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"She had wanted me to hold rape inside me like a dark pearl, keep it in there, as it grew, as I grew cramped, as it overtook me as hidden things do. Secrets become lies. I'd carried in every step I took this lie, the shame of it."
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Exlpore more Shame quotes
"Well it's because the record companies are pumping away with their commercial stuff. I think it's a shame."
"We would not be ashamed of doing some of the things we do in private, if the number of sane human beings who do them in public were large enough."
"I felt ashamed.""But of what? Psyche, they hadn't stripped you naked or anything?""No, no, Maia. Ashamed of looking like a mortal -- of being a mortal.""But how could you help that?""Don't you think the things people are most ashamed of are things they can't help?"
"I was ashamed of myself for being ashamed of myself. I didn't like feeling like that."
"I've found the best treasure... You."
"Ira Gershwin, shame on him. I mean, some of the writing."
"You've got to vote for someone. It's a shame, but it's got to be done."
Explore more quotes by Aspen Matis
"Absolutely devout in her complete care of my body, she had only taught me to be weak and voiceless. But I had unlearned that lesson. Our enmeshment no longer felt to me like proof of love. I was no longer willing to permit this silencing. 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 her 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."
"I was able to pitch a tent and carry a backpack twenty-five miles a day through mountains-I'd mastered a thousand amazing physical feats-physically I'd become undeniably confident and capable-but physical weakness had never been the problem that I had. My true problem had been passivity, the lifelong-conditioned submission that became my nature."
"I felt like I belonged to an ancient tradition of all young people given this same task of finding their own ways through to the futures they wanted for themselves."
"I saw for the first time that I could stop giving people the power to make me feel disrespected. In my anger I began to see the absurdity of allowing this boy to shame me."
"I wrote through darkness, vividly seeing: my passivity was not a crime; my desire to trust was not a flaw."
"I'd have to be impolite, an inconvenience, and sometimes awkward. But if I could commit, all that discomfort would add up to zap predatory threads like a Taser gun. I'd stun them. They'd bow to me. I'd let my no echo against the mountains.And better to feel bad for a moment saying no-and stop it-than to get harmed.I would take better care.That small word, no. I'd see its deity."
"Each year, Gracie Henderson moons a thousand strangers, collects their shocked faces in an annual photo album."
"I doubted I could survive in the woods without these very basic things to help me. It seemed like a tremendous leap of faith to forsake the tools I'd always been told I needed. And yet leaving college to walk was such a massive leap of faith already, and nothing I'd ever trusted and believed in seemed true any longer."
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