8 Quotes by M.E. Thomas

When you grow up as a girl, it is like there are faint chalk lines traced approximately three inches around your entire body at all times, drawn by society and often religion and family and particularly other women, who somehow feel invested in how you behave, as if your actions reflect directly on all womanhood.

The threat of punishment at home or school only served as a challenge to figure out how to circumvent the consequences when I did what I wanted to do anyway. I didn't fear the punishment, I just saw it as an inconvenience to work around.

My most salient worry would not be how [my future children] would treat the world, but how the world would treat them. Would they be outsiders or outcasts? I would hate for them to feel compelled to go underground, never to find acceptance for who they are, to be regarded as hollow, unfinished people—or even the embodiment of evil.

Outwardly I was all confidence and openness; inwardly I was spiteful and lonely and unaware of how to relate to the world. I wanted so much to be good but only knew how to appear that way by being bad.

One nurse thought I was "brave." I think she was talking about my steely-eyed, grin-and-bear-it kind of attitude. There were no tears, no complaints from me - a total lack of affect. In a victim, it is courage and thus admirable; in a predator, it is a lack of humanity and instills fear.

I often wish I could just passively watch people without being expected to participate myself, like television.

It isn't enough that the bad guy is prevented from doing his bad deeds; he must suffer as much as possible. It is as if the existence of evil - or something that can be designated as evil - provides a safe haven for the good to engage in evil. It's a safe space to indulge in inflicting harm, to experience the sublime of suffering.

It often seems to me that these people whocommit such heinous crimes—sociopath or empath—are not so much more damaged thaneveryone else, but that they seem to have less to lose.