From Ariel Leve’s 2016 memoir, An Abbreviated Life:

p. 137
He tells me that scientists have found connections between children who are psychologically abused and permanent changes in the brain. We are discussing the neurological effects when a child’s rational responses are continually invalidated.

“When you have an erratic, unpredictable, and aggressive parent, a child will detect signs and know when not to say something or know when to hide, so a threat-detecting sense begins to emerge early on. In the end, it wires the individual to be acutely aware and highly reactive to perceived threats.”

p. 145
The times I remember my mother most at peace is when she would stand without moving, unaware of passing time, reading or rereading passages from a book she’d picked off the shelf. Words were liberation from the frantic world she occupied. She could lose herself temporarily in the sanctuary of the lyricism. Unlike people, words were always enough.

p. 266
I did not hate my mother. I feared her. I feared her destroying my life. I feared her lies would turn others against me. I feared the incessant and unending conflict I would be forced to engage in with someone who couldn’t see past her own reality.

From Cory Taylor’s memoir, Dying:

p. 31
I don’t know where I would be if I couldn’t do this strange work. It has saved my life many times over the years, and it continues to do so now. For while my body is careering towards catastrophe, my mind is elsewhere, concentrated on this other, vital task, which is to tell you something meaningful before I go. Because I’m never happier than when I’m writing, or thinking about writing, or watching the world as a writer, and it has been this way since the start.

p. 45
No, my priorities remain the same. Work and family. Nothing else has ever really mattered to me. It might sound odd for a writer with my small output to claim work as a lifelong preoccupation, but it’s true. When I wasn’t writing, I was preparing to write, rehearsing ideas, reading, observing life and character, learning from other writers. As Nora Ephron always said, everything is copy. If I was slower than some at finding success, it isn’t because I wasn’t trying. I was trying and failing all the time. That’s what I’m doing now and I hope failing better.

From Voltaire’s Candide:

p. 95
‘But what was this world created for?’ said Candide.
‘To drive us mad,’ replied Martin.

From debbie tucker green’s hang:

p. 24
People are too embarrassed to say anything.
To say anything of use.
To say anything of use any more.
People say nothing, presume I’ve stopped
waiting for them to say anything. To say
anything useful. People presume, I’m, over it.
Over the worst.
People have tired of talking about it,
they’re all cried out about it.

From Diana Athill’s memoir Instead of a Letter (1962):

p. 40
[T]hey considered a house without books in it uncivilized.

p. 71
Lessons I saw as necessary, often interesting, and sometimes enjoyable. I made friends whose companionship I appreciated. It was the absence of things which had to be endured: the absence of freedom, the absence of home, the absence of privacy, the absence of pleasures.

p. 72
It was at school that my secret sin was first brought into the open: laziness. I was considered a clever girl, but lazy. It has been with me ever since, and the guilt I feel about it assures me that it is a sin, not an inability. It takes the form of an immense weight of inertia at the prospect of any activity that does not positively attract me: a weight that can literally paralyze my moral sense. That something must be done I know; that I can do it I know; but the force which prevents my doing it when it comes to the point, or makes me postpone it and postpone it until almost too late, is not conscious defiance of the “must” nor a deliberate denial of the “can.” It is an atrophy of the part of my mind which can perceive the “must” and the “can.” I slide off sideways, almost unconsciously, into doing something else, which I like doing.