311 pages
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“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
“MY LORD, when you ask me to tell the court in my own words, this is what I shall say. I am kept locked up here like some exotic animal, last survivor of a species they had thought extinct. They should let in people to view me, the girl-eater, svelte and dangerous, padding to and fro in my cage, my terrible green glance flickering past the bars, give them something to dream about, tucked up cosy in their beds of a night. After my capture they clawed at each other to get a look at me. They would have paid money for the privilege, I believe. They shouted abuse, and shook their fists at me, showing their teeth. It was unreal, somehow, frightening yet comic, the sight of them there, milling on the pavement like film extras, young men in cheap raincoats, and women with shopping bags, and one or two silent, grizzled characters who just stood, fixed on me hungrily, haggard with envy. Then a guard threw a blanket over my head and bundled me into a squad car. I laughed. There was something irresistibly funny in the way reality, banal as ever, was fulfilling my worst fantasies.”
― John Banville, quote from The Book of Evidence
“The urge to fall [in love] was utterly new and made her [Athena] dizzy. He [Odysseus] could catch her and hold her up. She knew he could.
If this is how Aphrodite feels every day, it's no wonder she's such an idiot.”
― Kendare Blake, quote from Antigoddess
“The best way to manage people, he thought, was to convince them that you were good for their careers. He further believed that the only way to get people to believe that you were good for their careers was actually to be good for their careers.”
― Michael Lewis, quote from Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt
“La verdadera inteligencia empieza cuando uno deja de citar a los demás...”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Pygmy
“Daylight fires the ridges green, shifts the colors of the fog, touches the brick streets of Rock Camp with a reddish tone. The streetlights flicker out, and the traffic signal at the far end of Front Street's yoke snaps on; stopping nothing, warning nothing, rushing nothing on. --from The Honored Dead”
― Breece D'J Pancake, quote from The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake
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