A man with a club [bat] is a law-maker, a man to be obeyed, but not necessarily conciliated.

— Jack London

Amnesia, which is a loss of memory, is a symptom of many different trauma and/or dissociative disorders, including PTSD, Dissociative Fugue, Dissociative Disorder Not Otherwise Specified and Dissociative Identity Disorder. Amnesia can affect both implicit and explicit memory.

— Ruth A. Lanius

An abuser can seem emotionally needy. You can get caught in a trap of catering to him, trying to fill a bottomless pit. But he’s not so much needy as entitled, so no matter how much you give him, it will never be enough. He will just keep coming up with more demands because he believes his needs are your responsibility, until you feel drained down to nothing.

— Lundy Bancroft

An abuser isn't abusive 24/7. They usually demonstrate positive character traits most of the time. That's what makes the abuse so confusing when it happens, and what makes leaving so much more difficult.

— Miya Yamanouchi

Ana was a perpetual victim in a never-ending search for a victimizer.

— Travis Luedke

And as she held me, I suddenly realized that my lifelong search for love and acceptance had finally ended in the arms of a foster parent.

— Dave Pelzer

And could you, from a place of love, actually stand up and, use force, to give someone back, the suffering, they were trying to put on you? Would I do it? Maybe it would even be, an act of fierce compassion, as ENSO Rossi sometimes talked about, to not take it anymore. To not cow down, anymore. To let my father know, the tyrant, the aggressor, that if he hits me, I’m going to hit back, and hard.

— T. Scott McLeod

And maybe it was more than that. Maybe it was actually an unspoken instant agreement between the four women on the balcony: No woman should pay for the accidental death of this particular man. Maybe it was an involuntary, atavistic response to thousands of years of violence against women. Maybe it was for every rape, every brutal backhanded slap, every other Perry that had come before this one.

— Liane Moriarty

And then there were men who were violently afraid of losing to a woman, the scariest men in the world. They become dictators, heads of state, bureaucrats, men with deadly weapons, they were everywhere. Sometimes she could pick one out with a look, but they were often charming, they had to have the power to attract in order to dominate.

— Haven Kimmel

An emotionally abusive relationship, in very simplistic terms, is much like standing up in a too hot bath and sinking back in so as not to feel so dizzy.

— Jackie Haze