Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls: A Memoir of Women, Addiction, and Love
Nina Renata Aron
Top 10 Best Quotes
“love is an action, the practice of a human power, which can be practiced only in freedom and never as the result of a compulsion. Love is an activity, not a passive affect; it is a ‘standing in,’ not a ‘falling for.”
“I want him to see how hard my life is, how much easier he could make it, how unjust it is that he won't. I have this idea that he is a bad man who is stealing my time and energy - that is meant to be a feminist reading of what's happening, but the truth is I don't conceptualize my time as mine in the first place. He can't steal something that I don't consider my own.”
“I can't live like this forever, I thought. But as the days wore on, a more frightening realization dawned: that I could. I absolutely could.”
“Men miss these moments, I think. They so rarely stick around for the magic of women becoming themselves, or maybe we can only become ourselves in the spaces where they aren't.”
“I thought the shame of self-hatred, or hopeless aspiration, should be concealed. Even more crass than wanting something so badly was acknowledging it out loud.”
“I grew up in love with women's stories, with the ways their labor made itself visible everywhere, even when men would prefer to pretend that it wasn't the scaffolding of their very existence.”
“For a long time, I believed that if I took care of myself, I would necessarily, organically move farther away from others. In the binary logic of individualism, you fortify the self at the expense of the other. But in filling the empty space of me, I have found that actually the complete opposite is true. The more I love myself, the more my heart opens, the more present and sensitive I become, so much so it hurts.”
“Thinking about adults putting on a happy face for children, or worse, being unable to put on the happy face, is devastating. That we maintain this dishonesty with them, that we must. I have a longing to protect the kids from coming into some consciousness of the fact that taking care of them is difficult. I always imagined that keeping that fact from them was an essential part of good mothering.”
“...I drag the kids to the farmers' market and fill out the week's cheap supermarket haul with a few vivid bunches of organic produce...Once home, I set out fresh flowers and put the fruit in a jadeite bowl. A jam jar of garden growth even adorns the chartreuse kids' table...I found some used toddler-sized chairs to go around it...It sits right in front of the tall bookcases...When the kids are eating or coloring there, with the cluster or mismatched picture frames hanging just to their left, my son with his mop of sandy hair, my daughter just growing out of babyhood...they look like they could be in a Scandinavian design magazine. I think to myself that maybe motherhood is just this, creating these frames, the little vistas you can take in that look like pictures from magazines, like any number of images that could be filed under familial happiness. They reflect back to you that you're doing it - doing something - right. In my case, these scenes are like a momentary vacation from the actual circumstances of my current life. Children, clean and clad in brightly striped clothing, snacking on slices of organic plum. My son drawing happy gel pen houses, the flourishing clump of smiley-faced flowers beneath a yellow flat sun. To counter the creeping worry that I am a no-good person, I must collect a lot of these images, postage-stamp moments I can gaze upon and think, I can't be fucking up that bad. Can I?”
“they’ve come up with a thousand different ways to say Stay. I listened to songs and I looked at art, my ear to the ground where the footsteps of the fiercest foremothers had walked, and these said Run. I ran.”
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Book Keywords:
invisible, invisibility-of-women, children, self-love, invisible-work, invisible-labor, aspiration, work, familial-happiness, wanting-something, time, giving, self-hatred, invisibility, storytelling, codependency, motherhood, parenting, resignation































