Vanessa

“Often father and daughter look down on mother (woman) together. They exchange meaningful glances when she misses a point. They agree that she is not bright as they are, cannot reason as they do. This collusion does not save the daughter from the mother’s fate.”
― Bonnie Burstow, Radical Feminist Therapy: Working in the Context of Violence

“Having once embarked on your marital voyage, it is impossible not to be aware that you make no way and that the sea is not within sight - that, in fact, you are exploring a closed basin.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“People elude me by halves. I see only the good, then only the bad. I never see them whole. I have no explanation for this. No explanation for the coolness that stretches out between my periods of warmth, the disaffection between my periods of affection. I touch people when I talk to them. I put my hand on a newcomer's knee, or hand, or arm, and immediately the new person is drawn into an intimacy that I cannot sustain. People are charmed by my warmth and disconcerted to discover that it doesn't last.”
― Elizabeth Hay, Small Change

“The tragedies we steel ourselves for never come for years and years, and our negative fantasies wear us down inch by inch, so that when the blow actually comes, there's little left of us to care.”
― Halle Butler, The New Me