Dina

“Fight one more round. When your feet are so tired that you have to shuffle back to the centre of the ring, fight one more round. When your arms are so tired that you can hardly lift your hands to come on guard, fight one more round. When your nose is bleeding and your eyes are black and you are so tired you wish your opponent would crack you one on the jaw and put you to sleep, fight one more round – remembering that the man who always fights one more round is never whipped.”
― James Corbett

“In order to win the femininity game, women and girls must abandon the valued "masculine" characteristics of self-efficacy and self-determination. However, this is the catch: the femininity game ultimately presents girls and women with a "no-win" situation. Although failure to live up to the expectations of femininity can have devastating effects on girls' and women's self-esteem, so can success in attaining them. A "winner" of the femininity game has effectively stripped herself of valued human characteristics in adopting an undervalued identity.”
― Lauraine Leblanc, Pretty in Punk: Girl's Gender Resistance in a Boy's Subculture

“I had always believed, and not only out of cynicism, that a man and a woman could tell in the first ten minutes whether they wanted to go to bed together; and that the time that passed after those first ten minutes represented a tax, which might be worth paying if the article promised to be really enjoyable, but which nine times out of ten became rapidly excessive.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

“Most adult children of toxic parents grow up feeling tremendous confusion about what love means and how it’s supposed to feel. Their parents did extremely unloving things to them in the name of love. They came to understand love as something chaotic, dramatic, confusing, and often painful—something they had to give up their own dreams and desires for. Obviously, that’s not what love is all about. Loving behaviour doesn’t grind you down, keep you off balance, or create feelings of self-hatred. Love doesn’t hurt, it feels good. Loving behaviour nourishes your emotional well-being. When someone is being loving to you, you feel accepted, cared for, valued, and respected. Genuine love creates feelings of warmth, pleasure, safety, stability, and inner peace.”
― Susan Forward, Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life