Resmaa Menakem · 300 pages
Rating: (463 votes)
“A key factor in the perpetuation of white-body supremacy is many people’s refusal to experience clean pain around the myth of race. Instead, usually out of fear, they choose the dirty pain of silence and avoidance and, invariably, prolong the pain.”
― Resmaa Menakem, quote from My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Mending of Our Bodies and Hearts
“There’s a way out of this mess, and it requires each of us to begin with our own body. You and your body are important parts of the solution. You will not just read this book; you will experience it in your body. Your body—all of our bodies—are where changing the status quo must begin.”
― Resmaa Menakem, quote from My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Mending of Our Bodies and Hearts
“In today’s America, we tend to think of healing as something binary: either we’re broken or we’re healed from that brokenness. But that’s not how healing operates, and it’s almost never how human growth works. More often, healing and growth take place on a continuum, with innumerable points between utter brokenness and total health.”
― Resmaa Menakem, quote from My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Mending of Our Bodies and Hearts
“Years as a healer and trauma therapist have taught me that trauma isn’t destiny. The body, not the thinking brain, is where we experience most of our pain, pleasure, and joy, and where we process most of what happens to us. It is also where we do most of our healing, including our emotional and psychological healing. And it is where we experience resilience and a sense of flow.”
― Resmaa Menakem, quote from My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Mending of Our Bodies and Hearts
“Recent studies and discoveries increasingly point out that we heal primarily in and through the body, not just through the rational brain. We can all create more room, and more opportunities for growth, in our nervous systems. But we do this primarily through what our bodies experience and do—not through what we think or realize or cognitively figure out.”
― Resmaa Menakem, quote from My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Mending of Our Bodies and Hearts
“All of this suggests that one of the best things each of us can do—not only for ourselves, but also for our children and grandchildren—is to metabolize our pain and heal our trauma. When we heal and make more room for growth in our nervous systems, we have a better chance of spreading our emotional health to our descendants, via healthy DNA expression. In contrast, when we don’t address our trauma, we may pass it on to future generations, along with some of our fear, constriction, and dirty pain.”
― Resmaa Menakem, quote from My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Mending of Our Bodies and Hearts
“Whether or not the decision was made in 2008 or in 2011, Medvedev proved to be nothing more than a pawn in Putin’s gambit to sidestep the letter of the law that limited a leader’s term. Russians”
― quote from The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin
“Geralt knew that bonnet and that feather, which were famed from the Buina to the Yaruga, known in manor houses, fortresses, inns, taverns and whorehouses. Particularly whorehouses.”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, quote from Sword of Destiny
“I knew who I was this morning, but I've changed a few times since then.”
― Lewis Carroll, quote from The Annotated Alice
“Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.
He looked about at the dark forest in which they were bivouacked. He nodded toward the specimens he'd collected. These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men's knowing. Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth.”
― Cormac McCarthy, quote from Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West
“A man who comes to be hanged,' pursued Jasper, impartially, 'has the satisfaction of knowing that he has brought society to its last resource. He is a man of such fatal importance that nothing will serve against him but the supreme effort of law. In a way, you know, that is success.' 'In”
― George Gissing, quote from New Grub Street
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