Anna Shields

“You had to withstand a profound sense of wrongness if you ever wanted to get somewhere new.”
― Miranda July, All Fours

“But the sadness of a lost childhood feels like yearning, impossible desire. It feels like a hollow, insatiable hunger.”
― Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma

“The asylum was, in short, a “storage unit for unsatisfactory wives.”19 They’d been, Elizabeth observed archly, “put here, like me, to get rid of them.”
― Kate Moore, The Woman They Could Not Silence

“If so, is it worth my potential loss of status for victims to be able to say what happened to them? My answer is, tentatively: yes. Even though loss of status can be pretty fucking awful. This trade-off is depressing and maybe even inhuman—but, to my mind, it’s the bargain that’s on the table right now. Some people endure shaming, deserved or undeserved, so that some other people can say what happened to them. Instead of accepting that bargain, we make up an insulting and increasingly dumb name—cancel culture—that invalidates half the equation: the half where people are able to say something is wrong. Perhaps this is the wrong bargain; probably it is. But it’s the reality we live in.”
― Claire Dederer, Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma