While much cultural attention is given to domestic violence and practically everyone agrees it is wrong for men to hit women as a way of subordinating us, most men use psychological terrorism as a way to subordinate women. This is a socially acceptable form of coercion. And lying is one of the most powerful weapons in this arsenal. When men lie to women, presenting a false self, the terrible price they pay to maintain “power over” us is the loss of their capacity to give and receive love.

bell hooks, All About Love

Emotional cruelty is more complicated. Its motives are often impossible to understand, and it is sometimes committed by people who say they like or even love you. Nearly always it’s hard to know whether you played a role in what happened, and, if so, what that role was… my point is that pain can be an experience that defies codification.

Mary Gaitskill, “The Trouble with Following the Rules”

When you’re young, everyone’s an artist. But it’s a game of endurance, a fight against addiction, children, comfort, stasis, health insurance, home ownership. People drop off one by one. No one ever tells you that.

Chelsea Hodson, Tonight I’m Someone Else

I’ll say your name fully and often, the way they do in movies. You’ll hear the shape of my mouth summoning you, singled out at last—you’ll like it. I’ll meet you at the barstools and you’ll touch my hair and I’ll take home everything you say. Don’t you know you can’t trust a writer? She’ll see a cigarette and call it a house fire. She’ll take a suggestion and turn it into a crime scene. She’ll wrap herself up in caution tape. She’ll write you down.

Chelsea Hodson, Tonight I’m Someone Else

Dream logic seems fine for a world that has been theorized to be nothing more than a simulation—a big video game where we think we play the world, but in fact someone else plays us. I buy what I can’t afford; I idolize people who have nothing to do with me; I refuse to believe one thing leads to another, which is to say I don’t believe in logic, not all the time—not the way this world rotates and orbits. I feel slower than it, too poor to live in it; I want to sleep until I’m someone else.

Chelsea Hodson, Tonight I’m Someone Else