Bri Lee > Quotes

“I read once that the human body slowly pushes shrapnel back out through the skin. That a shard of metal can take years to reach the surface and finally truly be expelled. Veterans get bits coming out of them decades after wars. Could the same thing happen to memories? Perhaps that was what I was feeling: an itchy, irksome thing, a foreign object inside me, moving just millimeters every year, tearing through me until it breached.”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“How could I tell him what was actually eating at me, rotting on the inside? How could I do that to my mother and father—make them as sad as I knew they’d be? At least if I carried my Secret alone, there would be only one casualty.”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“Driving and sex are both privileges granted at certain ages, both can do irreparable damage when done recklessly, but only driving requires tests, checkpoints and licences. I don’t understand why the government—at schools and through public education programs—doesn’t teach people about consent the way we teach them about drink-driving. After all, overconsumption of alcohol often leads to horrific consequences in both activities. Why can a man be charged with negligent, reckless driving after getting himself drunk, but he can argue that the same level of voluntary intoxication led him to honestly and mistakenly believe a woman consented to intercourse, and be acquitted of a rape charge accordingly?”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“The majority of rapists aren’t actually repeat offenders; they’re not afflicted with an uncontrollable lust. Mostly they’re regular men, with otherwise regular sexual preferences, who see an opportunity and take it.”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“Judges tell juries: if a defendant lies, it doesn’t necessarily mean he’s guilty, but if a woman is crying as she dials triple zero after being raped, she might just be putting on a show.”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“...I'd felt dread about how average and suburban Brisbane seemed. The normalcy was stifling and that I yearned for bigger things, that I missed New York.”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“found it very difficult to determine my worth independent of him. Since puberty I had accepted, as a fact of my existence, that I wasn’t worth anything; that the ugly thing was ever-present inside me. That it was the dark truth, a rotten core, and that the smiling daytime Bri was the facade. It wasn’t until years later that I learned that so many of the feelings I struggled with are perfectly normal for abuse and trauma survivors.”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“The ugly parts of my life kept crashing into the beautiful ones.”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“Why didn’t he think about how it would affect me? To molest a child is to completely disregard their humanity. Their personal and physical autonomy. To commit irreparable damage to a still-soft, still-forming mind.”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“He had deposited an experience into my lifetime, and that experience was now a memory I couldn’t forget, but it wasn’t an unknowable, mysterious, evil thing. There was space inside me for it to live alongside all my other memories and thoughts and feelings. I would never beat the demon, I could not exorcise it, I would simply learn to live above it.”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“Every act of sexual abuse is either deliberately or negligently cruel: each involves a terrified victim whose life experience an abuser completely devalues.”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“They weren’t children anymore either, and juries aren’t kind to women unless they’re ‘perfect victims’.”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“It wasn't just him in the same way it wasn't just me. It was because I was sick of men like him. Because I'd seen them all, each as unoriginal in their selfishness as the next.”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“Only skinny enough when starving, only successful enough when exhausted.”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“In Australia, where more than one in ten women have been sexually assaulted before they turn fifteen”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“It’s the ultimate terror—perhaps the worst form of gaslighting—for a woman who complains of being raped to be told she isn’t desirable enough for that to be true.”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“At law school the first and most sacred principle they teach you comes from Blackstone: that it is better that ten guilty men go free, than for a single innocent man to be imprisoned.”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“Defence couldn’t ask this little girl about what contraception she was on, then draw inferences to her promiscuity by reminder her that she also didn’t have a boyfriend. They asked her what she was wearing to actually test her memory, not to suggest a shorter skirt had been selected to indicate willingness. She could, in no way whatsoever, have ‘known what she was getting into’ or ‘asked for it’ or ‘made a drunken mistake that she regretted the next morning.”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“There were so many moments of bartering my autonomy for his affection. I oscillated between convincing myself he didn't really love me and feeling terror at the prospect that he did. I didn't know how to just be in love”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“flood,”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“went”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“Megan had a case once where a man—the head of a big, reputable company—had printed out pictures of children as young as three being raped, printed out pictures of his own stepchildren, and cut out the faces of his stepchildren, stuck them to the bodies of children being raped, and then printed his own face and stuck it on the man in the pictures, and masturbated to the unique collages. His defence barrister went all the way, making the submission that his client had gone to such lengths in order to relieve himself and not ‘risk’ acting on such desires with the stepchildren in real life.”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“put the bottle”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“in a window. So big. So ugly. So fucking stupid.”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“We have to sentence him according to what he would have received at the time he committed the offence.”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“I put my hands out onto my files and thought of the faces of all the women and children I’d seen in court. I’d seen them crying. I had felt their fear and their freeze when they relived their horrors in front of a cavernous room of angry adult strangers.”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“verdict?”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“I burst through the web of a giant golden orb spider, sparkling with morning dew,”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull

“Knowledge is power, and when powerful people are allowed to shape knowledge and restrict access to knowledge, they are able to consolidate and strengthen their hold on that power. Manusians are not cannibals. Neither are Indigenous Australians. Yet the terror of those who engage in that most deeply held taboo was rolled out over 100 years ago by our government and newspapers to gain new land, and here it was now being rolled out again, ostensibly to protect that land. A horrifying mirroring of history; nothing learned.”
― Bri Lee, Who Gets to Be Smart: Privilege, Power and Knowledge

“am anxious,’ I would say, naming my feeling out loud. ‘I am having the feeling that I am anxious,’ I’d say next, separating the feeling from myself. ‘The feeling that I am anxious is making me feel like I should die,’ attributing the thoughts that flowed from the feelings. Sometimes it worked and I would finish, ‘This is an awful thing that is happening to me, and it is taking me time to deal with it, and that is okay.”
― Bri Lee, Eggshell Skull