Michaela Okland

“He began to understand violence as the result of a belief system men all seemed to share, which told them they were the authority in their lives, that they were to be respected, obeyed. Top of the human hierarchy. It was a belief system that not only distanced them from people around them, but also limited their range, kept them boxed in by their own narrow ideas of what men could be and how men could behave.”
― Rachel Louise Snyder, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

“As they carried along and met more people Furlong did and did not know, he found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another? Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?”
― Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These

“Victims often side with their abusers publicly, to family, to police, to prosecutors. Because long after the police leave, even after charges are filed and a sentence meted out, it is with the abuser that a victim must continually negotiate her life. And the life of her children.”
― Rachel Louise Snyder, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

“You aren’t a machine with broken parts. You are an animal whose needs are not being met. You need to have a community. You need to have meaningful values, not the junk values you’ve been pumped full of all your life, telling you happiness comes through money and buying objects. You need to have meaningful work. You need the natural world. You need to feel you are respected. You need a secure future. You need connections to all these things. You need to release any shame you might feel for having been mistreated.”
― Johann Hari, Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions