Xinlin

“I turned back to the canvas, and it occurred to me then that only a woman could have made this image. This was not a painting of temptation, but rather one of harassment and intimidation, a scene that could be taking place right now in nearly anyplace in the world. The painting operated around a schism, it represented two irreconcilable subjective positions: the man, who believed the scene to be one of ardor and seduction, and the woman, who had been plunged into a state of fear and humiliation. That schism, I now realized, was the true inconsistency animating the canvas, and the true object of Leyster's gaze.”
― Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

“It seemed to her that he was ready to live and die for emotional errors as women did, but that like most men he did not call them emotional errors; he called them history, philosophy, metaphysics, science.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel

“Beatrice Beebe, one of my mentors and an infant researcher at Columbia University, is known for saying “Research is me-search.” By that she means that all psychological research, even when we are not aware of it, is our quest to understand and heal ourselves and the people who raised us.”
― Galit Atlas, Emotional Inheritance: A Therapist, Her Patients, and the Legacy of Trauma

“We think we long for eternal life, but maybe what we’re really longing for is perfect and unconditional love; a world in which lions actually do lay down with lambs; a world free of famines and floods, concentration camps and Gulag archipelagos; a world in which we grow up to love others in the same helplessly exuberant way we once loved our parents; a world in which we’re forever adored like a precious baby; a world built on an entirely different logic from our own, one in which life needn’t eat life in order to survive.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole