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Quote by Allene vanOirschot

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Daddy's Little Girl: A Father's Prayer

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Allene vanOirschot

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“I do not believe that grief unites, pain is a unique experience, in its intensity, in its expression, in its mixture with other emotions, other feelings, with one's history, with one's hopes and despairs. That is why one can never really say: I join in your pain, or understand your pain. Other people's pain cannot be fully understood, it isolates, it divides. Grief is one of the most intimate experiences of the human being. That is why it is also useless to say 'leave me alone with my sorrow': with pain we are always alone.”

“By protecting our children from adversity, have we made them deathly afraid of it? By bolstering their self-esteem with false praise and a lack of real-world consequences, have we made them less tolerant, more entitled, and ignorant of their own character defects? By giving in to their every desire, have we encouraged a new age of hedonism?”

“The pursuit of personal happiness has become a modern maxim, crowding out other definitions of the “good life.” Even acts of kindness toward others are framed as a strategy for personal happiness. Altruism, no longer merely a good in itself, has become a vehicle for our own “well-being".”

“Public torture, in seventeenth-century Europe, created searing, unforgettable spectacles of pain and suffering in order to convey the message that a system in which husbands could brutalize wives, and parents beat children, was ultimately a form of love. … It seems to us that this connection – or better perhaps confusion – between care and domination is utterly critical to the larger questions of how we lost the ability freely to recreate ourselves by recreating our relationships with one another. It is critical, that is , to understanding how we got stuck, and why these days we can hardly envisage our own past or future as anything other than a transition from smaller to larger cages.”