Incest Quotes & Sayings

Family secrets can go back for generations. They can be about suicides, homicides, incest, abortions, addictions, public loss of face, financial disaster, etc. All the secrets get acted out. This is the power of toxic shame. The pain and suffering of shame generate automatic and unconscious defenses. Freud called these defenses by various names: denial, idealization of parents, repression of emotions and dissociation from emotions. What is important to note is that we can't know what we don't know. Denial, idealization, repression and dissociation are unconscious survival mechanisms. Because they are unconscious, we lose touch with the shame, hurt and pain they cover up. We cannot heal what we cannot feel. So without recovery, our toxic shame gets carried for generations. — John Bradshaw

Mind Your Language in the Presence of Patriachs

Q. When is rape not rape?
A. When it is your father or stepfather. — S. Caroline Taylor

kinship libido."8 That is to say, the original state of participation mystique in the uroboros expresses itself as the force of inertia that keeps man fixed in the oldest and most intimate of family ties. These family ties are personalistically projected to mother and sister; and the symbolic incest with them, straining back to the uroboros, is therefore marked by a 'lower femininity" which binds the individual and his ego to the unconscious. — Erich Neumann

Or in my grandparents's case, the circling worked like this: as they paced around the deck the first time, Lefty and Desdemona were still brother and sister. The second time, the were bride and bridegroom. And the third, they were husband and wife. — Jeffrey Eugenides

To survive one tragedy was to learn you cannot survive them all, and this knowledge was both a freedom and a great loss. — Chris Womersley

Women need total life support services for the mother as she and the family move through the crisis following disclosure. — Janis Tyler Johnson

Incest is almost always a devastating experience for
the victim. — Susan Forward

For many people, the shock of sexual abuse pales before the shock of this mother's statement, "I wish the fuck I never had her." So thoroughly is motherhood sentimentalized that the mother who wishes to be rid of her child is considered a monster. In reality, women have always greeted the burden of motherhood ambivalently, even in the best of circumstances, and many women bear children involuntarily. But the approbrium which attaches to any woman who willing gives up her child is so great that some mothers will keep and mistreat their children rather than admit that they cannot care for them. Sometimes, the revelation of maternal neglect constitutes a plea for outside intervention, signaling the fact that a mother wants to be relieved of the duty to care for her child. — Judith Lewis Herman

That guy with the silver hair, he's your dad, right?" Amber questioned, surveying the scene.
"Yes," I said, reluctant to say anything but, considering what was happening, figured was the least of my worries.
"Ooo la la. He's, like, totally diesel. Look at those arms." She went on, admiring my dad to a sickening degree.
"All right, jailbait, back off. It's practically incest."
She sucked air through her teeth. "I know," she said regretfully. "But a girl can dream. And I have a feeling he's going to be starring in a lot of them. — Brandi Salazar

Once it was the fashion to represent villages as places inhabited by laughable, livable simpletons, unspotted by the worldliness of city life, though occasionally shrewd in rural concerns. Later it was the popular thing to show villages as rotten with vice, and especially such sexual vice ... incest, sodomy, bestiality, sadism, and masochism were supposed to rage behind lace curtains and in the haylofts, while a rigid piety was professed in the streets. — Robertson Davies

It's customary for the field team to take a break after a confirmed memetic incursion into baseline reality - in layman's terms, we're supposed to get some time off after we stop a fairy tale from rewriting a major metropolitan area into an evil, R-rated version of Disney World. New and improved! Now with extra incest and murder! — Seanan McGuire

No more money, no more fancy dress
This other Kingdom seems by far the best until its other jaw reveals incest & loose obedience to a vegetable law
I will not go
Prefer a Feast of Friends
To the Giant family — Jim Morrison

She had all the best things wrong with her - incest, insanity, drug addiction, bulimia, alopecia: you name it. All the perfect stuff for a memoir. She's so lucky. — Peter Cameron

By developing a contaminated, stigmatized identity, the child victim takes the evil of the abuser into herself and thereby preserves her primary attachments to her parents. Because the inner sense of badness preserves a relationship, it is not readily given up even after the abuse has stopped; rather, it becomes a stable part of the child's personality structure. — Judith Lewis Herman

Because the child does not have the power to withhold consent, she does not have the power to grant it. — Judith Lewis Herman

To begin with, homosexuality has nothing to do with pedophilia; one is sexual orientation and the other is sexual perversion. Yet, in that most cases of pedophilia involve incest, we must consider the question. If our objective is to prevent pedophilia in adoption then the only logical action is to permit only homosexuals to adopt children who are only of the opposite sex. This would reduce incest to zero. If we permit heterosexual couples to adopt children, then children would be at risk. — Pope John Paul I

Give up the human, and I'll call them off," Reseph called out.
"Fuck you."
"Incest, brother?" He shrugged. "Well, hell, I've tried everything else since my Seal broke ... — Larissa Ione

There is no "universal moral urge" and not all ethical systems agree. Polygamy, human sacrifice, infanticide, cannibalism (Eucharist), wife beating, self-mutilation, foot binding, preemptive war, torture of prisoners, circumcision, female genital mutilation, racism, sexism, punitive amputation, castration and incest are perfectly "moral" in certain cultures. Is god confused? — Dan Barker

I value and honor the way that my suffering brings me to further search and surrender. — Maureen Brady

After Justinian became Emperor: "He was a man of deep piety, which he signalized, two years after his accession, by closing the schools of philosophy in Athens, where paganism still reigned. The dispossessed philosophers betook themselves to Persia, where the king received them kindly. But they were shocked
more so, says Gibbon, than became philosophers
by the Persian practices of polygamy and incest, so they returned home again, and faded into obscurity." How tumultuous thou art, sixth century! — Bertrand Russell

Because the perpetrators typically have little understanding as to why they are sexually assaulting children, they usually are unable to stop after the first assault. Abusive behavior continues until a crisis of some kind prevents further abuse. — Tony Martens

If the war against drugs is lost, then so are the wars against theft, speeding, incest, fraud, rape, murder, arson, and illegal parking. Few, if any, such wars are winnable. So let us all do anything we choose. — Theodore Dalrymple

A story is a wondrous invention. — Chris Womersley

Gay men! And it's incest! With the same face! — Bisco Hatori

Only I had dry eyes, a dry heart. — V.C. Andrews

I am afraid of him now. The one I love most in the world. — Neil Jordan

He says, I would walk around the township and I could point them out, which girls had been abused. You could see it in them. There's a luminosity to incest. The taboo is so strong and the damage so great. Luminosity
do you understand? It travels across oceans and down generations. They shine with it. — Emma Brockes

During a period in which women and children's testimony of incest and sexual abuse were gaining an increasingly sympathetic hearing, lobby groups of people accused of child abuse construed and positioned "ritual abuse" as the new frontier of disbelief. The term "ritual abuse" arose from child protection and psychotherapy practice with adults and children disclosing organized abuse, only to be discursively encircled by backlash groups with the rhetoric of "recovered memories", "false allegations" and "moral panic".
Salter, M. (2011), Organized abuse and the politics of disbelief. — Michael Salter

Besides, it is doubtful that incest was a real obstacle to the establishment of society, as the partisans of an exchangist conception claim ... The real danger is elsewhere. If desire is repressed, it is because every position of desire ... is capable of calling into question the established order of society ... it is revolutionary in its essence ... It is therefore of vital importance for a society to repress desire, and even to find something more efficient than repression, so that repression, hierarchy, exploitation, and servitude are themselves desired ... that does not at all mean that desire is something other than sexuality, but that sexuality and love do not live in the bedroom of Oedipus, they dream instead of wide-open spaces, and ... do not let themselves be stocked within an established order. — Gilles Deleuze

I got Oedipus off the incest charge
technicality, of course
he didn't know it was his mother at the time. — Jasper Fforde

Plus, I can't look at him the same since I ran into Mrs. Marino at our family reunion. It's not comforting to learn you've made out with your cousin."
"Third cousin once removed," I argued. "It's hardly incest."
"Life is like a box of chocolates, Lisa," Katie noted around a half-chewed carrot stick. "You never know what you're going to get."
Lisa narrowed her eyes, confused. "Did she just quote Forrest Gump at me?"
"It's Matt's fault," I said. "She lost a bet and now anytime his name gets mentioned, she has sixty seconds to drop a relevant movie quote."
"That's insane."
"Yup," Katie piped in, "insanity tuns in my family. Its practically gallops."
"Classic." I high-fived her. — Cecily White

After all, the girl actually had faith in something, which was more than most people had in these dark times. It was wrong to destroy it. — Chris Womersley

I am inundated with feeling. I feel like a pinball machine on tilt. All the buzzers are ringing, lights are flashing, and I am about to fry my circuits. Nothing is coming in,and nothing is going out. I feel electrified. The wires ignited, sparked, and fizzled. I want it all to slow down. I go right to the water to douse my flame. I immerse myself in the hot water. I want to wash the smells off my body. I can smell Isabella's hair, her breath, and her child vaginal scent. My hair smells of smoke,and I want to wash Francis off me. — Holly A. Smith

Try everything once, except folk dancing and incest. — Thomas Beecham

What is it you do for your family? Aside from trying to put it in your sister, I mean? — Greg Rucka

Until we are willing to oppose all abortion
ALL ABORTION
then the Christian community will lack the true ethical high ground to oppose ANY ABORTIONS.
The minute we concede that there is any ground
even in the so-called case of rape, incest or the health of the mother
to make a decision to self-consciously and deliberately kill a child based on our puny, finite understanding of the facts, and a a cost-benefit analysis based on our pragmatic post-modern vision of utlilitarian ethics, we have conceded everything. We have abandoned biblical law and granted to Planned Parenthood the legitimacy of the core argument they have advanced since Margaret Sanger founded the organization
namely, that some circumstances of pregnancy are sufficiently uncomfortable or troubling that man has the right to play God and declare his own authority to take the life of an innocent, unborn baby. — Douglas W. Phillips

It sounds not only disagreeable but also paradoxical, yet it must nevertheless be said that anyone who is to be really free and happy in love must have surmounted his respect for women and have come to terms with the idea of incest with his mother or sister. — Sigmund Freud

I know you're in a world of pain, but that pain will lessen. At the beginning you can't see that. You can only see your pain and you think it will never go away.
But the nature of pain is that it changes - it changes like a sunset. At first, it's this intense red-orange in the sky, and then it starts getting softer and soften. The texture of pain changes as you work through it. And then one day, you wake up and realize that life isn't just about working through your incest; it's about living, too.
- survivor of child sexual abuse — Ellen Bass

In some very rare cases, an opposite-sex pair was born, and they always mated one another. Disturbing as it might sound, when it did happen, the offspring were invariably gifted. Sera and Trace's sons were noted psych-scientists. — Belinda McBride

When it came to hatred, Brodd Tenways had a bottomless supply. He was one of those bastards who can't even breathe quietly, ugly as incest and always delighted to push it in your face, leering from the shadows like the village pervert at a passing milkmaid. — Joe Abercrombie

My mom called Grandma today and told her we would no longer be attending family parties. My mom told her we have had enough of being blamed for something Brian did and everyone brushing it off like it was no big deal. — Erin Merryn

How differently would the world view Christians if we focused on our own failings rather than on society's? As I read the New Testament I am struck by how little attention it gives to the faults of the surrounding culture. Jesus and Paul say nothing about violent gladiator games or infanticide, both common practices among the Romans. In a telling passage, the apostle Paul responds fiercely to a report of incest in the Corinthian church. He urges strong action against those involved but quickly clarifies, "not at all meaning the people of this world. . . . What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? God will judge those outside. — Philip Yancey

unable to realize she was grown and the incest was no longer about to happen. When traumatic memories are reactivated, access to other memories is more or less obstructed. EP often seems unaware of much, if anything, about the present, and does not necessarily have access to skills and factual knowledge that are available to ANP — Onno Van Der Hart

Become your own soulmate. Then you'll always have someone watching your back, and you'll always have someone who loves you. — Rebecca O'Donnell

I estimate the number [of incest victims] to be somewhere between ten and twenty million Americans... — Susan Forward

Languages have complicated family trees, you know - mixed marriages, stepchildren, even bastards. There are countless scandals in the history of languages, many murders, much incest. — Lauren Kate

The ultimate cause suggested by the biological hypothesis is the loss of genetic fitness that results from incest. It is a fact that incestuously produced children leave fewer descendants. The biological hypothesis states that individuals with a genetic predisposition for bond exclusion and incest avoidance contribute more genes to the next generation. Natural selection has probably ground away along these lines for thousands of generations, and for that reason human beings intuitively avoid incest through the simple, automatic rule of bond exclusion. To put the idea in its starkest form, one that acknowledges but temporarily bypasses the intervening developmental process, human beings are guided by an instinct based on genes. Such a process is indicated in the case of brother-sister intercourse, and it is a strong possibility in the other categories of incest taboo. — Edward O. Wilson

In the context of Lawrence's rejection of the Freudian notion of incest and the close identification between author and character, Sons and Lovers becomes an exercise in deliberate ambiguity. — John E. Stoll

Just as verbally and physically abused children internalize blame, so do incest victims. However, in incest, the blame is compounded by the shame. The belief that 'it's all my fault' is never more intense than with the incest victim. This belief fosters strong feelings of self-loathing and shame. In addition to having somehow to cope with the actual incest, the victim must now guard against being caught and exposed as a 'dirty, disgusting' person — Susan Forward

Cages everywhere I went. I was no better off in Saxonia, excepting only for the threat of vigorous, royal incest. Perhaps this also means that a princess is only a particularly desirable kind of monstrous creature--a lure that must be kept in a box at all times. — J.M. McDermott

If you're more concerned about our reputation than about me, then I'll just withdraw and not have a family anymore. p.32 — Gregory R. Reid

[The incestuous father...] may be unconsciously seeking revenge against either his wife or his mother for what he considers a variety of emotional crimes against him. — Susan Forward

Just by imagining the clump it seemed to me that I could hear whispers secret surges smell the beating of hot blood under wild unsecret flesh watching against red eyelids the swine untethered in pairs rushing coupled into the sea and he we must just stay awake and see evil done for a little while its not always and i it doesnt have to be even that long for a man of courage and he do you consider that courage and i yes sir dont you and he every man is the arbiter of his own virtues whether or not you consider it courageous is of more importance than the act itself than any act otherwise you could not be in earnest and i you dont believe i am serious and he i think you are too serious to give me any cause for alarm you wouldnt have felt driven to the expedient of telling me you had committed incest otherwise and i i wasnt lying i wasnt lying and he you wanted to sublimate a piece of natural human folly into a horror and then exorcise it with truth — William Faulkner

Behold, my love, behold all that I simultaneously do: scandal, seduction, bad example, incest, adultery, sodomy! Oh, Satan! one and unique God of my soul, inspire thou in me something yet more, present further perversions to my smoking heart, and then shalt thou see how I shall plunge myself into them all! — Marquis De Sade

And thank you for saying all of that, and for loving me, for you haven't gone unloved, or unadmired, yourself. — V.C. Andrews

I used to teach at an abused children's home. I told the kids, You all have a manure pile of memories. Nothing you can do about that. Now you can drown in the stink or turn it into compost and grow a garden. I wouldn't't be as good a teacher to you if I didn't know what you're going through. That way, I make my memories do good instead of letting them eat me. I'm like Herbie from Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer. I pulled my Bumble's teeth. He's still big and scary but he can't bite me anymore. — Rebecca O'Donnell

I didn't call you here to bust my chops." I clarified, "I need some advice." He sarcastically replied, "Awesome. How may I assist the almighty Nik Strand?" "Fuck you," I said with no heat. My brother knew how much his opinion mattered to me. He laughed, "No, thanks. I'm really not into that sort of thing. Besides, incest is illegal," he pointed out. "Hardy — Lora Ann

There are innumerable civilized people who would shrink from murder or incest, and who yet do not hesitate to gratify their avarice, their aggressiveness and their sexual lusts, and who have no compunction in hurting others by lying, fraud and calumny, so long as they remain unpunished for it; and no doubt this has been so for many cultural epochs. If — Sigmund Freud

According to a 2014 Huffington Post article, Southern states are consistently behind the rest of the country in wages, economic mobility, education, and health care. However, they lead the country in incest, teen pregnancy, gun deaths, incarceration, poverty, obesity, intoxication, and general unhappiness. They're also still hooked on creationism, and freaked out over gay marriage. It's like evolution took a detour, crashed through a dead end sign and plunged into a swamp. But instead of calling for help, it mated with the swamp creatures and built a civilization. — Ian Gurvitz

As long as fathers rule but do not nurture, as long as mothers nurture but do not rule, the conditions favoring the development of father-daughter incest will prevail. — Judith Lewis Herman

The horror of incest is not in the sexual act. but in the exploitation of children and the corruption of parental love. p4 — Judith Lewis Herman

Try everything once. Except incest and folk dancing.' Sir Thomas Beecham — Richard Branson

You're both mother fuckers. She was half asleep. Her voice was matter-of-fact as if referring to actual incest. — William S. Burroughs

Coleridge was a drug addict. Poe was an alcoholic. Marlowe was killed by a man whom he was treacherously trying to stab. Pope took money to keep a woman's name out of a satire, then wrote a piece so that she could still be recognized, anyhow. Chatterton killed himself. Byron was accused of incest. Do you still want to a writer -and if so, why? — Bennett Cerf

The real danger has always lived in my granddad's kind voice, his soft caresses. All of it masquerading as innocent, but really just a gateway drug for girls starved for affection, desperate for someone to love them. He doesn't force us with a heavy hand. He manipulates with a gentle touch, guides us exactly where he wants us to go. So in the end, we blame only ourselves. — Amy Engel

Sexual abuse is also a secret crime, one that usually has no witness. Shame and secrecy keep a child from talking to siblings about the abuse, even if all the children in a family are being sexually assaulted. In contrast, if a child is physically or emotionally abused, the abuse is likely to occur in front of the other children in the family, at least some of the time. The physical and emotional abuse becomes part of the family's explicit history. Sexual abuse does not. — Renee Fredrickson

It is properly said that the Devil can "quote Scripture to his purpose." The Bible is full of so many stories of contradictory moral purpose that every generation can find scriptural justification for nearly any action it proposes - from incest, slavery, and mass murder to the most refined love, courage, and self-sacrifice. And this moral multiple personality disorder is hardly restricted to Judaism and Christianity. You can find it deep within Islam, the Hindu tradition, indeed nearly all the world's religions. Perhaps then it is not so much scientists as people who are morally ambiguous. It — Carl Sagan

So if we're going to keep all kids safe, we have to make incest and child sexual abuse acceptable topics of conversation. When other people want us to keep quiet because the subject makes them uncomfortable, or when someone questions our memory of events, we have to hold to the truth. Sexual abuse of children is preventable! But we can't wait for someone else to act. We're the ones who have to stop this madness. And it starts with each of us telling our story. — Lauren Book

The discovery of the horror tale at an early age was fortuitous for me. This sort of tale serves, in many ways, the very same purpose as fairy tales did in our childhood. It operates as a theater of the mind in which internal conflicts are played out. In these tales we can parade the most reprehensible aspects of our being: cannibalism, incest, parricide. It allows us to discuss our anxieties and even to contemplate the experience of death in absolute safety.
And again, like a fairy tale, horror can serve as a liberating or repressive social tool, and it is always an accurate reflection of the social climate of its time and the place where it gets birthed. — Guillermo Del Toro

We live in a time when the values of courage and honesty, particularly for women writers, equate to confessing only the darkest, most painful parts of our lives. "How brave you are," my students say to each other over workshop tables, "to expose that." Meaning, to uncover this family secret or that heinous act or to openly confront the demons of alcoholism, promiscuity, substance abuse, incest, infidelity, illness, betrayal ... I have also wrestled many dark angels, and continue to do so, so I acknowledge the price such writing exacts. But more and more I have come to respect the honesty and courage required to recognize the bright angels when they appear in our memory, and to allow them equal space in our narratives. — Rebecca McClanahan

Leviticus 18 doesn't tell us everything we need to know about sex, but it gives us the basic rules: incest is bad (vv. 6-27); taking a rival wife is bad (v 18) ... adultery is bad (v 20); killing our children is bad (v 21); homosexuality activity is bad (v 22); and bestiality is bad (v 23). — Kevin DeYoung

A son is a poor substitute for a mother. — Joseph Stefano

Sexual abuse of children now presents society with the ultimate crisis of patriarchy, when children refuse to protect their fathers by keeping secrets. — Beatrix Campbell

In general, the more dysfunctional the family the more inappropriate their response to disclosure. Never expect a sane response from an insane system. — Renee Fredrickson

The vast majority of incest begins years before the earliest conceivable age of consent. p4 — Judith Lewis Herman

Without realizing it, I fought to keep my two worlds separated. Without ever knowing why, I made sure, whenever possible that nothing passed between the compartmentalization I had created between the day child and the night child.
p26 — Marilyn Van Derbur

Sometimes sex is the price that is exacted from her for warmth and attention. And if these sometimes wonderful moments of closeness must coexist with terrifying, confusing moments of abuse, she learns to see the two as parts of the same experience. She grows to think she wanted the incest itself. Because they've become enmeshed, she doesn't know that it was love she wanted, not sex. — E. Sue Blume

When trauma involves intentional harm, such as in a crime or abuse, trust can totally collapse. — Dena Rosenbloom

Amador and Bianca have a great life that I'm only a little jealous of. They have two kids they bring to see me. His daughter, Ashlee, is almost five now. She has asked me to marry her when I get out. It feels kind of weird since she calls me Uncle Reyes and incest is frowned upon, but who am I to argue with true love? — Darynda Jones

For all this talk about us being a nation at war with child abuse, and for all the media hype about witch-hunts and false allegations - and don't ever let anyone use the word witch-hunts about this; there were no witches - the fact remains that in 1994, it is extremely difficult to come forward with allegations of sexual abuse. And the external forces of denial are almost overwhelming. If a case as verified as mine meets with denial, I dread to think about the experience of people who don't have the kind of corroboration that I do. And I really worry that we're getting close to a point where it's going to be impossible to prosecute child molesters, because we don't believe children, and now we don't believe adults. (Cheit "Paper presented at the Mississippi Statewide Conference on Child Abuse and Neglect" Jackson, April 29 1994.) — Ross Cheit

Coming to terms with incest is not easy. Learning to be a survivor, not a victim, gives new meaning to life — Lynette Gould

This was puzzling, as the standard textbook of psychiatry at the time stated that incest was extremely rare in the United States, occurring about once in every million women.8 Given that there were then only about one hundred million women living in the United States, I wondered how forty seven, almost half of them, had found their way to my office in the basement of the hospital. Furthermore, the textbook said, "There is little agreement about the role of father-daughter incest as a source of serious subsequent psychopathology." My patients with incest histories were hardly free of "subsequent psychopathology" - they were profoundly depressed, confused, and often engaged in bizarrely self-harmful behaviors, such as cutting themselves with razor blades. The textbook went on to practically endorse incest, explaining that "such incestuous activity diminishes the subject's chance of psychosis and allows for a better adjustment to the external world."9 — Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

In the early 1990s, a group of people accused of sexual abuse formed the 'False Memory Syndrome Foundation' (FMSF). The FMSF's primary goal was to advocate on behalf of parents accused of child sexual abuse by their adult children, but the Foundation also became an important resource for people accused of sexual abuse by minors. Importantly, the Foundation attracted academics from a range of discliplines whose experise had been contested or challenged by the legitimisation of children's and women's testimony of sexual abuse. — Michael Salter

You have the right to set ground rules. This means deciding if, when, and how you want to see the people in your family. Many survivors feel that if they open up the channels at all, they have to open them up all the way. When you were a child you had two options - to trust or not to trust. Your options are broader now. — Ellen Bass

Just one more line, please. I'll do anything. And I mean anything."
"Good, we've got him hooked," said Ryan. "It won't be long now before he's on heroin."
Josie added, "Then it's just slavery, pedophilia, and murder."
"Don't forget incest," said Flora. — Aiden Shaw

...Incest is rape by extortion. Thus the child's very childhood becomes a weapon used to control her. — E. Sue Blume

A child who is being abused on an ongoing basis needs to be able to function despite the trauma that dominates his or her daily life. That becomes the job of at least one ANP [alternate personality], whom the child creates to be unaware of the abuse and also of the multiplicity, and to "pass as normal" in the real world. The ANP is just an alter specialized for handling the adult world - in other words, the "front person" for the system. — Alison Miller

When there is incest, adultery, atheism, hatred of religion, no more dharma, and sin everywhere, the impossible Iron Age has come; in what way the world will be saved? For the helpless, the Lord Himself will manifest as the Supreme Purusha. He will be called the Kalki incarnation and will be glorious like a lion coming down from heaven. — Guru Gobind Singh

Maternal absence, in one form or another, is always found in the background of the incest romance. Womens literature on incest generally treats the theme of maternal absence tragically. Mens literature trivializes it or treats it comically. And clinical literature tends to treat it judgmentally. — Judith Lewis Herman

But who could resist the erotic lives of atoms and molecules - the violent passion of electrostatic attractions, the comfortable mutuality of covalent bonds, the gentle air kisses of van der Waals forces? The rules governing the couplings and uncouplings of tiny particles seemed to me as fascinating as the kinship rules of what we still called "primitive" societies - with the revulsion of like-charged particles, for example, functioning as a kind of incest taboo. — Barbara Ehrenreich

INCEST, n. In many parts of the Bible Belt, the most popular form of dating — Charles Bufe

I thought that I was the Warrior and Cersei was the Maid, but all the time she was the Stranger, hiding her true face from my gaze. "Pray for me, if you like," he told his cousin. "I forgotten all the words. — George R R Martin

Remember that you own what happened to you. If your childhood was less than ideal, you may have been raised thinking that if you told the truth about what really went on in your family, a long bony white finger would emerge from a cloud and point to you, while a chilling voice thundered, "We *told* you not to tell." But that was then. Just put down on paper everything you can remember now about your parents and siblings and relatives and neighbors, and we will deal with libel later on. — Anne Lamott

I'm pro-choice because I've never been a fourteen-year-old incest victim pregnant by her father, or a woman who's going to die if her pregnancy continues, or even a teenager who made a mistake or a rape victim. I want women to have choices, but I also believe that it's a life, especially once it's big enough to live outside the womb. — Laurell K. Hamilton

Apart from religious ceremonies, triduums, novenas, gardening, harvesting, vintaging, whippings, slavery, incest, fires, hangings, invasion, sacking, rape and pestilence, we have had no experience. What can a poor nun know of the world? — Italo Calvino

The sun was hot and bright. A day for fishing, for swimming, for playing tennis and having fun, and they put my Christopher in the ground. — V.C. Andrews

On top of the abuse and neglect, denial heaps more hurt upon the child by requiring the child to alienate herself from reality and her own experience. In troubled families, abuse and neglect are permitted; it's the talking about them that is forbidden. — Marcia Sirota

Oh my God, I'm not letting you out of this bed until you are thoroughly debouched. Incest has never looked so fucking good before. — Annie George

All right, Chris, you've given me a breather. I'm prepared for
anything.
And thank you for saying all of that, and for loving me, for you
haven't gone unloved, or unadmired, yourself." I kissed him quickly on
the lips, and told him to go on, to hit me with his knockout blow.
"Really, Chris, I know you must have something perfectly awful to tell
me-so out with it. Keep holding me as you tell me, and I can stand
anything you have to say. — V.C. Andrews

My goal in going public was not to put my extended family to shame, or to get back at Brian for abusing my sister and me; rather, my mission was to give a face and voice to an epidemic that society stays hushed about. — Erin Merryn