Apeksha✨

“When I was nineteen, approaching my fourth hour behind those Scientology HQ doors, I had no idea the millions of dollars and psychological trauma this “church” had wrung out of everyday people under false promises that started with $35 self-improvement workshops. All I knew was that this felt like a timeshare sell. And I couldn’t let them take us to that next room. So I stood up. I said, “NO THANK YOU. WE ARE NOT YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE. PLEASE LET US GO. MANI, WE’RE LEAVING.”
― Amanda Montell, Cultish

“We made something magnificent. We disrupted the very thing that was seemingly fixed—the way people handled the most intimate moments of their lives. We gave them something they didn’t even know they wanted, and once we’d given it to them, nothing was ever the same again. We were revolutionaries. We were radicals. We had upended the order of things.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife

“Though the stakes and consequences of their respective affiliations differed considerably, the methods used to assert such power—to create community and solidarity, to establish an “us” and a “them,” to align collective values, to justify questionable behavior, to instill ideology and inspire fear—were uncannily, cultishly similar. And the most compelling techniques had little to do with drugs, sex, shaved heads, remote communes, drapey kaftans, or “Kool-Aid” . . . instead, they had everything to do with language.”
― Amanda Montell, Cultish

“I think of the coal grease    black dust and memories that burn slow as anthracite how some colours don’t fade however deep they’re buried how even a dowry of rags smouldering in a box can flare in a winter grate and how    to own the country of her birth a woman might have to wear a fire”
― Pascale Petit, Tiger Girl