Whitney W > Whitney's Quotes

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#1

“The fact that we can often only register the fury of white men as heroic is so established that it would verge on the comical if it weren’t so deeply tragic.”
― Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

3 likes

#2

“She listens at doors and around corners. She has always had this habit. A child in danger must learn to pay more attention to the adults than a child loved and cherished.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Power

tags: abuse, abuse-survivors, child-abuse

31 likes

#3

“We’re only pretending everything is normal because we don’t know what else to do.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Power

49 likes

#4

“Nothing special has happened today; no one can say she was more provoked than usual. It is only that every day one grows a little, every day something is different, so that in the heaping up of days suddenly a thing that was impossible has become possible. This is how a girl becomes a grown woman. Step by step until it is done.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Power

tags: growing-up, maturity, womanhood

62 likes

#5

“You are so brave and quiet I forget you are suffering.”
― Ernest Hemingway

1249 likes

#6

“I didn't want to kiss you goodbye — that was the trouble — I wanted to kiss you good night — and there's a lot of difference.”
― Ernest Hemingway

tags: ernest-hemingway, kiss, love, trouble

914 likes

#7

“Perfectionism is the unparalleled defense for emotionally abandoned children. The existential unattainability of perfection saves the child from giving up, unless or until, scant success forces him to retreat into the depression of a dissociative disorder, or launches him hyperactively into an incipient conduct disorder. Perfectionism also provides a sense of meaning and direction for the powerless and unsupported child. In the guise of self-control, striving to be perfect offers a simulacrum of a sense of control. Self-control is also safer to pursue because abandoning parents typically reserve their severest punishment for children who are vocal about their negligence.”
― Pete Walker

tags: abandonment, abusive-parents, child-abuse, child-neglect, conduct-disorder, defense-mechanism, dissociation, dissociative-disorder, dissociative-identity-disorder, emotional-abuse, emotionally-unavailable, mental-health, mental-illness, perfectionism, powerlessness, psychological-abuse, punishment, self-control, survivors, survivors-of-abuse

174 likes

#8

“With respect to the acceptance of dissociative disorders, as with most issues in life, it is counterproductive to spend time trying to convince people of things they don't want to know.”
― Warwick Middleton

tags: avoidance, denial, dissociation, dissociative-disorders, dissociative-identity-disorder, don-t-want-to-know, not-knowing, society-denial

12 likes

#9

“America seems filled with violent people who like causing people pain but hate when those people tell them that pain hurts.”
― Kiese Laymon, Heavy

82 likes

#10

“My body knew things my mouth and my mind couldn't, or maybe wouldn't, express. It knew that all over my neighborhood, boys were trained to harm girls in ways girls could never harm boys, straight kids were trained to harm queer kids in ways queer kids could never harm straight kids, men were trained to harm women in ways women could never harm men, parents were trained to harm children in ways children would never harm parents, babysitters were trained to harm kids in ways kids could never harm babysitters. My body knew white folk were trained to harm us in ways we could never harm them.”
― Kiese Laymon, Heavy

tags: black, harm, heavy, political, racism

30 likes

#11

“rest of my teachers maybe did the best they could, but they just needed a lot of help making their best better. There were so many things we needed in those classrooms, in our city, in our state, in our country that our teachers could have provided if they would have gone home and really done their homework. They never once said the words: “economic inequality,” “housing discrimination,” “sexual violence,” “mass incarceration,” “homophobia,” “empire,” “mass eviction,” “post traumatic stress disorder,” “white supremacy,” “patriarchy,” “neo-confederacy,” “mental health,” or “parental abuse,” yet every student and teacher at that school lived in a world shaped by those words.”
― Kiese Laymon, Heavy

25 likes

#12

“Our superpower, I was told since I was a child, was perseverance, the ability to survive no matter how much they took from us. I never understood how surviving was our collective superpower when white folk made sure so many of us didn't survive. And those of us who did survive practiced bending so much that breaking seemed inevitable.”
― Kiese Laymon, Heavy

19 likes

#13

“I will wonder if the memories that remain with age are heavier than the ones we forget because they mean more to us, or if our bodies, like our nation, eventually purge memories we never wanted to be true.”
― Kiese Laymon, Heavy

27 likes

#14

“How nice -- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

tags: catatonia, coma, life

3341 likes

#15

“And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., A Man Without a Country

3166 likes

#16

“Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

tags: afterlife, atheism, humanism, secularism

2183 likes

#17

“Many people need desperately to receive this message: 'I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake

tags: not-alone

1431 likes

#18

“A sane person to an insane society must appear insane.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Welcome to the Monkey House

908 likes

#19

“Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

tags: doubt, terrifying, vile

780 likes

#20

“Live by the harmless untruths that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Cat’s Cradle

tags: arts

801 likes

#21

“As for literary criticism in general: I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel or a play or a poem is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or a banana split.”
― kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage

tags: bad-reviews, critics, literary-criticism, reviewers, writing

599 likes

#22

“We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

tags: health, humanity

580 likes

#23

“The practice of art isn't to make a living. It's to make your soul grow.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

502 likes

#24

“All these people talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values. Well, as an old poop I can remember back to when we had those old-fashioned values, and I say let's get back to the good old-fashioned First Amendment of the good old-fashioned Constitution of the United States -- and to hell with the censors! Give me knowledge or give me death!”
― Kurt Vonnegut

tags: censorship, education, free-speech, paraphrased

471 likes

#25

“Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and well-oiled guns.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

462 likes

#26

“I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't going to want to go on living.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

477 likes

#27

“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus

tags: creation, destruction, flawed, human-character, human-nature

493 likes

#28

“And a step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano

tags: corrections, erring, mistakes, progress, responsibility

361 likes

#29

“So, in the interests of survival, they trained themselves to be agreeing machines instead of thinking machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking, and then they thought that, too.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

tags: breakfast-of-champions, girls, kurt-vonnegut, machines, manipulation, thinking, women

303 likes

#30

“Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons

tags: examined-life, life, meaning-of-life, plato, socrates, unexamined-life

258 likes

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