Open Quotes

“indulging others’ harmful behavior is what many Buddhist teachers call “idiot compassion.” If anything, true, not-idiot compassion should afford you more energy to make the necessary boundaries and changes.”
― Rachel Krantz, Open: One Woman's Journey Through Love and Polyamory

“There’s sometimes a certain relief when the thing you’ve been so afraid of happens. You can finally surrender to the grief without struggling to stave it off. Though your body hollows, there is a sort of rest there, an absence of struggle.”
― Rachel Krantz, Open: One Woman's Journey Through Love and Polyamory

“Have you ever noticed how you can put on a song, any song, and the birds will appear to fly perfectly in tune with it? I think it is one of my favorite things about being alive.”
― Rachel Krantz, Open: One Woman's Journey Through Love and Polyamory

“Like, if you realize your kid just ate a Tide pod, you shouldn’t waste time feeling ashamed and guilty about leaving the container out. You regret it and immediately try to fix the situation. Regret can drive you to seek correction and change a behavior. But prolonged guilt and shame? They usually move you to hide and stall reparative action, thus perpetuating the cycle.”
― Rachel Krantz, Open: One Woman's Journey Through Love and Polyamory

“Like, if you realize your kid just ate a Tide pod, you shouldn’t waste time feeling ashamed and guilty about leaving the container out.”
― Rachel Krantz, Open: One Woman's Journey Through Love and Polyamory

“Hurt people hurt people,”
― Rachel Krantz, Open: One Woman's Journey Through Love and Polyamory

“I don’t feel particularly attached to being a man,” Asa told me when I asked if he felt at home in his assigned gender. “But I don’t feel like a woman, either. I’m happy with my body, my pronouns, and all that. I just don’t identify with a lot of the things people seem to expect being a man means.”
― Rachel Krantz, Open: One Woman's Journey Through Love and Polyamory

“Sometimes saying no is the experience.”
― Rachel Krantz, Open: One Woman's Journey Through Love and Polyamory

“Two people don’t think or feel or want the same things, and don’t have to.”
― Rachel Krantz, Open: One Woman's Journey Through Love and Polyamory

“Why are we always seal-clapping for men who can weather our basic humanity?”
― Rachel Krantz, Open: One Woman's Journey Through Love and Polyamory

“And, in a way, to time-travel. I’m reaching out from the past—yet as you read, I enter your present. Look how I’m holding out my hand across time and space, and you are right now grabbing it. What a gift you’ve given an imperfect stranger. Can you feel how you were already pulling me through? How much you already mattered? Yes, you. I am talking to you.”
― Rachel Krantz, Open: One Woman's Journey Through Love and Polyamory

“Savor the season, for this too shall pass, Brooklyn’s autumnal leaves confirmed. One of many things that make fall in New York so poignantly beautiful is the knowledge that winter is coming. And it’ll get you every time.”
― Rachel Krantz, Open: One Woman's Journey Through Love and Polyamory

“Like non-monogamous relationships, queer ones are no more inherently noble or sophisticated.”
― Rachel Krantz, Open: One Woman's Journey Through Love and Polyamory

“Stay with her, I thought. Worship her until she remembers she’s like the sun, always doing its radiant thing whether or not someone’s there to see it. Communicate it’s a privilege she lets you soak her in.”
― Rachel Krantz, Open: One Woman's Journey Through Love and Polyamory

“Jealousy is made all the more infuriating by how you watch it invite exactly what you’re trying to prevent.”
― Rachel Krantz, Open: One Woman's Journey Through Love and Polyamory

“Living life on the record means learning from them publicly, hopefully in a way that’s ultimately more beneficial than harmful.”
― Rachel Krantz, Open: One Woman's Journey Through Love and Polyamory

“We’re cast as anxious Cinderellas; exactly when our chariots will turn into pumpkins is unknown but it’s certain to happen.”
― Rachel Krantz, Open: One Woman's Journey Through Love and Polyamory

“a few US states”
― Rachel Krantz, Open: One Woman's Journey Through Love and Polyamory

“And it took me a long time to learn, but it’s true: Sometimes saying no is the experience.” It was exactly what I needed to hear. And a lesson I appear to be continually relearning since.”
― Rachel Krantz, Open: One Woman's Journey Through Love and Polyamory

“That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.”
― Rachel Krantz, Open: One Woman's Journey Through Love and Polyamory