see her grace and her beauty

“I have sat here and listened to you smear my cousin and question my parentage, but I will not tolerate an insult to my father. Get out. I may not be a Demarr by blood, but I had their training, and by the Aspects, I will draw blood. Leave my house.”

Mr. Rochester: yes, I tried to get you to marry me when my wife, who suffers from violent psychosis and can never get help in this era, was still alive. without you knowing about her. also you are 18 and I'm 40. I do love you, though, and when you're being Very Jane(tm) I love that too, even if it's inconvenient for me

Me after meeting St. John Rivers: BRING ME BACK THE ATTEMPED BIGAMIST!!!

Slowly, as though thinking it out for himself, Winter said, "That there's no such thing as a coward, or a brave man—not out there. There's no man's will stronger than the war. He might as well have called you an angel as call you a coward, the—distinction—is just as valuable. That is to say, not at all. And of course, the world ended. But it went on too."

Vin and Elend. And nothing bad ever happened.

As I quote:

'Oh heavens, oh heavens,' said Yennefer much later, slowly wiping a tear from her cheek. "..."

And then stuck with it for all her main male love interests. They can be different levels of kind, of funny, of honest, but every single love interest is the type that hold themselves in complete control, and honestly, she's absolutely right.

books I’ve read in 2026 📖 no. 033

Burn For Me by Ilona Andrews

“What are your qualifications for this job?”

Shakespeare wrote a wide variety of fleshed out female characters. He wrote Damsels in Distress, Cross-dressing Girlbosses, and Complex Female Villains. He wrote a woman who refused to sell her virtue to save her family and then shamed her brother for suggesting it. He wrote Taming of the Shrew and it's opposite, All's Well that Ends Well, in which the wife hunts down and tames the husband. He wrote men who are good because they listen to, trust, and defend women. He wrote women of all kinds. He wrote women who drive the plot and women doomed by the narrative. He wrote women in love and women who pathetically follow a man who doesn't like them and women in hatred. He wrote sensible women and silly women and everything in between of all ages.

Apollonius of Rhodes. Voyage of the Argo. Trans. Emile Victor Rieu. 2nd ed. N.p.: Penguin Classics, 1959. Print.

Bracke, Evelien. “Of Metis and Magic: The Conceptual Transformations of Circe and Medea in Ancient Greek Poetry.” Doctoral thesis. Maynooth, 2009. Print.

Clark, Brian. “The Witches of Thessaly.” N.d. MS.

Collins, Derek. Magic in the Ancient Greek World. N.p.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008. Print.

D'Este, Sorita. Hekate: Liminal Rites. N.p.: Avalonia, 2009. Print.

Euripides. Medea. Trans. Rex Warner. Rep Una ed. N.p.: Dover, 1993. Print. Dover Thrift Editions.

Faraone, Christopher A. Ancient Greek Love Magic. N.p.: Harvard University, 2001. Print.

Flint, Valerie, et al. Ancient Greece and Rome. Ed. Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania, 1999. Print. Vol. 2 of Witchcraft and Magic in Europe. 6 vols.

Gager, John G. Curse Tablets and Binding Spells from the Ancient World. N.p.: Oxford University, 1999. Print.

Griffiths, Emma. Medea. N.p.: Routledge, 2006. Print. Gods and Heroes of the Ancient World.

Johnston, Sarah Iles. Ancient Greek Divination. N.p.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008. Print.

- - -. Hekate Soteira: A Study of Hekate’s Roles in the Chaldean Oracles and Related Literature. N.p.: Oxford University, 1990. Print.

- - -. Restless Dead: Encounters between the Living and the Dead in Ancient Greece. Reprint ed. N.p.: U of California, 2013. Print.

Lucan. Civil War. Trans. Matthew Fox. N.p.: Penguin Classics, 2012. Print.

Luck, Georg. Arcana Mundi. N.p.: John Hopkins University, 2006. Print.

Ogden, Daniel. Greek and Roman Necromancy. N.p.: Princeton University, 2004. Print.

- - -. Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds. 2nd ed. N.p.: Oxford University, 2009. Print.

- - -. Night’s Black Agents: Witches, Wizards, and the Dead in the Ancient World. N.p.: Bloomsbury Academic, 2008. Print.

Ovid. Metamorphoses. Trans. David Raeburn. Reprint ed. N.p.: Penguin Classics, 2004. Print.

Penman, Elicia Ann. “Toil and Trouble: Changes of Imagery to Hekate and Medea in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.” Doctoral thesis. Queensland, 2014. Print.

Rabinowitz, Jacob. The Rotting Goddess: The Origin of the Witch in Classical Antiquity. N.p.: Autonomedia, 1998. Print.

Seneca. Medea. Trans. Frederick Ahl. N.p.: Cornell University, 1986. Print. Masters of Latin Literature.

Spaeth, Barbette Stanley. “From Goddess to Hag: The Greek and Roman Witch in Classical Literature.” 2014. Daughters of Hecate: Women and Magic in the Ancient World. Ed. Dayna Kalleres and Kimberly Stratton. N.p.: Oxford University, 2014. 41-70. Print.

The girl, the King... and the monster they became.