Quotes from Comeback: A Mother and Daughter's Journey Through Hell and Back

“Caretaking is never about the other person. It's about wanting to feel needed because you're afraid you're not wanted.”
― quote from Comeback: A Mother and Daughter's Journey Through Hell and Back

“It is its own religion, this love. Uncontainable, savage, and without end, it is what I feel for my child.”
― quote from Comeback: A Mother and Daughter's Journey Through Hell and Back

“God doesn't create suffering Claire, we do. We make the world and then we break it.”
― quote from Comeback: A Mother and Daughter's Journey Through Hell and Back

“[Samantha Dunn] wrote that when God wants your attention, first He throws feathers. After that, He starts throwing bricks.”
― quote from Comeback: A Mother and Daughter's Journey Through Hell and Back

“Sometimes, we have to give birth to our children twice....Once your child becomes the "garbage" other parents are afraid of, you never look at any teen, or yourself, the same again. All you see is the child they once were.”
― quote from Comeback: A Mother and Daughter's Journey Through Hell and Back

“My relationship with God has evolved as well. I no longer rail or beg or sass back. I was standing on a bluff over the ocean the other day and suddenly laughed out loud as I realized what an illusion that was, what an impossibility. That would assume a relationship between a “me” and “Other,” a separation. There is no otherness; to be separate from God is to be separate from myself, from life itself. What I’ve been looking for, I’m looking with.”
― quote from Comeback: A Mother and Daughter's Journey Through Hell and Back

“Nor did I grasp the capacity of love's absence to destroy, that my lack of love for myself made my own life unbearable. You take someone whose life experiences have taught them they're worthless, string them out on drugs, and you have one miserable person. How could I have given what I didn't have? It's hard to value another life when you view your own as dispensable, hard to understand how you can have so great an effect on someone else when you don't think you matter.”
― quote from Comeback: A Mother and Daughter's Journey Through Hell and Back

“- Child is abused, perpetrator threatens to hurt mother. Child feels protective of mother.
- Struggle to escape perp reinforces feelings of mutual protection. It's Mom and I against the world.
- Something necessary at the time later creates "enmeshment." Child doesn't see her actions as separate from mother. Even during normal adolescent individuation. But--
- Normal individuation doesn't happen in abuse survivors. They don't feel normal, so they--
- Act out in unhealthy or self-destructive ways, which creates--
- Fear and pain for mother, which creates--
- Guilt for child who still feels responsible for mother's emotional health.
- Child seeks release from the guilt and from not feeling normal, which leads to--
- Escape to the world of other not normal people, where mother can't see her child self-destruct, which leads to--
"The bad news.”
― quote from Comeback: A Mother and Daughter's Journey Through Hell and Back

“Accountability is not about blame, it’s not about being wrong, it is about owning the choices you’ve made, or are making, that create the results you have in your life. And you do create everything in your life.”
― quote from Comeback: A Mother and Daughter's Journey Through Hell and Back

“What was the payoff? It obviously kept me in my cozy zone of being in control, being a good mother, with a good daughter. Most of all, I realize, is that it allowed me to maintain the lie that she was healed, that Nick hadn't permanently damaged her, that I'd truly saved her. Because if I did, if there was no lasting residue of him, it meant that the denial that kept me in the marriage long enough for him to hurt her didn't help create the situation she's in now.
The person who I worked hardest to keep safe seems to have been me.”
― quote from Comeback: A Mother and Daughter's Journey Through Hell and Back

Popular quotes

“If you truly love someone, you will cherish what they despise most about themselves" - Fernando Conclaves”
― Deborah Harkness, quote from The Book of Life

“Richard has informed me he’s shopping for his white picket fence. I’m happy behind my black wrought-iron fence. The one with the pointy spikes on top. White never really was my color.”
― Laurell K. Hamilton, quote from Danse Macabre

“Elena?"
"Yes, unless Nick found a woman in the forest, which I suppose wouldn't be too surprising.”
― Kelley Armstrong, quote from Frostbitten

“I don’t know if
you know this about me, but I am a soldier.”
Or the leader of God’s army, but okay, let’s be modest.”
― Cynthia Hand, quote from Boundless

“I was sitting there, as I said, and had been for several watches, when I came to me that I was reading no longer. For some time I was hard put to say what I had been doing. When I tried, I could only think of certain odors and textures and colors that seemed to have no connection with anything discussed in the volume I held. At last I realized that instead of reading it, I had been observing it as a physical object. The red I recalled came from the ribbon sewn to the headband so that I might mark my place. The texture that tickled my fingers still was that of the paper in which the book was printed. The smell in my nostrils was old leather, still wearing the traces of birch oil. It was only then, when I saw the books themselves, when I began to understand their care.”

His grip on my shoulder tightened. “We have books here bound in the hides of echidnes, krakens, and beasts so long extinct that those whose studies they are, are for the most part of the opinion that no trace of them survives unfossilized. We have books bound wholly in metals of unknown alloy, and books whose bindings are covered with the thickest gems. We have books cased in perfumed woods shipped across the inconceivable gulf between creations—books doubly precious because no one on Urth can read them.”

“We have books whose papers are matted of plants from which spring curious alkaloids, so that the reader, in turning their pages, is taken unaware by bizarre fantasies and chimeric dreams. Books whose pages are not paper at all, but delicate wafers of white jade, ivory, and shell; books too who leaves are the desiccated leaves of unknown plants. Books we have also that are not books at all to the eye: scrolls and tablets and recordings on a hundred different substances. There is a cube of crystal here—though I can no longer tell you where—no larger than the ball of your thumb that contains more books than the library itself does. Though a harlot might dangle it from one ear for an ornament, there are not volumes enough in the world to counterweight the other.”
― Gene Wolfe, quote from The Shadow of the Torturer

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