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“A poet, he argued, is different from somebody who simply writes poetry. A poet is loyal to his own experience and does not write about things outside his own understanding, whereas somebody who writes poetry simply puts together sentences, whose words he arranges in separate lines. Without fresh colors, without luster, without images, he asked, where is a poem’s artistic life?”
― Weiwei Ai, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows: A Memoir

“Despite my mother being the best possible sport when his family visited, he picked a fight with her over something trivial because he couldn’t acknowledge his truth: when he wasn’t at the center of things, he felt small. A venom he didn’t understand filled his throat. To avoid choking, he spat it at whomever was closest, swelling with self-loathing disguised as self-importance.”
― Lisa Nikolidakis, No One Crosses the Wolf: A Memoir

“It’s hard to believe she could have thought of herself as a good mother, but I guess narcissistic people don’t have much sense of what they are really like or how they make other people feel.”
― Anderson Cooper, The Rainbow Comes and Goes: A Mother and Son on Life, Love, and Loss

“They stay in abusive marriages because they understand something that most of us do not, something from the inside out, something that seems to defy logic: as dangerous as it is in their homes, it is almost always far more dangerous to leave.”
― Rachel Louise Snyder, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us