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1 " Mothers have martyred themselves in their children’s names since the beginning of time. We have lived as if she who disappears the most, loves the most. We have been conditioned to prove our love by slowly ceasing to exist. What a terrible burden for children to bear—to know that they are the reason their mother stopped living. What a terrible burden for our daughters to bear—to know that if they choose to become mothers, this will be their fate, too. Because if we show them that being a martyr is the highest form of love, that is what they will become. They will feel obligated to love as well as their mothers loved, after all. They will believe they have permission to live only as fully as their mothers allowed themselves to live. If we keep passing down the legacy of martyrdom to our daughters, with whom does it end? Which woman ever gets to live? And when does the death sentence begin? At the wedding altar? In the delivery room? Whose delivery room—our children’s or our own? When we call martyrdom love we teach our children that when love begins, life ends. This is why Jung suggested: There is no greater burden on a child than the unlived life of a parent. "
― Glennon Doyle , Untamed
2 " Numbness keeps us from becoming. "
3 " I took control back with words, sentences, chapters and scripts. I started with the story’s resolution in mind… and worked backwards from there. I do not know if I lived the next few years and then wrote about what happened, or wrote the next few years; and then made it all happen. "
4 " I was amazed at how easy this was. I was filled with electric thunder, simmering water, fiery red and gold, but all I had to do was smile and nod and the world would take me for easy breezy blue. Sometimes I wondered if I wasn’t the only one using her skin to contain herself. Maybe we are all fire wrapped in skin, trying to look cool. "
5 " The voice I finally heard that day was my own--the girl I'd locked away at ten years old, the girl I was before the world told me who to be--and she said: Here I am. I'm taking over now. "
6 " Tish is sensitive, and that is her superpower. The opposite of sensitive is not brave. It’s not brave to refuse to pay attention, to refuse to notice, to refuse to feel and know and imagine. The opposite of sensitive is insensitive, and that’s no badge of honor. "
7 " That thing that happens to you in the shower, babe. It’s called thinking. It’s something folks did before Google. Thinking is like…it’s like googling your own brain. "
8 " I was filled with electric thunder, simmering water, fiery red and gold, but all I had to do was smile and nod and the world would take me for easy breezy blue. Sometimes I wondered if I wasn’t the only one using her skin to contain herself. Maybe we are all fire wrapped in skin, trying to look cool. "
9 " I guess women have to almost die before we give ourselves permission to live how we want. "
10 " The opposite sensitive is not brave. It's not brave to refuse to pay attention, to refuse to notice, to refuse to feel and know and imagine. The opposite of sensitive is insensitive, and that's no badge of honor. "
11 " We weren’t born distrusting and fearing ourselves. That was part of our taming. We were taught to believe that who we are in our natural state is bad and dangerous. They convinced us to be afraid of ourselves. So we do not honor our own bodies, curiosity, hunger, judgment, experience, or ambition. Instead, we lock away our true selves. Women who are best at this disappearing act earn the highest praise: She is so selfless. Can you imagine? The epitome of womanhood is to lose one’s self completely. That is the end goal of every patriarchal culture. Because a very effective way to control women is to convince women to control themselves. "
12 " Feelings are for feeling. All of them. "
13 " To be humble is to be grounded in knowing who you are. It implies the responsibility to become what you were meant to become—to grow, to reach, to fully bloom as high and strong and grand as you were created to. It is not honorable for a tree to wilt and shrink and disappear. It’s not honorable for a woman to, either. "
― Glennon Doyle Melton , Untamed
14 " What is better: uncomfortable truth or comfortable lies? Every truth is a kindness, even if it makes others uncomfortable. Every untruth is an unkindness, even if it makes others comfortable. "
15 " We train boys to believe that the way to become a man is to objectify and conquer women, value wealth and power above all, and suppress any emotions other than competitiveness and rage. Then we are stunned when our boys become exactly what we have trained them to be. Our boys cannot follow our directions, but they are cheating and dying and killing as they try to. Everything that makes a boy human is a “real man’s” dirty secret. "
16 " I was feeling the rage of a writer with a broken plot. Hell hath no fury like a memoirist whose husband just fucked up her story. "
17 " This way of life requires living in integrity: ensuring that my inner self and my outer self are integrated. Integrity means having only one self. Dividing into two selves – the shown self and the hidden self – that is brokeness, so I do whatever it takes to stay whole. I do not adjust myself to please the world. I am myself whereever I am, and let the world adjust. "
18 " This way of life requires living in integrity: ensuring that my inner self and my outer self are integrated. Integrity means having only one self. Dividing into two selves – the shown self and the hidden self – that is brokeness, so I do whatever it takes to stay whole. I do not adjust myself to please the world. I am myself wherever I am, and let the world adjust. "
19 " Girls born into a patriarchal society become either shrewd or sick. It’s one or the other. "
20 " Each of us was born to bring forth something new that has never existed: a way of being, a family, an idea, art, a community - something brand-new. We are here to fully introduce ourselves, to impose ourselves and ideas and thoughts and dreams onto the world, leaving it changed forever by who we are and what we bring forth from our depths. So we cannot contort ourselves to fit into the visible order. We must unleash ourselves and watch the world reorder itself in front of our eyes. "
