Favourite Quotes

There are no X-rays for hearts, for souls. There are only courageous people willing to step forward and speak of certain difficult truths. -Dr Akness

This process of the good life is not, I am convinced, a life for the faint-hearted. It involves the stretching and growing of becoming more and more of one’s potentialities. It involves the courage to be. It means launching oneself fully into the stream of life. – Carl Rogers 1961
“Stereotypes are devices for saving a biased person the trouble of learning” ~ Author unknown

Premier of Tasmania in Apology – “To the children, who are now grown up, and who have lived lives full of questions without answers we recognise you have suffered profound feelings of abandonment and loss, and have struggled with issues of identity.
“To you, those children who are now adults, we acknowledge your trauma and your loss, and we are sorry.”

The Snarkurchin –  I hate the presumption that an adoptive family is always better. Adoption also, of course, gives a child a chance for a worse life.

Cameron Horn For once i agree with you VC – the fact that not every adopted person grows up to be a fraking fruitcake or serial killer, is a miracle of human resilience and certainly not an endorsement of adoption. I don’t know how adopted people keep their heads together – especially once they wake up from the fog and unravel all (or some) or the bullshit they have to live.

“I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.” ― Susan B. Anthony

Lily Arthur about a Peter Dodds interview –  This is a great interview done by an adoptee who really has a handle on this.

*Artificial insemination by anonymous sperm donors solves no problem of any child. It is a convenience to adults who are encountering fertility problems and would prefer the convenience of jettisoning part of their child’s true life history in order to commandeer that child from its true biological father. – Dr Ablow

*”How a human being comes into a family should not dictate what rights they have,” said Executive Director Adam Pertman

*Life is not a problem to be solved but reality to be experienced.” — Søren Kierkegaard

*The loss of a parent creates an aftershock of emptiness, which leaves a void in  the soul of the child that can never be filled.
Read more at Suite101: Loss of a Parent: The Impact of Childhood Bereavement on a Child’s Life | Suite101.com http://suite101.com/article/loss-of-a-parent-a37661#ixzz1xRSuILx1  –  Candy Brown

*In achieving the depersonalization of childbirth and at the same time solving the problem of pain, our society may have lost more than it has gained. We are left with the physical husk; the transcending significance has been drained away. In doing so, we have reached the goal which is perhaps implicit in all highly developed technological cultures, mechanized control of the human body and the complete obliteration of all disturbing sensations. – Sheila Kitzinger Women as Mothers

*” To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

*Who you should really feel sorry for is the desperate, the greedy, the cloying.  – Joy

*”The wicked snatch fatherless children from their mother’s breasts, and take a poor man’s baby as a pledge before they will loan him any money or grain” –Job 24:9

*“Every child should have an inalienable right to be nurtured and reared in the country and culture in which they are born,” David Mugawe

*Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful . William Morris

*If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.  H.D.Thoreau

*I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny invisible molecular forces that work from individual to individual by creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which, if you give them times,will rend the hardest monuments of man’s pride. William James

*My nature however is to care about people, to give them chance after chance, to look at them with compassion.  Time and time again has shown me that is a really stupid idea.  It reminds me of an idea I was introduced to as a child, “Don’t trust a person who tells you they are honest, only liars have the need to do this”   Which is true, if you are whatever, you don’t have to prove it.  You guard it, it is assumed. – Joy

*Mindfulness means leaning into life (even when it’s painful), approaching experiences with interest, curiosity, and courage. It also means relating to experience with equanimity, as it’s from this ground of acceptance that we can act consciously and decisively, unfettered by our habitual patterns of judging, labeling, and reacting. Jonty Heaversage

*The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.  Ralph Waldo Emerson

*We can hope that good things will happen to us if we work hard and are moral, but there is no guarantee this will be true all the time and for every one. If we rigidly hold onto the assumption that bad things happen to only bad people, we end up blaming the victim – ourselves or others who are experiencing the misfortune of ambiguous loss. Believing too strongly that bad things never happen to good people prevents tempering mastery and is a barrier to resilience.

Therapists who work with traumatic and ambiguous losses cannot bring clients beyond where we ourselves are willing to go.We cannot expect people to understand beyond our own comprehension the links among loss, ambiguity, trauma, stress and resilience.The people we work with are less likely to tolerate ambiguity if we, the therapists, are primatily orientated toward mastery and control. page 200

Pauline Boss p 104-105 ‘Loss, Trauma and Resilience: Therapeutic Work with Ambiguous Loss’   W.W. Norton & Co

*The boundary of the self-concept is permeable to other people’s perceptions of you ( or, somewhat more accurately,your perception of their perception of you).

Cordelia Fine Delusions of Gender   Icon Books p 10

*There was a warrior spirit in her, an implacable need to win the day. Even if it scared me a little, I understood the contempt she felt for those who withdrew from the fray or settled for something modest or reasonable.

Tim Winton ‘Breath’  Hamish Hamilton

*All humans want to attain early Paradise here on earth. The problem is that ego desires to feel wonderful but a yen for the paradisiacal, when combined with naivete, makes us not fulfilled, but food for the predator. p 45

The normalising of the abnormal even when there is clear evidence that it is to one’s own detriment to do so applies to all battering of the physical, emotional, creative, spiritual and instinctive natures. Women face this issue any time they are stunned into doing anything less than their soul-lives from invasive projections, cultural, psychic or otherwise. p 244

Clarissa Pinkola Estes  Women Who Run With The Wolves  Rider

*The more you protest, the more insecure you seem. And trust me, adoptees can smell insecurity from a mile away –

Real Daughter – blog of a real adoptee