#repress

This is what it means to be a woman in this world. Every step is a bargain with pain. Make your black deals in the black wood and decide what you’ll trade for power. For the opposite of weakness, which is not strength but hardness. I am a trap, but so is everything. Pick your price. I am a huckster with a hand in your pocket. I am freedom and I will eat your heart. ↗

— Catherynne M. Valente

#repression #society #strength #women #freedom

While the repression of a memory is a psychological process, the suppression of feeling is accomplished by deadening a part of the body or reducing its motility so that feeling is diminished. The repression of the memory is dependent upon and related to the suppression of feeling, for as long as the feeling persists, the memory remains vivid. Suppression entails the development of chronic muscular tension in those areas of the body where the feeling would be experienced. In the case of sexual feeling, this tension is found in and about the abdomen and pelvis ↗

— Alexander Lowen

#health #repression #sex #sexuality #suppression

I became skilled at covering my tracks, filling in the blanks. Sometimes the blanks were never filled. At other times, I would recall places where I had been or things I had done as if from a dream, which made the playback of my father and other men abusing me seem I even less real, fantasies conjured up from my imagination I not my memory. Perhaps somebody else’s memory. I didn’t think of myself as having mental-health problems. You don’t at sixteen. I thought of myself as being special, highly strung, moody. ↗

— Alice Jamieson

#amnesia #dissociation #dissociative #dissociative-identity-disorder #incest

Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline. ↗

— Theodor Adorno

#play #repressive #rule #self-discipline #while

Colonialism is known in its primitive form, that is to say, by the permanent settling of repressive foreign powers, with an army, services, policies. This phase has known cruel colonial occupations which have lasted 300 years in Indonesia. ↗

— Ahmed Ben Bella

#colonial #colonialism #cruel #foreign #foreign powers

My name became known because I was, one might say accidentally the target of state repression and because so many people throughout the country and other parts of the world organized around the demand for my freedom. ↗

— Angela Davis

#around #became #because #country #demand

In a repressive society, a writer can be deeply influential, but in a society that's filled with glut and repetition and endless consumption, the act of terror may be the only meaningful act. ↗

— Don DeLillo

#consumption #deeply #endless #filled #glut

Writers in repressive societies are considered dangerous. That's why so many of them are in jail. ↗

— Don DeLillo

#dangerous #jail #many #repressive #societies

Everything's so repressive now - it's the No generation. You can't do anything, you can't eat anything, you have to abstain. ↗

— Michael Douglas

#anything #eat #everything #generation #now

If I were to sum up the negative reactions to my work, I think there are two primary causes: one is that if there is discourse about anxiety it is necessarily going to induce anxiety. It will represent a return of the repressed for a great many people. ↗

— Harold Bloom

#anxiety #causes #discourse #going #great