Thaya

“I hope because I was open about what happened to me, my children will insist on intimacy, on knowing their partner deeply, on being known deeply. I hope they will talk to their partners about money, about what will happen if the partnership ends. I hope that as they build trust in their relationships, they never lose sight of their own authority, their own voice, their own intuition. I hope they will move toward people who are in pain, rather than away. I hope they will understand that every person has experiences that make them who they are. I hope they will fall in love with abandon as I did with their father. I hope they will know, from watching me, that if everything falls apart, they can get up and piece together something new.”
― Belle Burden, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage

“And yet the feeling persists: love is not dead. I am not dead. I still have faith in people. Once, that was my greatest weakness. Now it is my strength. My revenge.”
― Gisèle Pelicot, A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides

“I felt like I had lost my mind, like his exit had transformed me, suddenly, from an intelligent, stable wife and mother to an unhinged lunatic. A madwoman. Somehow, I had become the dangerous person in the story, the volatile character, rather than he, the man who had left his family.”
― Belle Burden, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage

“She must have seen my mother in me, my father's great love with whom she could never complete, the beautiful face that surely haunted his long silences.”
― Gisèle Pelicot, A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides