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The Mistake (Off-Campus, #2)

by Elle Kennedy (Goodreads Author)

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— May 19, 2026 04:27PM

May 19, 2026 04:27PM

“Because even if I sometimes use the word abuse to describe certain things that were done to me, in someone else’s mouth the word turns ugly and absolute. It swallows up everything that happened.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

227 likes

“I felt that you were more lonely than anybody else in the world,...and yet, perhaps, that you were the only person in the world who was really, truly alive. Born out of your time”
― Katherine Mansfield, Selected Stories

1 likes

“Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus [man is wolf to man]. Who, in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?”
― Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

tags: aggression, civilization, man

35 likes

“The excuses we make for them are outrageous, but they’re nothing compared with the ones we make for ourselves.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

266 likes

“One of the reasons a survivor finds it so difficult to see herself as a victim is that she has been blamed repeatedly for the abuse: "If you weren't such a whore, this wouldn't have to happen." Each time she is used and trashed, she becomes further convinced of her innate badness. She sees herself participating in forbidden sexual activity and may often get some sense of gratification from it even if she doesn't want to (it is, after all, a form of touch, and our bodies respond without the consent of our wills). This is seen as further proof that the abuse is her fault and well deserved. In her mind, she has become responsible for the actions of her abusers. She believes she is not a victim; she is a loathsome, despicable, worthless human being—if indeed she even qualifies as human. When the abuse has been sadistic in nature...these beliefs are futher entrenched.”
― Diane Langberg, Counseling Survivors of Sexual Abuse