malina rusu

“The transition from being hurt to hurting was natural. Even though I didn’t really know why he’d started crying – it felt like something I did. It felt like being a great big black widow and realizing that all the male spiders were tiny and weak and covered in soft vulnerable bits, whereas I had this hard, shiny thorax and great big teeth.”
― Eliza Clark

“There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you—may cleanse you of your darkness. Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone? Not much. What if an actor could do it for you? Isn’t that why they are called actors? They act for you. You sacrifice them to action. And this sacrifice is a mode of deepest intimacy of you with your own life. Within it you watch [yourself] act out the present or possible organization of your nature. You can be aware of your own awareness of this nature as you never are at the moment of experience. The actor, by reiterating you, sacrifices a moment of his own life in order to give you a story of yours.”
― Anne Carson, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

“Domination, I have argued, is a twisting of the bonds of love. Domination does not repress the desire for recognition; rather, it enlists and transforms it. Beginning in the breakdown of the tension between self and other, domination proceeds through the alternate paths of identifying with or submitting to powerful others who personify the fantasy of omnipotence. For the person who takes this route to establishing his own power, there is an absence where the other should be. This void is filled with fantasy material in which the other appears so dangerous or so weak - or both - that he threatens the self and must be controlled. A vicious cycle begins: the more the other is subjugated, the less he is experienced as a human subject and the more distance or violence the self must deploy against him.”
― Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination

“Do I have to smash a glass over the head of every single man I come into contact with, just so I leave a fucking mark?”
― Eliza Clark