“I was so stuck on being what I thought I should be, that I couldn't be who I needed to be. ~Becca in Drawing Free”

“I am the woman who glows in the dark, I'll stay awake forever if I have to.”

“Existence is this, I thought, a start of joy, a stab of pain, an intense pleasure, veins that pulse under the skin, there is no other truth to tell.”

“Certainly something had happened to me during the night. Or after months of tension I had arrived at the edge of some precipice and now I was falling, as in a dream slowly, even as I continued to hold the thermometer in my hand, een as I stood with the soles of my slippers on the floor, even as I felt myself solidly contained by the expectant looks of my children. It was the fault of the torture that my husband had inflicted. But enough, I had to tear the pain from memory, I had to sandpaper away the scratches that were damaging my brain.”

“You still love me? After all I have done?” she asked, her voice breaking.“It doesn’t matter. Nothing that has happened matters. I am here now, and I love you.”

“There can be no question that parrots have more intellect than any other kind of bird, and it is this that makes them such favourite pets and brings upon them so many sorrows. ...Men will buy them ... and carry them off to all quarters of the native town, intending, I doubt not, to treat them kindly; but "the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel", and confinement in a solitary cell, the discipline with which we reform hardened criminals, is misery enough to a bird with an active mind, without the superadded horrors of ... life in a tin case, hung from a nail in the wall of a dark shop... Why does the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals never look into the woes of parrots?...However happy you make her captivity, imagination will carry her at times to the green field and blue sky, and she fancies herself somewhere near the sun, heading a long file of exultant companions in swift career through the whistling air. Then she opens her mouth and rings out a wild salute to all parrots in the far world below her.”

“Fearlessly accept the reality; then fearlessly set about transforming what needs to change.”