Donna Freitas > Quotes

“Why is it that when we lose something big, we begin to lose everything else along with it?”
― Donna Freitas, The Survival Kit

“It's difficult to stop trying with the one you love. You always hope that this next time might work, might change everything for the better.”
― Donna Freitas, The Survival Kit

“Life was fragile and love was, too. At any moment, even our happiest ones, our world could shatter and we wouldn’t see it coming. There was only more loss ahead, showing its ugly face when we least expected it.”
― Donna Freitas, The Survival Kit

“Yet little by little, I was also becoming the girl who was learning to live with this, all of it, letting it weave together with everything else, the good and the bad, as life moved forward, because that's what life did, regardless of whether we were ready for it or not.”
― Donna Freitas, The Survival Kit

“I've barely been able to think about anything else.'
'Other than...' He waited for me to finish.
'Kissing you, dummy,' I said.
'Really?'
'You shouldn't be that surprised,' I said.
He grinned. 'I'm just glad to know we're on the same page.”
― Donna Freitas, The Survival Kit

“The girl I am now, this girl--she survived.
I just needed a little help getting here.”
― Donna Freitas, The Survival Kit

“The only thing that mattered was where I was and who I was with now, and when Will’s arms tightened around me I knew I was right where I needed to be all along.”
― Donna Freitas, The Survival Kit

“Now you," Grandma barks at him. "Yes, you, the invisible truck driver," she added, giving me a wicked grin. "Go stand next to Rose over there by the stone bench and smile like you mean it."
"Yes, ma'am," Will said.
"I am not to be called ma'am. My name is Maggie," she crabbed.
"Well, I also have a name. It's Will," he shot back.
Everyone stopped. We held our breath, waiting to see what Grandma would say next, but she just smiled at him. "I like this one, Rose. He's got spunk.”
― Donna Freitas, The Survival Kit

“I wish I could bottle this,' I whispered.
'And drink it every morning.'
'And every day at lunch, and then again at dinner, and before bed.'
'You'd get sick of it,' he said.
I shook my head. 'Never.'
'Seriously,' he said. 'I want to freeze this moment.'
'Good thing you don't need to.'
'No?'
'Will Doniger, there is nothing in the entire universe that could make me stop wanting to be with you. And so on and so forth ad infinitum.”
― Donna Freitas, The Survival Kit

“There is a liminal space created between the powerful person and the person who is the target of unwanted attention, a liminal space between outright yes and outright no. That space is not a compromise—not a maybe-yes or maybe-no—but more of a hovering, a being caught and not knowing where else to go or how to move without making things much worse. So you stay put. You hold the person off as best you can without causing them to retaliate too terribly, and because you know they can retaliate if they want to, that they have the power to do this, that they could decide to ruin you for displeasing them or rejecting them too forcefully. On the outside you continue to exist as though nothing is wrong, you perpetuate everything as though it is normal. You maintain the status quo with the abuser and with everyone around the abuser. Yet inside you are at war, you are shrinking, you are wishing you could die rather than continue much longer as though everything were fine. You become exhausted with the responsibility of making a situation okay that is not at all okay.”
― Donna Freitas, Consent: A Memoir of Unwanted Attention

“So what are you saying?" he asked.
"That we'd be crazy if we don't try again. That you are good for me, Will Doniger. You've proven it again and again."
He hesitated before he turned to me, words hovering on his lips.
"Tell me," I said. "What are you thinking?"
"That I love you, Rose. I have for a while."
I stopped breathing. "Me too. I love you, too.”
― Donna Freitas, The Survival Kit

“But is there such a thing as trauma without shame? Isn’t shame an integral part of what causes an event or series of events to become a trauma?”
― Donna Freitas, Consent: A Memoir of Unwanted Attention

“To create a community where faith matters not just in theory but in reality, faith has to be a public value, not just a private one.”
― Donna Freitas, Sex and the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on America's College Campuses

“My love for Addie is terrifying, a perpetual state of vertigo, an ongoing condition of living on the edge of an abyss.”
― Donna Freitas, The Nine Lives of Rose Napolitano

“All around the country, at universities far and wide, at workplaces of all sizes and types, at companies that boast of doing good and making the world a better place, there are file cabinets full of the bloody tongues of women. Some are young and tender, others more weathered and battered, but all of them taken from us by people in business-casual attire, in suits and sensible skirts, walking up to us as though what they are about to do is perfectly legitimate, perfectly reasonable, even as they take the long, curving knives from behind their backs, raising them up to strike our faces and our necks. Acting as though this is just business as usual while they disfigure us, and we stand there, letting them, because this seems like our only option.”
― Donna Freitas, Consent: A Memoir of Unwanted Attention

“El padre de Jordana falleció el año pasado. Recuerdo cuándo sucedió, cómo se le notaba en los ojos después esa muerte, como un alfiler clavado en el centro de su ser. Duelo, pérdida, dolor, resistencia ante todo ello.

Me obligo a mirarla de nuevo. Ahí está, la veo. La tristeza. Un añadido permanente, incluso cuando Jordana está en frascada en otras cosas, como nuestra clase.

¿También yo la tengo en la cara?”
― Donna Freitas, The Nine Lives of Rose Napolitano

“The happier people become the more I noticed my sadness.”
― Donna Freitas, The Survival Kit

“I guess you could say my mind was injured and that’s why I didn’t play.”
― Donna Freitas, The Survival Kit

“I am a survivor, but I also am, and always will be, a victim. I can't speak for others who share this dual identity, but I can say for myself that, while I wish to be the proud person who exclusively occupies the title of survivor, I still claim the territory of the shivering, cowering victim.”
― Donna Freitas, Consent: A Memoir of Unwanted Attention

“How quickly the brain, the body adapts to this new presence in life; how quickly the brain, the body develops a sense for it, for her--the ebb and flow of Addie's nearness and farness, the awareness of her location, her safety, her comfort and well-being.”
― Donna Freitas, The Nine Lives of Rose Napolitano

“Was he going to ask me to go with him? Maybe I was getting ahead of myself and he was just making conversation. Oh, why was talking to a boy so fraught with complication?”
― Donna Freitas, The Possibilities of Sainthood

“There is a liminal space created between the powerful person and the person who is the target of unwanted attention, a liminal space between outright yes and outright no -- not a maybe-yes or maybe-no -- but more of a hovering, a being caught and not knowing where else to go or how to move without making things much worse. So you stay put. You hold the person off as best you can without causing them to retaliate too terribly, and because you know they can retaliate if they want to, that they have the power to do this, that they could decide to ruin you for displeasing them or rejecting them too forcefully.”
― Donna Freitas, Consent: A Memoir of Unwanted Attention

“Because everyone knew I hadn’t wanted a baby, now that I was having one I felt watched, tired of people wondering how I was handling the pregnancy, like it was their right to judge, to observe, to opine on my behavior.”
― Donna Freitas, The Nine Lives of Rose Napolitano

“(…) I`d learned from experience that hugging someone only encouraged the person to cry even harder and I always wanted the tears to stop. But I was beginning to understand that there would always be sadness when it comes to our mother. A layer of sorrow was now knit through us so certain moments, memories, even new experiences, would tap it, and this was one of those moments. So instead of leaving Jim alone until the tears dried up and disappeared, I mustered to courage to reach out and wrap my arms around him, and when I did, he bent down and cried even harder into my shoulder.
I was willing to be his shoulder as long as he needed me to be.
This was how we survived, I was learning.”
― Donna Freitas, The Survival Kit

“Music hadn`t always deepened my grief. For most of my sixteen years, it had healed my hurts, soothed them, given me a way to remember and the strength to move on.”
― Donna Freitas, The Survival Kit

“This question of motherhood, of if I will become one, and if so when, and what if I don’t become one, then what, all of them intimately laced into who I am as a woman, if I am a good or bad woman, a fulfilled or unfulfilled one, selfish or selfless, happy or not, and all of this tied up in marriage, work, divorce – it’s formed one enormously heavy boulder.”
― Donna Freitas, The Nine Lives of Rose Napolitano

“(…) I remembered the words in the note Mom left in my Survival Kit about using my imagination. Finally, after all this time, I felt its wheels begin to turn again, slowly at first, as if they were rusty, then with more confidence, as if someone had flipped on a switch. In the light of this awareness, I began to have faith that my mother was still with me, embedded and woven into this part of me I`d tried so hard to bury, the part that was most like her, my imagination. Even though she wasn`t here anymore, not literally, I could suddenly feel her everywhere, see her presence in everything, in the memories she created ad left for us, in the hope she had for our survival as a family, and that she`d packed into a series of brown paper lunch bags with big capital letters on the side.”
― Donna Freitas, The Survival Kit

“I thought about love as we stood there, the day turning to dusk and the temperature dropping, and my heart, the one inside of me, become fuller.”
― Donna Freitas, The Survival Kit

“We cannot sanitize every comment, every come-on, every gesture in our efforts to stamp out harassment and assault. We cannot sanitize all of our spaces, we cannot make them irrefutably safe from words and acts and behaviors. We are humans, and our emotions and desires make us into complicated creatures. Sometimes we are nervous and awkward. We misjudge and we make mistakes and we dream of things that will not happen, of people we want to be with who will not want to be with us. We muster our courage and go for someone who seems unattainable to see if, by some miracle, it turns out they like us back, and this is not a crime.

But we can certainly do a better job of teaching people how to understand romantic feelings, how to read signals, how to back off when someone says no, how not to keep pursuing someone when they have rejected us, about what is appropriate and what is inappropriate in certain contexts, in professional and educational circumstances. We must become better thinkers—critical thinkers—about this aspect of our lives, better communicators on every level with respect to consent and non-consent. We may not want consent to be present-at-hand forever, but we should not want consent to go back to being invisible, so invisible that we don’t notice its function, that we don’t care or refuse to care or even see when it has been ignored, disregarded, when this disregard has caused someone else to suffer, to become traumatized, when it has changed her life forever.”
― Donna Freitas, Consent: A Memoir of Unwanted Attention

“But it is a present, isn’t it? Something only I can give my husband, something only a woman’s body can offer.”
― Donna Freitas, The Nine Lives of Rose Napolitano