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"Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it really isn't about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn't about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open. Maybe it's about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing."
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"I'd never felt so helpless - so hopeless - in my life as I did there. To be completely under someone's power, with no one to turn to for help, to make someone feel like they're at fault for you hurting them . . . I realized that was exactly what I'd done to Carly. That hangs over me every day."
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Personal Development
"The landlords are not agriculturists; that is an abuse of terms which has been too long tolerated."
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Personal Development
"The photographs of Iraqi prisoners being subjected to degrading and humiliating treatment by their captors, and the reports of acts of sexual abuse, physical abuse, and other acts of maltreatment shock the conscience."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it really isn't about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn't about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open. Maybe it's about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The interruption did nothing but earn her a similar slap, as I'm sure she knew it would. Sometimes I wondered if my mother spoke up at the wrong time on purpose. As often as we endured my father's abuse, she had to be aware that it wouldn't save me from a beating but simply earn her one as well. Or was it that sharing my fate made her feel less guilt-ridden about those things that happened to me?"
Author Name
Personal Development
"When you have no basis for an argument, abuse the plaintiff."
Author Name
Personal Development
"If you want that good feeling that comes from doing things for other folks then you have to pay for it in abuse and misunderstanding."
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Personal Development
"Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts."
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Personal Development
"We have copped a lot of ignorant abuse in the past, but it makes you wonder when a former state coroner openly attacks Aboriginal families who have been through hell."
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Personal Development
"The earth we abuse and the living things we kill will, in the end, take their revenge; for in exploiting their presence we are diminishing our future."
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"With shrunken fingerswe ate our oranges and bread,shivering in the parked car;though we know we had neverbeen there before,we knew we had been there before."
Love
"We shouldn't have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young."
Morality
"Never pray for justice, because you might get some."
Justice
"A bachelor, a studio, those were the names for that kind of apartment. Separate entrance it would say in the ads, and that meant you could have sex, unobserved."
Lifestyle
"Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future. The ruin you've made."
Reflection
"From under the ground, from under the waters,they clutch at us, they clutch at us,we won't let go."
Reflection
"I planned my death carefully, unlike my life, which meandered along from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to control it."
Life
"I need to remember what they look like. I try to hold them still behind my eyes, their faces, like pictures in an album. But they won't stay still for me, they move, there's a smile and it's gone, their features curl and bend as if the paper's burning, blackness eats them. A glimpse, a pale shimmer on the air; a glow, aurora, dance of electrons, then a face again, faces. But they fade, though I stretch out my arms towards them, they slip away from me, ghosts at daybreak. Back to wherever they are. Stay with me, I want to say. But they won't."
Memory
"It can't last forever. Others have thought such things, in bad times before this, and they were always right, they did get out one way or another, and it didn't last forever. Although for them it may have lasted all the forever they had."
Resilience
"But in life, a tragedy is not one long scream. It includes everything that led up to it. Hour after trivial hour, day after day, year after year, and then the sudden moment: the knife stab, the shell burst, the plummet of the car from a bridge."
Drama
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