Michael

“You can’t find intimacy—you can’t find home—when you’re always hiding behind masks. Intimacy requires a certain level of vulnerability. It requires a certain level of you exposing your fragmented, contradictory self to someone else. You running the risk of having your core self rejected and hurt and misunderstood.”
― Junot Díaz

“He showed me his scars, and in return he let me pretend that I had none.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“How does a master manipulator create and sustain faith? Why do his converts persist in believing things that are patently false?—also”
― Margalit Fox, The Confidence Men: How Two Prisoners of War Engineered the Most Remarkable Escape in History

“…each woman is a wonderful world unto herself. And monogamy? It’s like choosing to live in a single town and never traveling to experience the beauty, history, and enchantment of all the other unique, wonderful places in the world. Why does love have to limit us?
Perhaps it doesn’t. Only fear is restrictive. Love is expansive. And I wonder, since fear of enmeshment impels us to avoid commitment and fear of abandonment makes us possessive, what type of evolved relationship can emerge once those wounds are healed?”
― Neil Strauss, The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships