Nusaiba > Nusaiba's Quotes

“never believe a man can change a woman
those men are pretenders
who think
that they created women
from one of their ribs”
― Nizar Qabbani

“Recovery can take place only within then context of relationships; it cannot occur in isolation.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

“THE ABUSER’S PROBLEM IS NOT THAT HE RESPONDS INAPPROPRIATELY TO CONFLICT. HIS ABUSIVENESS IS OPERATING PRIOR TO THE CONFLICT: IT USUALLY CREATES THE CONFLICT, AND IT DETERMINES THE SHAPE THE CONFLICT TAKES.”
― Lundy Bancroft, Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men

“The scars from mental cruelty can be as deep and long-lasting as wounds from punches or slaps but are often not as
obvious. In fact, even among women who have experienced violence from a partner, half or more report that the man’s emotional abuse is what is causing them the greatest harm.”
― Lundy Bancroft, Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men

“Angry men with pointy things sent to secure a foreign city are pretty much alike anywhere. That's what I've heard. So far nothing's convinced me different.”
― Sherwood Smith, King's Shield

“your hand
touching mine.
this is how
galaxies
collide.”
― Sanober Khan

“And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“In the 1890s, when Freud was in the dawn of his career, he was struck by how many of his female patients were revealing childhood incest victimization to him. Freud concluded that child sexual abuse was one of the major causes of emotional disturbances in adult women and wrote a brilliant and humane paper called “The Aetiology of Hysteria.” However, rather than receiving acclaim from his colleagues for his ground-breaking insights, Freud met with scorn. He was ridiculed for believing that men of excellent reputation (most of his patients came from upstanding homes) could be perpetrators of incest.
Within a few years, Freud buckled under this heavy pressure and recanted his conclusions. In their place he proposed the “Oedipus complex,” which became the foundation of modern psychology. According to this theory any young girl actually desires sexual contact with her father, because she wants to compete with her mother to be the most special person in his life. Freud used this construct to conclude that the episodes of incestuous abuse his clients had revealed to him had never taken place; they were simply fantasies of events the women had wished for when they were children and that the women had come to believe were real. This construct started a hundred-year history in the mental health field of blaming victims for the abuse perpetrated on them and outright discrediting of women’s and children’s reports of mistreatment by men.
Once abuse was denied in this way, the stage was set for some psychologists to take the view that any violent or sexually exploitative behaviors that couldn’t be denied—because they were simply too obvious—should be considered mutually caused. Psychological literature is thus full of descriptions of young children who “seduce” adults into sexual encounters and of women whose “provocative” behavior causes men to become violent or sexually assaultive toward them.
I wish I could say that these theories have long since lost their influence, but I can’t. A psychologist who is currently one of the most influential professionals nationally in the field of custody disputes writes that women provoke men’s violence by “resisting their control” or by “attempting to leave.” She promotes the Oedipus complex theory, including the claim that girls wish for sexual contact with their fathers. In her writing she makes the observation that young girls are often involved in “mutually seductive” relationships with their violent fathers, and it is on the basis of such “research” that some courts have set their protocols. The Freudian legacy thus remains strong.”
― Lundy Bancroft, Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men

“It was as if the empty nights were made for thinking of him. And sometimes I found myself so vividly aware of him it was as if he had only just left the room and the ring of his voice were still there. And somehow, there was a disturbing comfort in that, and, despite myself, I’d envision his face.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“She writes a lot about religion for someone who looks out of place in a pew.”
― Trista Mateer, The Dogs I Have Kissed

“My girl always talks about herself like she’s a graveyard,   a place for other people to come and bury what they’ve lost. As much as I want to tell her that she’s wrong, I still find myself crouching in her earth with flowers I’ve brought for someone else.   My”
― Trista Mateer, The Dogs I Have Kissed

“But whether you stay or go, the critical decision you can make is to stop letting your partner distort the lens of your life, always forcing his way into the
center of the picture. You deserve to have your life be about you; you are worth it.”
― Lundy Bancroft, Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men

“Monday doesn’t like us sad kids, it’s the day that it fights us. We don’t wanna leave bed, but it finds a way to hold us down and twist us around like a helpless human being in the center of a hurricane.”
― Mae Krell, All The Things I Never Said

“Have you ever looked at your body without the lens of your colonized mind?”
― Key Ballah, Preparing My Daughter For Rain

“I don’t know what it is in me that yearns to be the lifeboat that people throw themselves at when they are drowning.”
― Trista Mateer, The Dogs I Have Kissed

“We all tell lies to protect our solitude. We deny the truth and present a false image of ourselves to blend into society.”
― Saleem Haddad

“You know people say the opposite of fear is desire, where we presumably run away from what we fear and toward what we desire. But fear and desire are more complicated than that. There’s fear at the heart of every desire and desire at the heart of fear. So I wonder, by desiring Taymour, what exactly are you afraid of?”
― Saleem Haddad

“PERHAPS IN SOME FORMAL SENSE every book begins by considering its own impossibility, but this book’s completion has depended on a way of working with that impossibility without a clear resolution. Even so, something of that impossibility has to be sustained within the writing, even if it continually threatens to bring the project to a halt.”
― Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism

“Who talks most about freedom and equality? Is it not those who hold the bill of rights in one hand and a whip for affrighted slaves in the other?”
― Alexander Hamilton

“If you do not feel comfortable somewhere, leave.
It is not rude,
you are not wrong.
There is no such thing as manners when
your gut is telling you to get out!
I wish my mother had taught me this,
I would have seen so much more of the world by now.”
― Key Ballah

“Whatever happens after this, I just want you to know that this was worth it. You were worth it. You were worth everything.”
― Sierra Simone, Priest

“The path to God has become binary: you find God as a monastic or clergy, or you find God as a layperson. There is precious little in between. Oblation comes close but is still only one thread when there used to be an entire tapestry.”
― Sierra Simone, Saint

“Dark house, by which once more I stand
Here in the long unlovely street,
Doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand,

A hand that can be clasp'd no more -
Behold me, for I cannot sleep,
And like a guilty thing I creep
At earliest morning to the door.

He is not here; but far away
The noise of life begins again,
And ghastly thro' the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.”
― Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam

“Once upon a time there were as many ways to be holy as there were people, and the space between secular and monastic, between laity and clergy, was filled with all sorts of strange books and crannies. You could have visions, dream dreams, you could be monastic from the four walls of your own house or you could wander the country barefoot and begging. But we’ve lost much of that over the centuries.”
― Sierra Simone, Saint

“If the sword of oppression be permitted to lop off one limb without opposition, reiterated strokes will soon dismember the whole body.”
― Alexander Hamilton

“It may not be dying we fear so much, but the diminished self.”
― Arthur W. Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics

“I can negate everything of that part of me that lives on vague nostalgias, except this desire for unity, this longing to solve, this need for clarity and cohesion. I can refute everything in this world surrounding me that offends or enraptures me, except this chaos, this sovereign chance and this divine equivalence which springs from anarchy. I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“Lily had lived with the same pain for so long it felt like a part of her. The worst days, though, were when the pain was different. When it came faster, or harsher, or fiercer than she was used to. When it prickled instead of throbbed. When it attacked her right ankle instead of her left knee. When it woke her up at night instead of aching dully first thing in the morning. On those days, her standard-issue pain was replaced by something different and frightening, something that took over her body and left her without the slightest clue of when, or even if, it would release her.

Those times, her pain wasn’t a part of her anymore. Those times, she was a part of it.”
― Robin Talley, As I Descended

“يبدو أنني أرثُ الموتى
ويوماً ما
سأجلسُ وحدي على المقهى
بعد موتِ جميع مَن أُحبُّهم
دون أيّ شعورٍ بالفقد
حيثُ جسدي سلةٌ كبيرةٌ
ترك فيها الراحلون
ما يدلّّ عليهم.”
― إيمان مرسال, ممر معتم يصلح لتعلم الرقص

“I'm conscious this could be rather burdensome to hear, but you remain the thing I have most chosen for myself. The thing that's most exclusively mine. The one thing that brings me the deepest joy.”
― Alexis Hall, Boyfriend Material