Candor does not provide us with protection, sustenance, or technological innovation. Therefore you are expendable to us.

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Since I was young, I have always known this: Life damages us, every one. We can’t escape that damage. But now, I am also learning this: We can be mended. We mend each other.

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You know, there's a word for big, strong men who attack women, and it's coward.

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Some things are hard to let go of.

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Killing you is not the worst thing they can do to you," I say. "Controlling you is.

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Desperation can make a person do surprising things.

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I see a kind of thirst in her expression, the same one I saw when she told me about her brother in the back room of the tattoo parlor. Before the attack simulation I might have called it a thirst for justice, or even revenge, but now I am able to identify it as a thirst for blood. And even as it frightens me, I understand it. Which should probably frighten me even more.

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To me, when someone wrongs you, you both share the burden of that wrongdoing—the pain of it weighs on both of you. Forgiveness, then, means choosing to bear the full weight all by yourself.

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Writing means not just staring ugliness in the face, but finding a way to embrace it.

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My mother told me once that we can't survive alone, but even if we could, we wouldn't want to. Without a faction we have no purpose and no reason to live.

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