to live with a blade and teach it not to make me bleed.”

The world is not allowed to make a meal of you, girl. It is there for your consuming.

You are permitted to be cruel sometimes, and you are allowed to fall apart, and feel every emotion they tell you not to feel.

I am more powerful than I am damaged and I will rise from any abyss you drown me in.

And she needs no prince or knight to save her, because her might is enough to tame dragons.

Survival is ugly. Healing is messy. Self-love is complicated.

So when they ask you what you weigh, you don’t need to look down at any scale. Instead, simply tell them the truth; tell them how you weigh whole universes and storms and scars and stories, too.

Before we had mouths or language or hope, we still had love. I know it’s not much. But my god, it’s beautiful and on so many days it is enough.

If a woman does not fit the shape of what you think a woman should, if a woman is not obedient, does not see things the way you do, if a woman is too independent to need anything more than herself, does she automatically become a threat filled with such terror to you?

It has taken me some time to learn that although karma exists, you can let your hatred go, not by destroying your own magic but by letting it grow.

The worst story I know is my heart. The best story I know is my heart. Both these truths know how to exist together in ways I never thought I will learn. This is the quietest of victories.

Love someone who is kinder to you than you are to yourself.

Listen to me girl, you have castles inside your bones, coronets in your heart, if he threatens you with a battle, you raise him a whole war, the last time I checked, queens cover before no man.

Somedays I am more wolf than woman. And I am still learning how to stop apologizing for my wild.

And darling, I hope your remember to kiss the ghosts goodnight. They are only older versions of you that you have had to discard and forget.

Grandmothers are a gift not to be taken lightly. So many lose them, before they are old enough to know their magic. I am glad my bones were born with this knowledge.

That growth is simply learning how to suffer, gracefully, elegantly constantly moving and travelling without letting your pain tear you apart.

Good Heavens! For more than forty years I have been speaking prose without knowing it.

It is better to will the good than to know the truth.

I know and love the good, yet, ah! the worst pursue.

Moreover, it thus follows that not a great deal of time was needed for the large animals of the three major parts of the world to become known to the people who spent time on the coasts of those regions.

I know not how to express better, what my sins appear to me to be, than by heaping infinite upon infinite, and multiplying infinite by infinite. When I look into my heart and take a view of my wickedness, it looks like an abyss infinitely deeper than hell.

He who does not know Him, knows nothing else as it truly is.

What name to call thee by, O virgin fair, I know not, for thy looks are not of earth And more than mortal seems thy countenances.

I know I could be an astronomer of this swooning.