pauline

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.”
― Ursula K. LeGuin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

“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

“That sadness—the sadness of loss—is a different flavor than the sadness of reckoning. The sadness of reckoning feels visceral and angry and tinged with violence. It feels healable, somehow, with revenge or justice. But the sadness of a lost childhood feels like yearning, impossible desire. It feels like a hollow, insatiable hunger. I’d spent my life telling myself I didn’t need a mommy or a daddy. But now I was beginning to realize that this hunger isn’t childish—it is a universal, primal need. We all want to be taken care of, and that’s okay. The woman who appears to me when I meditate, in her soft, baggy clothes—she isn’t quite the same as a parent, and she never will be. But she takes me into her arms and whispers, “I want to love you.” I lean in and let her.”
― Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma