Poorvi Agarwal

“Bessel van der Kolk: “The nature of trauma is that you have no recollection of it as a story.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
― Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

“I tell my students, who are concerned with the question of betrayal, that when it comes to memoir, there is no such thing as absolute truth—only the truth that is singularly their own. I say this not to release them from responsibility but to illuminate the subjectivity of our inner lives. One person's experience is not another's.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

“What most people mean by type is a sense of attraction—a type of physical appearance or a type of personality turns them on. But what underlies a person’s type, in fact, is a sense of familiarity. It’s no coincidence that people who had angry parents often end up choosing angry partners, that those with alcoholic parents are frequently drawn to partners who drink quite a bit, or that those who had withdrawn or critical parents find themselves married to spouses who are withdrawn or critical.”
― Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed