Quotes from Sarah Schulman

When one party has been significantly hurt by the violent behaviors of parents, long before becoming half of a couple in adulthood, sometimes the partner is made to take responsability for the damage done by the parents. The partner is then charged with creating the fantastical 'safe space".

No one with power in America "comes around." They always have to be forced into positive change.

That night both of us were ashamed. Not only showing our masochism but even worse, not being able to really do it well. We made love again in the bathtub and her halfhearted thrashing became a faded memory.

Just as unresolved, formerly subordinated or traumatized individuals can collude with or identify with bullies, so can unresolved, formerly subordinated or traumatized groups of people identify with the supremacy of the state.

I am interested, in this book, in examining the phenomenon of overstating harm where it begins in its earlier stage as Conflict, before it escalates and explodes into tragedy.

With the exception of those natural disasters that are not caused by human misdeed, most of the pain, destruction, waste, and neglect towards human life that we create on this planet and beyond, are consequences of our overreaction to difference.

Without in any way minimizing the role of violence in our lives, I am looking, simultaneously, at how a heightened rhetoric of threat that confuses doing nothing, normative conflict, and resistance with actual abuse, has produced a wide practice of over- stating harm.

Trying to create communication is almost always the uphill struggle of the falsely blamed.

Refusing to be self-critical in order to solve conflicts enhances the power of the state.

How could all the people understand the same thing? Was marketing the way to get her family to understand that her life mattered? For the men who ran the theaters to understand that Earl needed a part? Could marketing erase inequality, and let al people's feelings be seen on an elevated plane?

As individuals, we have enormous power in the ways we abandon the scapegoated, or instead stand up for them. We have power to change the ways we encourage shunning and instead do the work to facilitate communication. Simple shifts in personal behavior and their expressions in political structures of power, produce changing public norms which can make huge differences in individual and collective experiences.

But the cared for don't realize that on their daily path of neighbors, workmates, and faces on the streets there are those...who sit quietly looking out the window at other people's holiday lights, listening to other people's laughter, and finding the makings of other people's eggnog waiting in the morning trash.

And there's also the thrill, every time, of knowing that everything in the world tried to stop this woman next to you in bed from being there, but she got through anyway, only because she wanted to and had decided to.

She remembered the promise of an antiseptic future: domed cities and artificial weather. Somehow this was supposed to be good. Anna O. knew that hers was the last generation to believe the future would be better.

I am grateful to the men and women who create books, and I forgive the men and women who make books necessary." — VOICE AT QUAKER MEETING, Peterborough New Hampshire

They were both deciding not to be what others wanted them to be but to brand themselves for the world to see. To do their own packaging, so to speak, and to direct their powers to their specific target audiences.

Escalation is the key consequence of refusing to problem-solve or negotiate, and it demands our attention as a central obstacle to peace and justice.

Traumatized behavior and Supremacy ideology resemble each other [and] ...produce distorted thinking that seeks unreasonable levels of control over other people and does not tolerate self-criticism or difference.

In order to "protect" ourselves by keeping our lives small and shutting out intimacies, we could actually be hurting ourselves, missing out on a transformative experience of the heart, and sabotaging our small but crucial contribution to making peace.

It was the beginning of the end of the world but not everyone noticed right away. Some people were dying. Some people were busy. Some people were cleaning their houses while the war movie played on television.

Being desired is not the same as being harassed, and we do not have to punish or shun the person who sees what is special about us.

I don't care to know what the reason is that I am gay. But when it comes to being a Jew who only has one God, I know for sure that I was born that way.

This was the kind of girl who gestured big and talked big and showed her emotions big, but she wasn't really showing anything. All her actions turned out to be one big flirt. But, if you paid attention, as I did, it became obvious that she was flirting with no one. She was keeping all her real passion on reserve. That's how I knew she was a lesbian.

An apartment in New York City tells many truths. It shows where you really stand, relationally. It shows when you came, how much you had, and what kind of people you knew. Her apartment was lonely.