Said By A Witch In Macbeth Quotes

What are you doing sister? / Killing swine. ~ William Shakespeare

A few magical practitioners claimed that they first met their familiars in fairyland, or at the sabbath; however, a greater number claimed that their journey to these places had been initiated by the familiar's invitation. Nairnshire witch Isobel Gowdie ( 1662 ) , for example, first met the Devil as she was 'goeing betwix the townes of Drumdewin and the Headis' where she 'promeisit to me it him, in the night time, in the Kirk of Aulderne; quhilk I did'. Bessie Dunlop claimed that on one occasion Tom Reid 'tuke hir be the aproun, and wald haif had hir gangand [go} with him to Elfame', and that on another, she met a group of 'gude wychtis that wynnit in the Court of Elfame; quha come thair to desyre hir to go with thame'. Scattered throughout encounter-narratives from Southern England, where descriptions of sabbath and fairyland experiences are seldom found, we still find references to familiars attempting to lure magical practitioners to 'go with them', although the destination- is not specified. Huntingdonshire witch Ellen Shepheard ( 1646), for example, claimed that 'a Spirit, somewhat like a Rat, but not fully so big, of an iron-grey colour … said you must goe with me' , whilst nearly seventy years earlier Essex witch Elizabeth Bennett maintained that a familiar spirit in the form of a black dog asked her to 'go with it ~ Emma Wilby

On the Continent, every attempt to substitute a lighter punishment for death was fiercely denounced as a direct violation of the Divine law. Indeed, some persons went so far as to question the lawfulness of strangling the witch before she was burnt. Her crime, they said, was treason against the Almighty, and therefore to punish it by any but the most agonizing deaths was an act of disrespect to Him. Besides, the penalty in the Levitical code was stoning, and stoning had been pronounced by the Jewish theologians to be a still more painful death than the stake. ~ William Edward Hartpole Lecky

Only five minutes later he noticed a dozen crocuses growing round the foot of an old tree- gold and purple and white. Then came a sound even more delicious than the sound of water. Close beside the path they were following, a bird suddenly chirped from the branch of a tree. It was answered by the chuckle of another bird a little further off. And then, as if that had been a signal, there was chattering and chirruping in every direction, and then a moment of full song, and within five minutes the whole wood was ringing with birds' music, and wherever Edmund's eyes turned he saw birds alighting on branches, or sailing overhead or chasing one another or having their little quarrels or tidying up their feathers with their beaks.
"Faster! Faster!" said the Witch.
There was no trace of the fog now. The sky became bluer and bluer, and now there were white clouds hurrying across it from time to time. In the wide glades there were primroses. A light breeze sprang up which scattered drops of moisture from the swaying branches and carried cool, delicious scents against the faces of the travelers. The trees began to come fully alive. The larches and birches were covered with green, the laburnums with gold. Soon the beech trees had put forth their delicate, transparent leaves. As the travelers walked under them the light also became green. A bee buzzed crossed their path. ~ C.S. Lewis

Just reason it out. What are the pros and cons with her?"
"Reason! Always with your bloody reason. Do you know what I'm going to enjoy? When you meet your demoness and she shakes to tell your unflappable demeanor. I'm going to laugh when you turn enraged, horns flaring ramrod straight every time she saunters by."
"Noted. Now, begin with the pros."
"Verra well. She's clever, she's brave, and, by all the gods, she's graced in form. And I'm no' going to apologize for being a typical male - I do want the sexiest female I've ever laid eyes on to be mine. I'll admit that I want her on my arm and in my bed. And I want to be smug over having her desire me, too."
"The cons . . ."
"Right back to the witchery. Would you no' be a tad unnerved if your female could unleash the force of an atomic bomb whenever she got nettled with you?"
Rydstrom nodded in commiseration, then said, "Take away the fact that she's a witch - "
"I will be taking away that fact," Bowe interrupted. "Practicing witchcraft is voluntary. I could see to it that she never - "
Out of the blue, a bee stung him. "Damn it," he muttered, slapping it away, then continued, "If I snatched her away from her coven and immersed her with the Lykae - "
Another sting. "Son of a bitch!"
When the odd breeze blew once more, Bowe narrowed his eyes. "The witch." He gazed up at the sky and all around him. "Playing with me again! I'll turn her over my knee for this. ~ Kresley Cole

The front door of the Flippant Witch gave a series of loud clicks and swung inward. Renard Lambert, his blue-and-purple finery resembling a plum in the twitching lanterns, practically hurled himself through the open doorway
"Widdershins!" he called loudly, cape flowing behind him, "I - gaaack!" He ducked, barely in time to avoid the carafe that shattered loudly against the wall just behind his head. The tinkling of broken glass, a dangerous entry chime indeed, sounded around him.
"Oh," Genevieve said, her tone only vaguely contrite. "It's just your friend. Sorry, Renard."
"Sorry? Sorry?! What the hell were you - ah. Um, hello, ah, Widdershins."
Widdershins, who had lurched to her feet as the door opened, was suddenly and forcibly reminded by Renard's stunned stare that Genevieve had disrobed her in order to get at the rapier wound. Blushing as furiously as a nun in a brothel, she ducked behind her blonde-haired friend and groped desperately for her shirt.
"Didn't mean to take your head off, Renard," Genevieve said, mainly to distract him. "But you rather startled us."
"Quite understandable," the popinjay responded absently, his eyes flickering madly as he fought to locate some safe place to put them. ~ Ari Marmell

You can't let him get away with this!" Penny shrieked.
Caine wasn't having it. "You stupid witch," he yelled back. "No one told you to let it go that far!"
"He was mine for the day," Penny hissed. She pressed a rag to her nose, which had started bleeding again.
"He tore his own eyes out. What did you think Quinn would do? What do you think Albert will do now?" He bit savagely at his thumb, a nervous habit.
"I thought you were the king!"
Caine reacted without thinking. He swung a hard backhand at her face. The blow did not connect, but the thought did. Penny flew backward like she'd been hit by a bus. She smacked hard against the wall of the office.
The blow stunned her, and Caine was in her face before she could clear her thoughts.
Turk came bursting in, his gun leveled. "What's happening?"
"Penny tripped," Caine said.
Penny's freckled face was white with fury.
"Don't," Caine warned. He tightened an invisible grip around her head and twisted it back at an impossible angle.
Then Caine released her.
Penny panted and glared. But no nightmare seized Caine's mind. "You'd better hope Lana can fix that boy, Penny."
"You're getting soft." Penny choked out the words.
"Being king isn't about being a sick creep," Caine said. "People need someone in charge. People are sheep and they need a big sheepdog telling them what to do and where to go. But it doesn't work if you start killing the sheep."
"You're scared of ~ Michael Grant

Contentedly sat the old woman. Soon now, the sea would hold no terrors, and the blinds wouldn't have to be down, nor the windows shut; she would even be able to walk along the shore at midnight as of old; and they, whom she had deserted so long ago, would once more shrink from the irresistable energy aura of her new, young body.
The sound of the sea came to her, where she sat so quietly; calm sound at first, almost gentle in the soft sibilation of each wave thrust. Farther out, the voices of the water were louder, more raucous, blatantly confident, but the meaning of what they said was blurred by the distance, a dim, clamorous confusion that rustled discordantly out of the gathering night.
Night!
She shouldn't be aware of night falling, when the blinds were drawn.
("The Witch") ~ A.E. Van Vogt

Good day to you, Harry Potter's relatives!" said Dedalus happily, striding into the living room. The Dursleys did not look at all happy to be addressed thus; Harry half expected another change of mind. Dudley shrank nearer to his mother at the sight of the witch and wizard.
"I see you are packed and ready. Excellent! The plan, as Harry has told you, is a simple one," said Dedalus, pulling an immense pocket watch out of his waistcoat and examining it. "We shall be leaving before Harry does. Due to the danger of using magic in your house--Harry being still underage, it could provide the Ministry with an excuse to arrest him--we shall be driving, say, ten miles or so, before Disapparating to the safe location we have picked out for you. You know how to drive, I take it?" he asked Uncle Vernon politely.
"Know how to--? Of course I ruddy well know how to drive!" spluttered Uncle Vernon.
"Very clever of you, sir, very clever, I personally would be utterly bamboozled by all those buttons and knobs," said Dedalus. He was clearly under the impression that he was flattering Vernon Dursley, who was visibly losing confidence in the plan with every word Dedalus spoke.
"Can't even drive," he muttered under his breath, his mustache rippling indignantly, but fortunately neither Dedalus nor Hestia seemed to hear him. ~ J.K. Rowling

And so," continued the Witch, "that Human creature is mine. His life is forfeit to me. His blood is my property."
"Come and take it then," said the Bull-with-the-man's-head in a great bellowing voice.
"Fool," said the Witch with a savage smile that was almost a snarl, "do you really think your master can rob me of my rights by mere force? He knows the Deep Magic better than that. He knows that unless I have blood as the Law says, all Narnia will be overturned and perish in fire and water."
"It is very true," said Aslan; "I do not deny it."
"Oh, Aslan!" whispered Susan in the Lion's ear. "Can't we--I mean, you won't, will you? Can't we do something about the Deep Magic? Isn't there something you can work against it?"
"Work against the Emperor's magic?" said Aslan, turning to her with something like a frown on his face. And nobody ever made that suggestion to him again. ~ C.S. Lewis

Quincy laughed. "If I were Elizabeth I shouldn't thank either of you for that comforting diagnosis. Would it do any good to open Aunt Sarai's grave and drive a stake through her? If you believe in as much sorcery as that, you must regret the days of witch-burners, Carew."

Carew said quietly, "No. Witch-burners were barbarous blunderers. If I wanted to suppress a dangerous letter, could I do it by burning the envelope and leaving the letter loose? The witch would come back unchanged; I should merely have postponed the danger until another time and place. And have further handicapped myself to meet it, by depriving the witch, by violent death, of the years allotted her, or him, for evolution."

Joseph said with dry humor, "She might not have used them for that, Carew. At least not for your idea of it."

Carew shrugged. "That would be her responsibility, not mine. And, in any case, she would be that many years nearer the time of her inevitable change."

This time Joseph did not answer, only smiled. ~ Evangeline Walton

Good answer! Part of us thinks all kinds of things," said Mrs Ogg.
"Part of me is thinking: who's this haughty little miss who talks to me as if I was a kiddie of five? But most of me is thinking: she's got a heap of troubles of her own and has seen plenty of things a human shouldn't have to see. Mind you, part of me says: so have I. Seeing things a human shouldn't have to see makes us human. Well, miss … if you've any sense, part of you is thinking, there's a witch in front of me who's seen my granddad many times, when she's sat by a sickbed that's suddenly become a deathbed, and if she's ready to spit in his eye when the time comes then she could probably bother me considerably right now if she puts her mind to it. Understand? Let's all keep our parts to ourselves," and suddenly she gave Susan a wink, "as the High Priest said to the actress. ~ Terry Pratchett

What is so often said about the solders of the 20th century is that they fought to make us free. Which is a wonderful sentiment and one witch should evoke tremendous gratitude if in fact there was a shred of truth in that statement but, it's not true. It's not even close to true in fact it's the opposite of truth.

There's this myth around that people believe that the way to honor deaths of so many of millions of people; that the way to honor is to say that we achieved some tangible, positive, good, out of their death's. That's how we are supposed to honor their deaths. We can try and rescue some positive and forward momentum of human progress, of human virtue from these hundreds of millions of death's but we don't do it by pretending that they'd died to set us free because we are less free; far less free now then we were before these slaughters began. These people did not die to set us free. They did not die fighting any enemy other than the ones that the previous deaths created.

The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names. Solders are paid killers, and I say this with a great degree of sympathy to young men and women who are suckered into a life of evil through propaganda and the labeling of heroic to a man in costume who kills for money and the life of honor is accepting ordered killings for money, prestige, and pensions. We create the possibility of moral choice by communicating truth about ethics to people. That to me is where ~ Stefan Molyneux

I've been insulted by fools before. I survived." Even in the dim light he saw her eyes change.

"Just because he was using words instead of a knife, you can't dismiss it, Saetan. He hurt you."

"Of course he hurt me," Saetan snapped. "Being accused of - " He closed his eyes and squeezed her hand. "I don't tolerate fools, Jaenelle, but I also don't kill them for being fools. I simply keep them out of my life." He sat up and took her other hand. "I am your sword and your shield, Lady. You don't have to kill."

Witch studied him with her ancient, haunted sapphire eyes. "You'll take the scars on your soul so that mine remains unmarked?"

"Everything has a price," he said gently. "Those kinds of scars are part of being a Warlord Prince. You're at a crossroads, witch-child. You can use your power to heal or to harm. It's your choice. ~ Anne Bishop

Some of the New York Radical Women shortly afterward formed WITCH (Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) and its members, dressed as witches, appeared suddenly on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. A leaflet put out by WITCH in New York said:
WITCH lives and smiles in every woman. She is the free part of each of us, beneath the shy smiles, the acquiescence to absurd male domination, the make-up or flesh-suffocating clothes our sick society demands. There is no "joining" WITCH. If you are a woman and dare to look within yourself, you are a WITCH. You make your own rules. ~ Howard Zinn

This mundus tenebrosus, this shaddowy world of Mankind, is sunk into Night; there is not a Field without its Spirits, nor a City without its Daemons, and the Lunaticks speak Prophesies while the Wise men fall into the Pitte. We are all in the Dark, one with another. And, as the Inke stains the Paper on which it is spilt and slowly spreads to Blot out the Characters, so the Contagion of darkness and malefaction grows apace until all becomes unrecognizable. Thus it was with the Witches who were tryed by Swimming not long before, since once the Prosecution had commenced no Stop could be put to the raving Women who came forward: the number of Afflicted and Accused began to encrease and, upon Examination, more confess'd themselves guilty of Crimes than were suspected of. And so it went, till the Evil revealed was so great that it threatened to bring all into Confusion.

And yet in the way of that Philosophie much cryed up in London and elsewhere, there are those like Sir Chris. who speak only of what is Rational and what is Demonstrated, of Propriety and Plainness. Religion Not Mysterious is their Motto, but if they would wish the Godhead to be Reasonable why was it that when Adam heard that Voice in the Garden he was afraid unto Death? The Mysteries must become easy and familiar, it is said, and it has now reached such a Pitch that there are those who wish to bring their mathematicall Calculations into Morality, viz. the Quantity of Publick Good produced by any Agent is ~ Peter Ackroyd

Okay you guys need the dope on the real story of the princess and the frog...So once upon a time a beautiful independent confident princess came upon a frog sitting by a pond. The frog said to the princess 'I was once a handsome prince until an evil Witch put a spell on me.'...So the smart-assed frog said 'If you will just kiss me I will turn back into a prince. And then you'll marry me move into the castle with my mother and you can cook for me and clean my clothes have my children and live happy ever after while I go rescue a damsel in distress'...Later that night the princess laughed as she sat down to dinner. 'I don't think so ' she said and dug hungrily into her plate of frog's legs. And she lived happily ever after. ~ Phyllis Curott

A witch couldn't help being some kind of expert as to the ways people came into the world; by the time she was twelve, the older witches had trusted her to go out to a birth by herself. Besides, she had helped lambs to be born, even when she was quite small. It came naturally, as Nanny Ogg said, although not as naturally as you might think. She remembered Mr. and Mrs. Hamper, quite a decent couple who had three children in a row before they worked out what was causing it. ~ Terry Pratchett

Finn," she protested. "I wasn't laughing like, with her." Izzy glowered at me. "She tried to kill me."
"Actually, I didn't," I broke in. There was a hard look in Aislinn's and Finley's eyes that scared the heck out of me. The last thing I wanted was to be held responsible for Elodie's actions, especially now that I was, technically, one of these women, and the words just came pouring out of my mouth. "See, I don't have powers anymore, because I was supposed to go through the Removal, and that sort of locked my magic away so that I can't use it. But there was this girl-well, this witch-Elodie, and because she passed her magic on to me when she died, we're connected. That means her ghost follows me around and stuff, so when you attacked me, she possessed my body. Which is new and, quite frankly, super freaky, and something that I haven't really processed yet. Anyway, she was the one who used magic on you. Oh, and held the sword to your throat, and said all that creepy stuff. I'm not creepy. At least not on purpose."
By now, all three Brannick women-all four, if you counted Mom-were staring at me. Man, what had that piney-tasting stuff been? The Brannick version of Red Bull?
"I'll, uh, stop talking now. ~ Rachel Hawkins

Knocking on a massive carved door minutes later, the sigils on it shouting to those literate enough to 'Stay away or else!' he received a nice surprise when the door swung open.
Well, hello there. Reaching only his shoulder, with a wild mop of black hair, bright brown eyes and a rounded body made for worship – by his tongue – Remy wondered if he could convince the servant girl to come around the corner with him for a quickie before he met with this Ysabel person.
Then she opened her luscious mouth. "If you're done gawking, you might want to step back before I smash your nose with the door when I shut it."
Someone got up without sex today. He could fix that. "Hello beautiful, I actually have business with the occupant of this suite. I'm here to meet with Ysabel, the witch."
"Really." Her tone said what she thought of his claim and her brown gaze looked him up and down, then dismissed him. "I don't think so."
The door slammed shut in his face.
What. The. Fuck.
Remy pounded on the door. It immediately opened. The ebony haired vixen, her arms crossed under her bountiful tits, smirked. "Back already. What's wrong? Did I hurt your feelings?"
"Listen woman, I don't know what crawled up your ass and turned you into an uptight bitch, but I'm here to see Ysabel, so get the fuck out of my way before I put you over my knee and –"
"And what? Spank me?" Her eyes actually sparked with challenge, the minx. "I'd like to see you try. But, b ~ Eve Langlais

Ancient moon priestesses were called virgins. 'Virgin' meant not married, not belong to a man - a woman who was 'one-in-herself'. The very word derives from a Latin root meaning strength, force, skill; and was later applied to men: virle. Ishtar, Diana, Astarte, Isis were all all called virgin, which did not refer to sexual chasity, but sexual independence. And all great culture heroes of the past…, mythic or historic, were said to be born of virgin mothers: Marduk, Gilgamesh, Buddha, Osiris, Dionysus, Genghis Khan, Jesus - they were all affirmed as sons of the Great Mother, of the Original One, their worldly power deriving from her. When the Hebrews used the word, and in the original Aramaic, it meant 'maiden' or 'young woman', with no connotations to sexual chasity. But later Christian translators could not conceive of the 'Virgin Mary' as a woman of independent sexuality, needless to say; they distorted the meaning into sexually pure, chaste, never touched. When Joan of Arc, with her witch coven associations, was called La Pucelle - 'the Maiden,' 'the Virgin' - the word retained some of its original pagan sense of a strong and independent woman. The Moon Goddess was worshipped in orgiastic rites, being the divinity of matriarchal women free to take as many lovers as they choose. Women could 'surrender' themselves to the Goddess by making love to a stranger in her temple. ~ Monica Sjöö

I wish I could answer your question. All I can say is that all of us, humans, witches, bears, are engaged in a war already, although not all of us know it. Whether you find danger on Svalbard or whether you fly off unharmed, you are a recruit, under arms, a soldier."
"Well, that seems kinda precipitate. Seems to me a man should have a choice whether to take up arms or not."
"We have no more choice in that than in whether or not to be born."
"Oh, I like choice, though," he said. "I like choosing the jobs I take and the places I go and the food I eat and the companions I sit and yarn with. Don't you wish for a choice once in a while ?"
She considered, and then said, "Perhaps we don't mean the same thing by choice, Mr. Scoresby. Witches own nothing, so we're not interested in preserving value or making profits, and as for the choice between one thing and another, when you live for many hundreds of years, you know that every opportunity will come again. We have different needs. You have to repair your balloon and keep it in good condition, and that takes time and trouble, I see that; but for us to fly, all we have to do is tear off a branch of cloud-pine; any will do, and there are plenty more. We don't feel cold, so we need no warm clothes. We have no means of exchange apart from mutual aid. If a witch needs something, another witch will give it to her. If there is a war to be fought, we don't consider cost one of the factors in deciding whether or not it ~ Philip Pullman

To make this sign, the first and little fingers are upraised and the other fingers folded in towards the palm. This was a secret sign used for recognition purposes by followers of the medieval witch cult who were traditionally worshippers of the pagan Horned God. ~ Paul Rhys Mountfort

I know that one day he will lose to the waterfall, slip behind its turbulent curtain forever, lost to me like something out of a fairy tale. But in our story, there's no villain, no witch, no fairy godmother, no moral imperative or cautionary conclusion. No happily-ever-after. It just is. It's life. The water keeps flowing as we come and go. We were never forever, Jamie and I. Nothing is in this life. But if you love someone, and are loved by someone, you might find forever after. Whatever and wherever that is. ~ Julia Whelan

Mama, Ollie taught me how to play 'Let It Go' on guitar," Crista piped up in a muffled voice as she pulled her pajama shirt over her head. Aunt Linda shot me a look that was half sheer terror, half witch hunt. The face of someone at peak Frozen saturation. I didn't, I swear, I mouthed, making chopping motions by my neck. ~ Sophie Gonzales

He'll take from your mind the answer best suited to lead you on, to enthrall you. He'll weave a web of deceits so thick you won't see the world through it. He wants your strength and he'll say what he must say to get it. Break the chain, child! You're the strongest of them all! Break the chain and he'll go back
to hell for he has no other place to go in all the wide world to find strength like yours. Don't you see?
He's created it. Bred sister to brother, and uncle to niece, and son to mother, yes, that too, when he had
to do it, to make an ever more powerful witch, only faltering now and then, and gaining what he lost in one generation by even greater strength in the next. What was the cost of Antha and Deirdre if he could have a Rowan! ~ Anne Rice

So, what is it, woman?" She raised one delicate eyebrow and he felt as if she'd dug down into his very soul.
"I have word of Annwyl of the Dark Plains."
Brastias stood quickly, grasping the woman by the arms; she stood almost as tall as he. "Tell me, witch. Where is she?"
She stared at him. "Remove your hands, or I'll make sure you don't have any." Brastias took a deep breath and released her. "She is safe and alive. But she is healing. She won't be back for another fortnight."
Brastias heaved a sigh of overwhelming relief as he sat heavily in his chair. "Thank the gods. I thought we'd lost her."
"You almost had. But the girl must have the gods smiling down on her."
"Can I see her?"
The woman watched him carefully. "No. But I will get any messages you may have to her."
"Give me a few moments, I need to write something." He grabbed quill and paper and wrote Annwyl a brief-but-to-the-point letter. He folded it, affixed his seal, and handed it to the witch. "Give her this and my love."
"You are her man then?" she asked cautiously.
Brastias laughed. He did like his head securely attached to his shoulders. Becoming Annwyl's man risked that.
"Annwyl has no man because there is no man worthy of her. That includes me. So she has become the sister I lost many years ago in Lorcan's dungeons."
The woman nodded and walked back to the entrance of Brastias's tent. She stopped before leaving. "She asks," the witch spoke softly with ~ G.A. Aiken

Paradox is at the heart of the mysteries of witchcraft. I believe that paradox is what allows the conditions for the witch to create magick. By creating a paradox, we essentially overload the processing of reality by breaking the rules. In a way, we're jamming the system like throwing a wrench into the cogs, where we can then enter in our own codes for when we're done and the system and its processes of reality resume. ~ Mat Auryn

You see, even after decades of therapy and workshops and retreats and twelve-steps and meditation and even experiencing a very weird session of rebirthings, even after rappeling down mountains and walking over hot coals and jumping out of airplanes and watching elephant races and climbing the Great Wall of China, and even after floating down the Amazon and taking ayahuasca with an ex-husband and a witch doctor and speaking in tongues and fasting (both nutritional and verbal), I remained pelted and plagued by feelings of uncertainty and despair. Yes, even after sleeping with a senator, and waking up next to a dead friend, and celebrating Michael Jackson's last Christmas with him and his kids, I still did not feel - how shall I put this? - mentally sound. ~ Carrie Fisher

If you are a monster, stand up.
If you are a monster, a trickster, a fiend,
If you've built a steam-powered wishing machine
If you have a secret, a dark past, a scheme,
If you kidnap maidens or dabble in dreams
Come stand by me.

If you have been broken, stand up.
If you have been broken, abandoned, alone
If you have been starving, a creature of bone
If you live in a tower, a dungeon, a throne
If you weep for wanting, to be held, to be known,
Come stand by me.

If you are a savage, stand up.
If you are a witch, a dark queen, a black knight,
If you are a mummer, a pixie, a sprite,
If you are a pirate, a tomcat, a wright,
If you swear by the moon and you fight the hard fight,
Come stand by me.

If you are a devil, stand up.
If you are a villain, a madman, a beast,
If you are a strowler, a prowler, a priest,
If you are a dragon come sit at our feast,
For we all have stripes, and we all have horns,
We all have scales, tails, manes, claws and thorns
And here in the dark is where new worlds are born.
Come stand by me. ~ Catherynne M. Valente

[At the British Museum] For it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word [in the time of Shakespeare] when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet. What were the conditions in which women lived, I asked myself; (...)
[In] Professor Trevelyan's History of England [one can read that] wife-beating [or daughter-beating] was a recognized right of man (...) [A woman] could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband [or father].
Here I am asking why women did not write poetry in the Elisabethan age, and I am not sure how they were educated; whether they were taught to write; whether they had sitting-rooms to themselves; how many women had children before they were 21; what, in short, they did from eight in the morning till eight at night. They had no money evidently; (...) they were married whether they liked it or not (...) at fifteen or sixteen very likely... [Under these circumstances] It would have been extremely odd (...) for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare.
(...)
When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet (...). Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anom, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. (...) And undoubtedly, I thought, looking at the shelf ~ Virginia Woolf

This book is a fairy tale in which I am the prince and the princess. I am the king and the queen. I am my own wicked witch and fairy godmother. This book is a fairy tale in which I'm cursed and blessed by others. But, finally, I am the fair y finding my own magic. ~ Dean Atta

Female prophecy must be situated in the crisis of reproduction in the middle of the seventeenth century. This was the peak period for the criminalization of women in England and throughout Europe, as prosecutions for infanticide, abortion, and witchcraft reached their highest rate. It was also the period in which men began to wrest control of reproduction from women (male midwives appeared in 1625 and forceps soon thereafter); previously, "childbirth and the lying-in period were a kind of ritual collectively staged and controlled by women, from which men were usually excluded." Since the ruling class had begun to recognize its interest in increased fecundity, "attention was focussed on the 'population' as fundamental category for economic and political analysis." The simultaneous births of modern obstetrics and modern demography were responses to this crisis. Both, like the witchcraft prosecutions, sought to rationalize social reproduction in a capitalist context - that is, as the breeding of labor power. A recurring motif in the ruling-class imagination was intercourse between the English witch and the "black man" - a devil or imp. The terror was not limited to an imaginary chamber of horrors; it was an actuality of counterevolution. ~ Peter Linebaugh

Why are you doing this? I don't want you. Is that the problem? Is your ego so big you can't handle a woman rejecting you?"
"Oh, you want me alright, my sexy little witch. Want me so bad it scares you. Well, I've got news for you. It scares the fuck out of me, too. But I don't care. When the options are settling down with you for life and popping out little demonlings or watching you walk away, I know what I choose."
For a moment, she couldn't answer, could only gape at him as his words penetrated. Surely, she misunderstood. "What did you say?"
"I want you as my mate."
No misunderstanding that time.
She tamped down her elation by slapping it with the cold, hard truth. "You'll hurt me."
"Trust me."
He asked too much.
"I'm not the right woman."
"You're all I want."
She shook her head lest his words weave a spell around her and make her believe. Yet despite all the warnings in her head, hope blossomed and love warmed her. How nice it would be to allow herself to love him. To trust him.
Sadness entered his expression at her rejection. "I know it's hard for you, little witch, but I promise you've nothing to fear. Unless the thought of too many orgasms in a row freaks you out."
And that quickly, he changed from pensive male to the one she'd grown to love with the mischievous smile. He lunged. She squealed like a little girl and ran. Not far though.
With his ridiculously long stride, he quickly caught her a ~ Eve Langlais

There is a certain irony here, because many of the first werewolves to be outed in society from the 16th through the 18th centuries were actually women. Just as our American ancestors had their Salem Witch Trials, Europe had its Werewolf Trials, and a large number of the so-called "werewolves" tortured and burned at the stake were female. […] In the 17th-century werewolf trials of Estonia, women were about 150 percent more likely to be accused of lycanthropy; however, they were about 100 percent less likely to be remembered for it."

"Here's also a pronounced lack of female werewolves in popular culture. Their near absence in literature and film is explained away by various fancies: they're sterile, an aberration, or - most galling of all - they don't even exist.Their omission from popular culture does one thing very effectively: It prevents us, and men especially, from being confronted by hairy, ugly, uncontrollable women. Shapeshifting women in fantasy stories tend to transform into animals that we consider feminine, such as cats or birds, which are pretty and dainty, and occasionally slick and wicked serpents. But because the werewolf represents traits that are accepted as masculine - strength, large size, violence, and hirsutism - we tend to think of the werewolf as being naturally male. The female werewolf is disturbing because she entirely breaks the rules of femininity. ~ Julia Oldham

There is a curious idea among unscientific men that in scientific writing there is a common plateau of perfectionism. Nothing could be more untrue. The reports of biologists are the measure, not of the science, but of the men themselves. There are as few scientific giants as any other kind. In some reports it is impossible, because of inept expression, to relate the descriptions to the living animals. In some papers collecting places are so mixed or ignored that the animals mentioned cannot be found at all. The same conditioning forces itself into specification as it does into any other kind of observation, and the same faults of carelessness will be found in scientific reports as in the witness chair of a criminal court. It has seemed sometimes that the little men in scientific work assumed the awe-fullness of a priesthood to hide their deficiencies, as the witch-doctor does with his stilts and high masks, as the priesthoods of all cults have, with secret or unfamiliar languages and symbols. It is usually found that only the little stuffy men object to what is called "popularization", by which they mean writing with a clarity understandable to one not familiar with the tricks and codes of the cult. We have not known a single great scientist who could not discourse freely and interestingly with a child. Can it be that the haters of clarity have nothing to say, have observed nothing, have no clear picture of even their own fields? A dull man seems to be a dull man no matter wh ~ John Steinbeck

I felt just the way I imagine the shade of poor old Samuel must have felt when the witch dragged him up from Sheol. "Why hast thou disquieted me, to bring me up?" In fact, I had spent the morning darkness praying for the wisdom to do well by John Ames Boughton, and then when he woke me, I was immediately aware that my sullen old reptilian self would have handed him over to the Philistines for the sake of a few more minutes' sleep. ~ Marilynne Robinson