“Every time a man takes from a woman’s body without her permission, he is disrespecting the womb from which he was born, he is defiling the place that protected him when he was at his most defenseless.”

To heal you must forgive your heart, your skin, your body, all of their mistakes.

What I have spent in mourning is the price I have paid for my healing.

Even without him, you can bring down monsters. Believe me. You can still bring down monsters.

My Fairy Godmother is my heart sustaining me.

When I held her, I held her gently so that she always knew she could fly away and I would never harm her or clip her wings.

She’s a woman in love and is loved in return. That is a powerful thing.

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.

Defense is a definite part of the game, and a great part of defense is learning to play it without fouling.

It is that we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never no helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object of its love.

Only doubtful truths need defense.

Knowing the enemy enables you to take the offensive, knowing yourself enables you to stand on the defensive.

For there is no defense for a man who, in the excess of his wealth, has kicked the great altar of Justice out of sight.

The best offense needs the best defense.

Fashion has always been my defense mechanism.

Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.