Josephine Briggs

“I’m not minimizing. It’s just that if you paint a picture of him as a monster then you make him mythical, but men who hurt women are just men.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Once There Were Wolves

“Men get taught to expect control but a modern society no longer supports that, so some men feel it slipping and it humiliates them. The humiliation makes them angry, and then violent.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Once There Were Wolves

“He also taught us that compassion was the most important thing we could learn.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Once There Were Wolves

“One of the saddest tendencies in our present culture is an indignant intolerance for the basic humanity of being human. People of the past are harshly judged by the standards of the present (which their own difficult lives helped establish), and people of the present are harshly judged by impossible (and hypocritical, in the full context of any judger’s life) standards of uniform perfection across all regions of private and public existence. And yet the eternal test of character — our great moral triumph — is the ability to face our own imperfections with composure, reflecting on them with lucid and luminous determination to do better — an essential form of moral courage all the more difficult, and all the more important, amid a cultural atmosphere that mistakes self-righteousness for morality and suffocates the basic impulse toward betterment with punitive intolerance for human foible.

Maria Popova : “Resolutions for a Life Worth Living”
― Maria Popova