“
You were kind of mean to Brittany,” Holly said.
“Was I? Trying to be protective, I guess. I have a problem with cheerleaders, sorority sisters, gangs, committees, groups, anything pack-related.”
She shrugged. “Yeah, you’re not really a joiner.”
I was never much for cheerleaders or jocks myself, especially in high school. I always knew that kind of popularity was short term, but when you’re a teenager it seemed like the most important thing in the world. But Holly was only twelve.
”
”
Michael Grigsby (Segment of One)
“
She drew herself up and crossed her arms over her chest. “So Buck can enjoy sitting in a cell contemplating how he blew up his life. That dickwad hurt two people sitting at this table. And you’re worried about who’ll look bad if they tell? Screw that. Dean and D.J. and Kennedy and every frat boy on this campus can all go fuck themselves. Are we sisters or not?
”
”
Tammara Webber (Easy (Contours of the Heart, #1))
“
A stampede of footsteps came pounding up, accompanied by the yodeling howls of two very excited pugs. They loved drama like blonde haired sorority sisters.
”
”
Ann Swan (Covened (Mrs Pig and the Words of Power #1))
“
Fraternize means to behave like a brother. Luke told me that. He said there was no corresponding word that meant to behave like a sister. Sororize, it would have to be, he said. From the Latin.
”
”
Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale (The Handmaid's Tale, #1))
“
Fraternize means to behave like a brother. Luke told me that. He said there was no corresponding word that meant to behave like a sister. Sororize, it would have to be, he said.
”
”
Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale)
“
and no, no, I didn’t think it was a coincidence SS was short for sorority sister.
”
”
Nicole Williams (Hard Knox: The Outsider Chronicles)
“
She no longer looked like herself: diligent, plump, prim. She looked like a surfer girl or a sorority sister, one of those quivering dewy creatures she had always silently disliked.
”
”
Lauren Groff (Florida)
“
Fraternize means to behave like a brother. Luke told me that. He said there was no corresponding word that meant to behave like a sister. Sororize, it would have to be, he said. From
”
”
Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale (The Handmaid's Tale, #1))
“
Social media has put an incredible pressure on the Facebook generation. We’ve made our lives so public to one another, and as a result we feel pressure to live up to a certain ideal version of ourselves. On social media, everyone is happy, and popular, and successful—or, at least, we think we need to look like we are. No matter how well off we are, how thin or pretty, we have our issues and insecurities. But none of that shows up online. We don’t like to reveal our weaknesses on social media. We don’t want to appear unhappy, or be a drag. Instead, we all post rose-colored versions of ourselves. We pretend we have more money than we do. We pretend we are popular. We pretend our lives are great. Your status update says I went to a totally awesome party last night! It won’t mention that you drank too much and puked and humiliated yourself in front of a girl you like. It says My sorority sisters are the best! It doesn’t say I feel lonely and don’t think they accept me. I’m not saying everyone should post about having a bad time. But pretending everything is perfect when it’s not doesn’t help anyone. The danger of these kinds of little white lies is that, in projecting the happiness and accomplishments we long for, we’re setting impossible standards for ourselves and others to live up to.
”
”
Nev Schulman (In Real Life: Love, Lies & Identity in the Digital Age)
“
And it feels very similar to rushing a sorority; the planned conversation with the more important sorority sisters, always pretty, usually white, who've already gone through a list of photos and have their favorites pegged and the answers to their questions preloaded. "Oh, no way! You were a cheerleader, too?! So was I! You'll fit in so well in our house!" Meanwhile, we, of source, knew she was a cheerleader because we spent days studying the rushee's photos and applications, and we already knew which ones we'd be attacking. And here I am, in my mid-thirties, re-creating the same behavior to sell a similar promise of a different sisterhood.
”
”
Emily Lynn Paulson (Hey, Hun: Sales, Sisterhood, Supremacy, and the Other Lies Behind Multilevel Marketing)
“
Tonight, I was hoping you would feed me. And then I was planning on fucking you to sleep.
”
”
Rebekah Weatherspoon (Better Off Red (Vampire Sorority Sisters, #1))
“
When I couldn’t take the hunger anymore, I called Taylor and told her everything. She screamed so loud, I had to hold the phone away from my ear. She came right over with a black-bean burrito and a strawberry-banana smoothie. She kept shaking her head and saying, “That Zeta Phi slut.”
“It wasn’t just her, it was him, too,” I said, between bites of my burrito.
“Oh, I know. Just you wait. I’m gonna drag my nails across his face when I see him. I’ll leave him so scarred, no girl will ever hook up with him again.” She inspected her manicured nails like they were artillery. “When I go to the salon tomorrow, I’m gonna tell Danielle to make them sharp.”
My heart swelled. There are some things only a friend who’s known you your whole life can say, and instantly, I felt a little better. “You don’t have to scar him.”
“But I want to.” She hooked her pinky finger with mine. “Are you okay?”
I nodded. “Better, now that you’re here.”
When I was sucking down the last of my smoothie, Taylor asked me, “Do you think you’ll take him back?”
I was surprised and really relieved not to hear any judgement to her voice. “What would you do?” I asked her.
“It’s up to you.”
“I know, but…would you take him back?”
“Under ordinary circumstances, no. If some guy cheated on me while we were on a break, if he so much as looked at another girl, no. He’d be donzo.” She chewed on her straw. “But Jeremy’s not some guy. You have a history together.”
“What happened to all that talk about scarring him?”
“Don’t get it twisted, I hate him to death right now. He effed up in a colossal way. But he’ll never be just some guy, not to you. That’s a fact.”
I didn’t say anything. But I knew she was right.
“I could still round up my sorority sisters and go slash his tires tonight.” Taylor bumped my shoulder. “Hmm? Whaddyathink?”
She was trying to make me laugh. It worked. I laughed for the first time in what felt like a long time.
”
”
Jenny Han (We'll Always Have Summer (Summer #3))
“
Fraternize means to behave like a brother. Luke told me that. He said there was no corresponding word that meant to behave like a sister. Sororize, it would have to be, he said. From the Latin. He
”
”
Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale (The Handmaid's Tale, #1))
“
In 315 CE, for example, the Synod of Neocaesarea (now Niksar, Turkey) banned men from marrying the wife of a dead brother—no levirate marriage. A decade later, in 325, the Council of Nicaea prohibited men from marrying the sister of a dead wife—no sororate marriage—and from marrying Jews, pagans, and heretics.
”
”
Joseph Henrich (The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous)
“
But those moments I spent with her on the terrace... I will never forget them. We played like little girls. We saw colours come vividly to life before us. We joked. We laughed. We were us. In those moments when we threw mugfulls of water into the open space, I saw that we were two faces to one soul. She, bucolic. I, urban. She, conventional. I, modern. She, her. I, me. Sisters, the members of a sorority of pain. But the problems were one, real, single.
”
”
Kirthi Jayakumar (Stories of Hope)
“
My first impression of him was that he was free spirited, clever, funny. That proved to be completely inaccurate. We left the party together and walked around for hours, lied to each other about our happy lives, ate pizza at midnight, took the Staten Island Ferry back and forth and watched the sun rise. I gave him my phone number at the dorm. By the time he finally called me, two weeks later, I’d become obsessed with him. He kept me on a long, tight leash for months—expensive meals, the occasional opera or ballet. He took my virginity at a ski lodge in Vermont on Valentine’s Day. It wasn’t a pleasurable experience, but I trusted he knew more about sex than I did, so when he rolled off and said, “That was amazing,” I believed him. He was thirty-three, worked for Fuji Bank at the World Trade Center, wore tailored suits, sent cars to pick me up at my dorm, then the sorority house sophomore year, wined and dined me, and asked for head with no shame in the back of cabs he charged to the company account. I took this as proof of his masculine value. My “sisters” all agreed; he was “suave.” And I was impressed by how much he liked talking about his emotions, something I’d never seen a man do. “My mom’s a pothead now, and that’s why I have this deep sadness.” He took frequent trips to Tokyo for work and to San Francisco to visit his twin sister. I suspected she discouraged him from dating me.
”
”
Ottessa Moshfegh (My Year of Rest and Relaxation)
“
If we consider the possibility that all women–from the infant suckling her mother’s breast, to the grown woman experiencing orgasmic sensations while suckling her own child, perhaps recalling her mother’s milk-smell in her own; to two women, like Virginia Woolf’s Chloe and Olivia, who share a laboratory; to the woman dying at ninety, touched and handled by women–exist on a lesbian continuum, we can see ourselves as moving in and out of this continuum, whether we identify ourselves as lesbian or not. It allows us to connect aspects of woman-identification as diverse as the impudent, intimate girl-friendships of eight- or nine-year-olds and the banding together of those women of the twelfth and fifteenth centuries known as Beguines who “shared houses, rented to one another, bequeathed houses to their room-mates … in cheap subdivided houses in the artisans’ area of town,” who “practiced Christian virtue on their own, dressing and living simply and not associating with men,” who earned their livings as spinners, bakers, nurses, or ran schools for young girls, and who managed–until the Church forced them to disperse–to live independent both of marriage and of conventual restrictions. It allows us to connect these women with the more celebrated “Lesbians” of the women’s school around Sappho of the seventh century B.C.; with the secret sororities and economic networks reported among African women; and with the Chinese marriage resistance sisterhoods–communities of women who refused marriage, or who if married often refused to consummate their marriages and soon left their husbands–the only women in China who were not footbound and who, Agnes Smedley tells us, welcomed the births of daughters and organized successful women’s strikes in the silk mills. It allows us to connect and compare disparate individual instances of marriage resistance: for example, the type of autonomy claimed by Emily Dickinson, a nineteenth-century white woman genius, with the strategies available to Zora Neale Hurston, a twentieth-century black woman genius. Dickinson never married, had tenuous intellectual friendships with men, lived self-convented in her genteel father’s house, and wrote a lifetime of passionate letters to her sister-in-law Sue Gilbert and a smaller group of such letters to her friend Kate Scott Anthon. Hurston married twice but soon left each husband, scrambled her way from Florida to Harlem to Columbia University to Haiti and finally back to Florida, moved in and out of white patronage and poverty, professional success and failure; her survival relationships were all with women, beginning with her mother. Both of these women in their vastly different circumstances were marriage resisters, committed to their own work and selfhood, and were later characterized as “apolitical ”. Both were drawn to men of intellectual quality; for both of them women provided the ongoing fascination and sustenance of life.
”
”
Adrienne Rich (Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence)
“
Just as I started to put the finishing touched on my lip gloss,
”
”
Rebekah Weatherspoon (Blacker Than Blue (Vampire Sorority Sisters, #2))
“
...love is tough. It endures tragedy and joy and monotony. Love makes you laugh...there was no fairness in love. That love is never concerned with what's fair or 'never having to say you're sorry' or all the other things we learn about love from songs and romantic poetry...Love is not rational and it is not just; it is not evenhanded and it is not balanced; it is not gentle or soft. Love brawls. Love consumes. Love inspires. Love gives life its shape and form and meaning. But it is not fair... Love stands when everything else falls apart.
”
”
Claudia Welch (Sorority Sisters)
“
Justitiae soror fides. Latin again, of course. Faith is the sister of justice.
”
”
Madeleine L'Engle (A Wrinkle in Time (Time Quintet, #1))
“
In one case, at a meeting at Alpha Gamma Delta, “active sorority members . . . began standing up to voice support for the [black] recruit and challenge alumnae decisions.” “The entire house wanted this girl to be in Alpha Gam,” one of the sisters at Alpha Gamma Delta said.
”
”
Paul Theroux (Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads)
“
Sorry about that. For years, my sister has labored under the impression that she’s funny. My father and I have humored her in this.”
Rylann waved this off. “No apology necessary. She’s just protective of you. That’s what siblings do—at least, I assume it is.”
“No brothers or sisters for you?” Kyle asked.
Rylann shook her head. “My parents had me when they were older. I asked for a sister every birthday until I was thirteen, but it wasn’t in the cards.” She shrugged. “But at least I have Rae.”
“When did you two meet?”
“College. We were in the same sorority pledge class. Rae is…” Rylann cocked her head, trying to remember. “What’s that phrase men always use when describing their best friend? The thing about the hooker and the hotel room.”
“If I ever woke up with a dead hooker in my hotel room, he’d be the first person I’d call. A truer test of male friendship there could not be.”
Rylann smiled. “That’s cute. And a little scary, actually, that all you men have planned ahead for such an occasion.” She waved her hand. “Well, there you go. If I ever woke up with a dead hooker in my hotel room, Rae would be the first person I’d call.”
Kyle rested his arms on the table and leaned in closer. “Counselor, you’re so by the book, the first person you’d call if you woke up next to a dead hooker would be the FBI.”
“Actually, I’d call the cops. Most homicides aren’t federal crimes, so the FBI wouldn’t have jurisdiction.”
Kyle laughed. He reached out and tucked back a lock of hair that had fallen into her eyes. “You really are a law geek.”
At the same moment, they both realized what he was doing. They froze, eyes locked, his hand practically cupping the side of her cheek.
Then they heard someone clearing her throat.
Rylann and Kyle turned and saw Jordan standing at their table.
“Wine, anyone?” With her blue eyes dancing, she set two glasses in front of them. “I’ll leave you two to yourselves now.”
Rylann watched as Jordan strolled off. “I think you’re going to have some explaining to do after I leave,” she whispered to Kyle.
“Oh, without a doubt, she’s going to be all up in my business over this.
”
”
Julie James (About That Night (FBI/US Attorney, #3))
“
scorching desires, twins Hope and Faith join the APF sorority and find themsleves falling for the same man, which pushes the sisters
”
”
Zane (Addicted)
“
After the miscarriage I was surrounded by dead-baby flowers, dead-baby books, and lots of boxes of dead-baby tea. I felt like I was drowning in a dead-baby sea. My mother didn’t know how to help but knew that I needed her. She sent me a soft bathrobe and a teapot, and I wept for hours on the phone with her. Mostly, she listened as I sorted through all my thoughts and feelings. If I’m angry or upset about something, or even if I’m happy about something, it isn’t real until I articulate it. I need a narrative. I guess that’s something Jeff and I share. We both need a story to fit into. The Burton ability to turn misfortune into narrative is something I’m grateful I was taught. It helps me think, Well, okay, that’s just a funny story. You should hear my father talking about his mother and those damn forsythia bushes.
My sisters-in-law sent me lovely, heartfelt packages. Christina sent me teas and a journal and a letter I cherish. She included Cheryl Strayed’s book Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar. Christina is a mother. I felt like she understood the toll this sadness was taking on me, and she encouraged me to practice self-care. Jess gave me the book Reveal: A Secret Manual for Getting Spiritually Naked by Meggan Watterson and some other books about the divine feminine. She knew that there was nothing she could say, but everything she wanted to articulate was in those books. Jess has always had an almost psychic ability to understand my inner voice. She is quiet and attuned to what people are really saying rather than what they present to the world. I knew her book choices were deliberate, but I couldn’t read them for a while because they were dead-baby books.
If people weren’t giving me dead baby gifts, they wanted to tell me dead-baby stories. There’s nothing more frustrating than someone saying, “Well, welcome to the club. I’ve had twelve miscarriages." It seemed like there was an unspoken competition between members of this fucked up sorority. I quickly realized this is a much bigger club than I knew and that everyone had stories and advice. And as much as I appreciated it, I had to find my own way.
Tara gave me a book called Vessels: A Love Story, by Daniel Raeburn, about his and his wife’s experience of a number of miscarriages. His book helped because I couldn’t wrap my head around Jeff’s side of the story, and he certainly wasn’t telling it to me. He was out in the garage until dinnertime every day. He would come in, eat, help Gus shower, and then disappear for the rest of the night.
I often read social media posts from couples announcing, “Hey we miscarried but it brought us closer together." I think it’s fair to say that miscarriage did not bring Jeffrey and me closer together. We were living in the same space but leading parallel lives. To be honest, most of the time we weren’t even living in the same space.
That spring The Good Wife was canceled. We had banked on that being a job Jeff would do for a couple of years, one that would keep him in New York City. Then he landed Negan on The Walking Dead, and suddenly he would be all the way down in Georgia for the next three to five years.
We were never going to have another child. It had been so hard to get pregnant. I felt like I was pulling teeth trying to coordinate dates when Jeff would be around and I’d be ovulating. It felt like every conversation was about having a baby.
He’d ask, “What do you want for dinner?"
I’d say, “A baby."
“Hey, what do you want to do this weekend?"
I’d say, “Have a baby.
”
”
Hilarie Burton Morgan (The Rural Diaries: Love, Livestock, and Big Life Lessons Down on Mischief Farm)
“
Today, because of its faculty, its wealth, and its ties to the large Atlanta University system, Spelman is still able to compete successfully for the same students who are being accepted by Wellesley, Smith, Bryn Mawr, the other Seven Sisters colleges, and Ivy League universities. At Spelman, unlike most women’s colleges, more than 80 percent of its faculty hold doctorates, and more than a third of the students major in mathematics, engineering, or the sciences. When I encounter Spelman women of my own generation or of my mother’s generation, I recognize a sisterhood and a camaraderie that I have never seen among black women who attended predominately white women’s colleges or who have joined sororities at other historically black schools. Because it very much identifies itself to the world and to its students as the ultimate college for black women, these students and alumni are fiercely loyal to, and respectful of, this Atlanta institution.
”
”
Lawrence Otis Graham (Our Kind of People: Inside America's Black Upper Class)
“
I’d been a little bored lately, you see, so I’d started up this game with myself where I fucked each girl from the same group in a specific position. For example, I did all the Alpha Delta Pi sorority sisters in reverse cowgirl. Teaching majors were strictly oral. And the athlete groupies got it doggie style. That way, when they talked amongst themselves, they all realized I did them the same way, and they began to think I had some weird tick, or something.
Not really sure why I’d started up such a bizarre game with myself, but it amused the hell out of me to fuck with their heads.
”
”
Linda Kage (A Perfect Ten (Forbidden Men, #5))
“
Wouldn’t it have been easier to just drive back to Maryland and tell your sorority sisters the truth, that you didn’t take their money so you can’t give it back?
”
”
Elle Cosimano (Finlay Donovan Jumps the Gun (Finlay Donovan, #3))
“
Two of my sorority sisters had gotten married in the past six months, and three girls I’d grown up with had had babies. How had this happened? We’d all been allotted the same number of years, and they’d taken that time and built lives. Families. Meanwhile I was living in my parents’ attic, working at a job that could replace me in five minutes if I got hit by a bus, with nothing going for me but a fat tuxedo cat—sorry, Benedick—and a half bottle of wine.
”
”
Jen DeLuca (Well Played (Well Met, #2))
“
What makes me the proudest about Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., is that she truly lives up to the ideals and principles she stands for. This sisterhood is proactive and is ever progressing, never settling, and always upholding the highest level of expectations of the membership and all that she comes in contact with. At the forefront of any major change you will always see a Delta; the leadership of any progressing organization always had a Delta in the midst. My sisters are dynamic in all their ways and that makes me proud to be a Delta. They are examples of the essence of Fortitude in every sense of the word! —LaKesha Russ, Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc.
”
”
Lawrence C Ross (The Divine Nine: The History of African-American Fraternities and Sororities in America)
“
I did experiment once in college but quickly realized that it wasn’t for me.
Oh, please. Like you didn’t make out with your sorority sister while she felt you up to make a guy all hot and bothered. I’m probably in the minority on that one. Then again, I was feeling no pain after playing a few rounds of beer pong and thought it was the actual guy and not my sorority sister. So I don’t think that really qualifies as experimenting. I suck even with the ladies.
”
”
Barbie Bohrman (Playing It Safe)