Are you not magnificent? Or you will be, someday. But first, you must earn your beauty.

N K Jemisin, Emergency Skin

Hermetic quote Jemisin Emergency Skin earn your beauty

Consider also:

  1. “ritual ordeals which test the faith of someone being initiated into an ascetic spiritual discipline.”
  2. You adapted, and you made sacrifices. You did it for your children or for love. You did it because of illness or because of an accident. You did it because you had new dreams
  3. “Beauty, the sacred lotus: let me say The word, and make my purity complete. The whole is mine, and shall I keep a part? O Beauty, I must see thee as thou art!”
  4. “one might be taken for one of those dreadful advanced people that are always clamouring for free thought, and free speech, and free everything”
  5. “Her nails were crooked pink sloth-hooks and her bony, nervous hands made clutching, Nosferatu shadows across her concave belly.”