Lauren

“the brilliant book Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman describes seven key abilities most beneficial for human beings: the ability to motivate ourselves, to persist against frustration, to delay gratification, to regulate moods, to hope, to empathize, and to control impulse. Many of those who commit violence never learned these skills. If you know a young person who lacks them all, that’s an important pre-incident indicator, and he needs help.”
― Gavin de Becker, The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence

“No” is a word that must never be negotiated, because the person who chooses not to hear it is trying to control you.”
― Gavin de Becker, The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence

“Words: with them you can do and undo as you please.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name

“There's a difference between obsession and passion. One form of emotional oppression of women is the cheap and automatic labeling of passionate emotion as obsession, something neurotic and wrong.

If an artist like Aretha Franklin sings about love from the bottom of her gut, we call it genius. If an ordinary woman talks about love from the bottom of her gut, we call it co-dependent, obsessed, or over-wrought. This leads women to distrust our own instincts, to think of our own passions as delusional or, at the very least, unladylike.”
― Marianne Williamson, A Woman's Worth