"I'm good at science because I'm good at listening.  I have been told I am intelligent, and I have been told that I am simple-minded.  I have been told that I am trying to do too much, and I have been told that I can't do what I want to do because I am a woman, and I have been told that I have only been allowed to do what I have done because I am a woman.  I have been told that I can have eternal life, and I have been told that I will burn myself out into an early death.  I have been admonished for being too feminine and I have been distrusted for being too masculine.  I have been warned that I am far too sensitive and I have been accused of being heartlessly callous.  But I was told all of these things by people who can't understand the present or see the future any better than I can.  Such recurrent pronouncements have forced me to accept that because I am a female scientist, anybody knows what the hell I am, and it has given me the delicious freedom to make it up as I go along.  I don't take advice from my colleagues, and I try not to give it.  When I am pressed, I resort to these two sentences:  You shouldn't take this job too seriously.  Except for when you should."
-Lab Girl by Hope Jahren

"Eventually, whether you choose or are chosen, joyously accept or grudgingly resist, you take the plunge.

You are born, you grow up, you become a wife.

But what if it wasn't this way?

What if a girl grew up like a boy, with marriage an abstract, someday thought, a thing to think about when she became an adult, a thing she could do, or not do, depending?

What would that look and feel like?"
 -Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own by Kate Bolick