Adriana

“Woman is not born: she is made. In the making, her humanity is destroyed. She becomes symbol of this, symbol of that: mother of the earth, slut of the universe; but she never becomes herself because it is forbidden for her to do so.”
― Andrea Dworkin

“Sometimes we as women are special in our compassion. For people to be able to survive on the margins, they often must be. They must form alliances, they must look out for one another. They must develop some characteristics and attributes because they have to create networks of solidarity and mutual care to withstand the experience of marginalization. Those characteristics are developed by facing hardship and opposition. We also have to find ways of convincing our oppressors not to hurt us, not to kill us, to bother keeping us around at all. That can make us clever. But these attributes are not innate. In fact, the idea that women are naturally more empathetic and nurturing originates with men. They used it as an excuse to keep us at home, tending to the children. They used it as an excuse to dismiss us intellectually. Don’t try to be smart, sweetheart, it’s not your strong suit. And yet we adopted this belief because it suits us to believe it about ourselves. It makes us special. What should make us feel special instead is our method of survival. If we believe these skills are born into us we will lose them once they are no longer needed.”
― Jessa Crispin, Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto

“The thing under my bed waiting to grab my ankle isn't real. I know that, and I also know that if I'm careful to keep my foot under the covers, it will never be able to grab my ankle.”
― Stephen King, Night Shift

“Given that we are who we are, with whatever hang-ups and repressions, what can we do to improve our future? To overcome the anxieties and depressions of contemporary life, individuals must become independent of the social environment to the degree that they no longer respond exclusively in terms of its rewards and punishments. To achieve such autonomy, a person has to learn to provide rewards to herself. She has to develop the ability to find enjoyment and purpose regardless of external circumstances.”
― Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience