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"This was a vision of wildness contained " caged. Huge, powerful animals whose wild dignity was stripped from them.Panic jolted me. These animals had had their freedom seized by people who put their own desires first. In the glint of the silver cage bars I saw the same steely repression, the same cold entitlement that allows people to feel it is okay to steal bodies and lives as I glimpsed while frozen beneath Junior. The boy who had put his few minutes of pleasure before my entire life."
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"We do know that we are cheated from birth to the overcharge on our coffins."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Truth shrilled in prison or cemetary."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Many an injustice is presented as solution and gift."
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Personal Development
"As the many male victims of rape in the regime's disgusting jails can testify, this state-run pathology of sexual repression and sexual sadism is not content to degrade women only."
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Personal Development
"Put the case that he lived in an atmosphere of evil, and that all he saw of children was their being generated in great numbers for certain destruction. Put the case that he often saw children solemnly tried at a criminal bar, where they were held up to be seen; put the case that he habitually knew of their being imprisoned, whipped, transported, neglected, cast out, qualified in all ways for the hangman, and growing up to be hanged. Put the case that pretty nigh all the children he saw in his daily business life he had reason to look upon as so much spawn, to develop into the fish that were to come to his net,""to be prosecuted, defended, forsworn, made orphans, bedevilled somehow."
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Personal Development
"Within living memory of this country, men could rape their wives: women were not seen as a separate sexual entity, with the right of refusal."
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Personal Development
"I once heard of a class teacher who'd punish every student wearing a blue shirt whenever a student wearing blue shirt had committed a mistake. I thought that was pretty bad. I then heard of a class teacher who'd punish every student wearing a blue shirt whenever someone in blue shirt committed a mistake somewhere else. Clearly, the worst is not a reality."
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Personal Development
"They've been practicing racism so long, it's perfect."
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Personal Development
"From my keen observation, it is a very sad fact that the Philippines' current administration's drug war crisis has fully pressed the pedal of acceleration to more division, hatred, cycles of violence (copycat killings, summary killings, extra judicial killings, collateral victims of drug war), toxic revenge, and perpetual impunity."
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Personal Development
"If we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday at a time of presidential inaugurals, this is thanks to Ronald Reagan who created the holiday, and not to the Democratic Congress of the Carter years, which rejected it."
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Personal Development
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"Helplessness didn't have to be my identity, I wasn't condemned to it. I was willing - able - to change. Our enmeshment had been enabled by my belief that I needed [my mom] to help me, to take care of things for me - and to save me - but, back in the home where I'd learned this helplessness, I found I no longer felt that I was trapped in it."
Independence
"My path, beyond doubt or denial. I just hadn't looked toward it. I wasn't lost. I'd always known the way. If I'd only allowed myself to look. I had never been lost, only scared."
Destiny
"I was no longer following a trail. I was learning to follow myself."
Independence
"Somewhere in the sun-washed space between Southern California's hills of sand and the present desolate volcanic sprawl I was crossing, my legs had strengthened, but " invisibly " so had my will. The wisdom of my body had cultivated vibrantly since those sadness-drunken months after the rape when I'd felt so numbed by the hurt and shame that I didn't move further. No longer."
Recovery
"I didn't know if I was brave or reckless."
Bravery
"I wanted both things: strength in my independence and also this new desire. This felt like the beginning of a new kind of love."
Independence
"I was passive by nature. I had always been. Arguing felt unnatural and uncomfortable. I was always agreeing even when I didn't really, instinctively looking for ways to forfeit power, to become more dependent, to be taken care of. I realized how intensely Icecap reminded me of Jacob. They were similar, both diligent and harsh in their judgments-and my big brother's sureness had always comforted me.But as I ran on sore legs to keep up with Icecap, my tendency toward silence stressed me."
Dependence
"Childhood is a wilderness."
Youth
"From that unremarkable gap in dense northern forest, I could finally see clearly that if I hadn't walked away from school, through devastating beauty alone on the Pacific Crest Trail, met rattlesnakes and bears, fording frigid and remote rivers as deep as I am tall-feeling terror and the gratitude that followed the realization that I'd survived rape-I'd have remained lost, maybe for my whole life. The trail had shown me how to change.This is the story of how my recklessness became my salvation.I wrote it."
Healing
"The bravest thing I ever did was leave there. The next bravest thing I did was come back, to make myself heard."
Courage
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