#cat

I now know for certain that my mind and emotions, my fix on the real and my family's well-being, depend on just a few grams of salt. But treatment's the easy part. Without honesty, without a true family reckoning, that salt's next to worthless. ↗

— David Lovelace

#family #lithium #manic-depression #medication #mental-illness

Sometimes, in the stillness of my room, my mom’s voice came to me, repeating things she’d said for months. Like, “My skin is melting off my face, isn’t it?” And, “My whole body feels dead from the crap they’re pouring into me. Do I look green to you?” And, “When I’m naked, I can see my heart beating. ↗

— Laura Anderson Kurk

#depression #family-relationships #glass-girl #grief #laura-anderson-kurk

Without the family, we are helpless before the State. ↗

— G.K. Chesterton

#family #family

I was a little cross.I ask pardon. If I do get up a little temper I have no sufficient time to keep it up. ↗

— Abraham Lincoln

#life-and-living #self-deprecation #friendship

These are the few ways we can practice humility: To speak as little as possible of one's self. To mind one's own business. Not to want to manage other people's affairs. To avoid curiosity. To accept contradictions and correction cheerfully. To pass over the mistakes of others. To accept insults and injuries. To accept being slighted, forgotten and disliked. To be kind and gentle even under provocation. Never to stand on one's dignity. To choose always the hardest. ↗

— Mother Teresa

#bossy #cheerful #curiosity #difficulty #dignity

What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook. ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#education #freedom #education

Being female in this world means having been robbed of the potential for human choice by men who love to hate us. One does does not make choices in freedom. Instead, one conforms in body type and behavior and values to become an object of male sexual desire, which requires an abandonment of a wide-ranging capacity for choice... Men too make choices. When will they choose not to despise us? ↗

— Andrea Dworkin

#feminism #freedom #men #morality #objectification

...enslaved black males were socialized by white folks to believe that they should endeabor to become patriarchs by seeking to attain the freedom to provide and protect for black women, to be benevolen patriarchs. Benevolent patriarchs exercise their power without using force. And it was this notion of patriarchy that educated black men coming from slavery into freedom sought to mimic. However, a large majority of black men took as their standard the dominator model set by white masters. When slavery ended these black men often used violence to dominate black women, which was a repetition of the strategies of control white slave masters used. ↗

— Bell Hooks

#patriarchy #education

True freedom is the gift of the Spirit, the result of grace: but, precisely because it is freedom FOR as well as freedom FROM, it isn't simply a matter of being forced now to be good, against our wills and without our cooperation, but a matter of being released from slavery precisely into responsibility, into being able at last to choose, to exercise moral muscle, knowing both that one is doing it oneself and that the Spirit is at work within, that God himself is doing that which I too am doing. ↗

— N.T. Wright

#god #jesus #justification #paul #freedom

A martyr is, he who has become the instrument of God, who has lost his will in the will of God, not lost it but found it, for he has found freedom in submission to God. The martyr no longer desires anything for himself, not even the glory of martyrdom. ↗

— T.S. Eliot

#freedom