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
“He woke with Max's arms wrapped around his torso and Max's genitals soft against his ass. And for the first time in days he wasn't aware of wanting anything but breakfast. Breakfast and Max. Not necessarily in that order.”
― Josh Lanyon, quote from Come Unto These Yellow Sands
“I was hoping my life might make more sense from a great height.”
― Chris Cleave, quote from Incendiary
“If human nature were not base, but thoroughly honourable, we should in every debate have no other aim than the discovery of truth; we should not in the least care whether the truth proved to be in favour of the opinion which we had begun by expressing, or of the opinion of our adversary. That we should regard as a matter of no moment, or, at any rate, of very secondary consequence; but, as things are, it is the main concern. Our innate vanity, which is particularly sensitive in reference to our intellectual powers, will not suffer us to allow that our first position was wrong and our adversary’s right. The way out of this difficulty would be simply to take the trouble always to form a correct judgment. For this a man would have to think before he spoke. But, with most men, innate vanity is accompanied by loquacity and innate dishonesty. They speak before they think; and even though they may afterwards perceive that they are wrong, and that what they assert is false, they want it to seem thecontrary. The interest in truth, which may be presumed to have been their only motive when they stated the proposition alleged to be true, now gives way to the interests of vanity: and so, for the sake of vanity, what is true must seem false, and what is false must seem true.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, quote from The Art of Always Being Right
“They are the eyes of a poet, or painter—an artist, a tortured soul.”
― Morgan Rice, quote from Arena One: Slaverunners
“bodies becoming like prisons with the person stuck inside. Screaming, or not screaming, but staring at you like you should do something.”
― Elizabeth Strout, quote from Abide with Me
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