Mary

“...it's not surprising that Charlotte wants me to be the mother for her now. I can be the "normal" parent who safely and lovingly drives the car, and she can have the experience of being taken care of in a way she never has before. But in order to cast me in the competent role, Charlotte believes she has to cast herself as the helpless one, letting me see only her problems -- or, as Wendell once put it in relation to what I do with him: "seduce me with her misery." Patients often do this as a way to ensure that the therapist won't forget about their pain if they mention something positive.”
― Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

“It is difficult to rid yourself, in only a few weeks, of thirty or forty years of private belief that the world is a good place. With our rooted ideas of justice, we believed in the existence of a German, a European, an international conscience, and we were convinced that a certain degree of inhumanity is sure to self-destruct in the face of humane standards.”
― Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday

“We are enjoined to thank veterans, and them alone, for the supposed ease of American life, as though the Voting Rights Act, or the eight-hour day, or the minimum wage, had been wrested from a foreign power by movie-handsome SEALS in the Pacific. The American civilian is made to feel a signatory to two social contracts: the democratic one we learn about in school, and the imperial one, in which our enlightened, humane way of life is an unsustainable bubble in a dark world, maintained by an organization that terrorizes its employees, crushes dissent, scorns vulnerability, intermittently practices torture, resents the Geneva Convention.”
― Phil Christman, Midwest Futures

“By the way, I am changing the name of German measles. Hereafter it will be known as 'Liberty measles'." And it did bear that extraordinary title for the duration of [World War I]. War psychosis is a fearful and wonderful disrupter of horse sense.”
― S. Josephine Baker, Fighting for Life