Her Majesty's Royal Coven

It’s a life skill, finding the sweet spot between solitude and loneliness.

the patriarchy, above all else, fears women coming together, so internal female division only succeeds in greasing that machine.

Leonie was on a roll now. ‘From the second we’re born we’re made to feel insecure about our bodies, our choices, our lives. Then we hit puberty and all of a sudden we have to be both sexual and chaste at the same time, while our bodies are going fucking mental. We start leaking, for fuck’s sake. Then, after we’re covertly trained to conceal our excellence at school, we get to go work for men who don’t understand literally any of those dilemmas, and think they’re innately more skilled than us. They want you to be like men, but also not like men. It’s a fucking trap. We’re fucked as soon as the doctor says hun, it’s a girl.

A beginning often signals an end. That's the thing with dawn... you must first get through the night.

Both history and the past are fiction. Only the present is real.

Mum, you're freaking me out. You're not a witch. You shop at Next.

Charisma is a kind of magic, a very dangerous and unquantifiable weapon.

Both history and future are fictions. Only the present is real.

A compliment from a woman means twice as much as one from a man.

I can love being a woman while also recognising it’s traumatic.

Diaspora was not an army, she had not raised fighters, but – like any queer she could name – Val and Kane were inherently warriors. When you have fought to be who you are your whole life, you are used to fighting.

Helena’s life is so fucking cushy that she has all the time in the world to muse on the potential theoretical, philosophical, academical ramifications of trans lives. Theo just wants to fuckin’ be. Don’t quite seem fair, does it?

A beginning,’ she said, ‘often signals an end. That’s the thing with dawn…you must first get through the night.

There's something about your past, man. It's like crack. I keep going back for more." Chinara laughed. "We're all in recovery from our childhood. Amen to that.

The demons want us scared, Niamh, because fear makes us do some daft stuff.

And so she tried to go easier on Holly than she did Milo. If her own diaries were to be believed, being a teenage girl was a minefield of rules and traps. In 1997, apparently, an inch of fabric in the wrong direction was all that separated her from being a slag or a nun.

She washed her hands over the sink and then applied some Jo Malone hand cream. Expensive and needless, yes, but Elle liked to leave little treats to herself dotted around her home – rewards for maintaining it so well.

Helena looked nonchalantly over her shoulder at Niamh. ‘Do you think there’s anything a man could say to derail me?’ No, Niamh couldn’t think of a single thing.

He’d have barely been legal when the war broke out – all the easier for Hale to manipulate. He played well with young warlocks who sometimes struggled to reconcile how women could be the more powerful sex if they’d grown up in the mundane world, where quite the opposite was true.

She believed it was called cognitive dissonance: being philosophically and morally against capital punishment but wanting Dabney Hale dead for all the suffering he caused.

There would be no Balenciaga at this pyre.

she spoke so eloquently of how the patriarchy, above all else, fears women coming together, so internal female division only succeeds in greasing that machine.

I agree with whoever said [the Spice Girls] are soft porn. They’re the antichrist. —Thom Yorke of Radiohead, 1997

La plupart des adultes de son entourage étaient encore en train de résoudre tant bien que mal leurs propres énigmes personnelles. Elle trouvait un peu excessif d’exiger de Theo que tout soit en ordre dans sa vie à quinze ans simplement parce qu’elle était trans. De l’avis de Niamh, l’utilisation de pronoms différents ne faisait pas la moindre p*tain de différence pour une seule âme dans ce monde à l’exception de Theo. Et pour elle, ça semblait signifier énormément.

On peut pardonner à toute femme ses flirts d’adolescence irréfléchis. Quand on a dix-huit ans, on peut considérer un petit ami de vingt-quatre ans comme un signe de prestige, et non comme un sale type qui fréquente des adolescentes parce qu’elles sont plus malléables que les femmes de son âge.

They want you to be like men, but also not like men. It’s a fucking trap. We’re fucked as soon as the doctor says hun, it’s a girl.

Some white women struggle to see past their own oppression,’ Leonie said. ‘Look at the fucking suffragettes. Did they campaign for the rights of Black women? Or poor women? Did they fuck. Like, I get it, to be a woman in the patriarchy is inherently traumatic.

As you know, once rich white people start doing something, they very quickly make it legal.

She was just a woman who’d stepped up in a moment of deluded bravado. Gods, this must be how men feel all the time.