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A Leopard-Skin Hat
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Alex Michaelides
“I believe the same is true for most people who go into mental health. We are drawn to this profession because we are damaged - we study psychology to heal ourselves. Whether we are prepared to admit this or not is another question.”
Alex Michaelides, The Silent Patient

Alex Michaelides
“Sometimes it’s hard to grasp why it is that the answers to the present lie in the past. A simple analogy might be helpful: a leading psychiatrist in the field of sexual abuse once told me she had, in thirty years of extensive work with paedophiles, never met one who hadn’t himself been abused as a child. This doesn’t mean that all abused children go on to become abusers; but it is impossible for someone who was not abused to become an abuser. No one is born evil. As Winnicott put it: ‘A baby cannot hate the mother, without the mother first hating the baby.’ As babies, we are innocent sponges, blank slates – with only the most basic needs present: to eat, shit, love and be loved. But something goes wrong, depending on the circumstances into which we are born, and the house in which we grow up. A tormented, abused child can never take revenge in reality, as she is powerless and defenceless, but she can – and must – harbour vengeful fantasies in her imagination. Rage, like fear, is reactive in nature.”
Alex Michaelides, The Silent Patient

Alex Michaelides
“No one is born evil. As Winnicott put it, “A baby cannot hate the mother, without the mother first hating the baby.”
Alex Michaelides, The Silent Patient

Ocean Vuong
“They say nothing lasts forever but they're just scared it will last longer than they can love it.”
Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

Ocean Vuong
“I am thinking of beauty again, how some things are hunted because we have deemed them beautiful. If, relative to the history of our planet, an individual life is so short, a blink, as they say, then to be gorgeous, even from the day you're born to the day you die, is to be gorgeous only briefly.”
Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

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Jasmine
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