Rescuing Quotes

“Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?”
― Virginia Woolf

“Conversation between a princess and an outlaw:
"If I stand for fairy-tale balls and dragon bait--dragon bait--what do you stand for?"
"Me? I stand for uncertainty, insecurity, bad taste, fun, and things that go boom in the night."
"Franky, it seems to me that you've turned yourself into a stereotype."
"You may be right. I don't care. As any car freak will tell you, the old models are the most beautiful, even if they aren't the most efficient. People who sacrifice beauty for efficiency get what they deserve."
"Well, you may get off on being a beautiful stereotype, regardless of the social consequences, but my conscience won't allow it."
"And I goddamn refuse to be dragon bait. I'm as capable of rescuing you as you are of rescuing me."
"I'm an outlaw, not a hero. I never intended to rescue you. We're our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves.”
― Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker

“so often victims end up unnecessarily prolonging their abuse because they buy into the notion that their abuser must be coming from a wounded place and that only patient love and tolerance (and lots of misguided therapy) will help them heal.”
― George K. Simon

“Who told you that?" I say. "Davy Prentiss?"
He blinks. "What?"
"What do you mean what?" My voice is harder now. "Your new best friend. The man who shot me, Todd, and who you ride to work with laughing every morning."
He clenches his hands into fists.
"You've been spying on me?" he says. "Three months I don't see you, three months I don't hear nothing from you and you been spying? Is that what yer doing in your spare time when yer not blowing people up?"
"Yeah," I yell, my voice getting louder to match his. "Three months of defending you to people who'd only be too happy to call you enemy, Todd. Three months of wondering why the hell you're working so hard for the Mayor and how he knew to go right for the ocean the day after we spoke." He winces, but I keep going, thrusting out my arm and pulling up on the sleeve. "Three months wondering why you put these on women!"
His face changes in an instant. He actually calls out as if he felt the pain himself. He puts a hand to his mouth to stifle it but his Noise is suddenly washed with blackness. He moves his fingertips of his other hand within reach of the band, hovering over my skin, over the band that'll never be removed unless I lose my arm. The skin is still red, and band 1391 still trobs, despite the healing of three mistresses.
"Oh, no," he says. "Oh, no."
The side door opens and the man who let me in leans out. "Everything all right out there, Lieutenant?"
"Lieutenant?" I say.
"We're fine," Todd chokes a little. "We're fine."
The man waits for a second, then goes back inside.
"Lieutenant?" I say again, lowering my voice.
Todd's leant down, his hands on his knees, staring at the floor. "It wasn't me, was it?" he says, his voice quiet, too. "I didn't-" He gestures again at the band without looking up. "I didn't do it without knowing it was you, did I?”
― Patrick Ness, The Ask and the Answer

“The day you find out who you are is when you look back and realize that it was never the words, rather your actions that defined you.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“I wanted, for so long, for someone to understand me better than I understood myself, to take control of me, to save me, to make it all better. I thought that the hardest part of a loving, mutually healing relationship would be showing my vulnerable, raw spots to a person, even though I'd been hurt so many times before. This has not been the hardest part. The actual hardest part has been realizing that no one, no matter how compassionate and kind they are, will say the perfect things always. Myself included. The hardest part has been learning to communicate what I need, to hear what others need, to tell others how to tell me what they need. Intimacy takes a lot of communication. We all have triggers. I don't know your triggers and you don't know mine. No matter how much I love or trust you, you cannot possibly know exactly the words I need to hear, the words I don't want to hear, and the way I like to be touched. And how strange that we expect these things of each other. How strange, and self-sabotaging, that we refuse to get into relationships and friendships with people unless they treat us in just that perfect way. We've been raised to want fairy tales. We've been raised to wait for flawless saviors to rescue us. But the savior isn't flawless and the savior is not coming. The savior is you. The savior is still learning. The savior is never done learning. The savior is a human being. Forget perfect. Forget flawless. And start speaking your truth. Start speaking what you want and how you want it. And start asking and listening, really listening, to what the people around you say. Maybe, then, we will stop abandoning and hurting each other. Maybe, then, there's hope for us.”
― Vironika Tugaleva

“Woman! Come out! I have—" She looked down at the bloodless grass, embarrassed. "I have come to rescue you," she finally said, as if admitting that she were covered in boils.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, In the Night Garden

“If you ever feel the person in your life needs rescuing, particularly from him or herself - beware. Codependency is rearing its head again.”
― David Stafford, Codependency: How to break free and live your own life

“I can confidently state that the greatest rescues in my life have occurred when I’ve been saved from myself.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Rescuing myself’ is an oxymoron that will leave me in the perpetual need of being rescued ‘from myself’.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Sometimes someone receives help who doesn’t want it. Sometimes that someone falls under the Mental Health Act. Sometimes that someone is a child. And sometimes that someone is a dog. What do you do? Look the other way? Pretend it doesn’t matter? There’s a drive deep inside of me to help dogs. It’s not a choice. It’s a function of being me.”
― J. A. Robitaille, A Dog's Religion

“Maybe what I need to be rescued from is the feeling that I don’t need to be rescued, for without a doubt this is the most difficult rescue of all.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“In one way or another, every mission that I have ever set out on to rescue myself is yet another mission that I end up needing to be rescued from. Hence, there is God.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“It upset him to see my family spend so much money and watch me rescue them. He didn't like bailing my mom out of the consequences of her impulsive buying decisions and encouraged me to help her set up a budget instead”
― Olga Trujillo, The Sum of My Parts: A Survivor's Story of Dissociative Identity Disorder

“Around back of the stables she saw a group of boys, surrounding something on the ground. As she gasped, a boy- a great big fellow, nearly as big as a man- drew back his leg and kicked.
The thing on the ground yelped.
"No!" Bridget shouted, but she was drowned out by a gunshot.
She turned to see the Duke of Montgomery, standing in his shirt-sleeves and pink embroidered waistcoat and breeches, hip cocked, a smoking pistol held almost negligently aloft in his left hand.
He smiled, as sweetly as an adder baring its fangs, at the boys. "Won't you please vacate this area?"
The boys seemed frozen by surprise- or stark fear.
The duke tilted his head and his smile dropped from his face, leaving it blank- and somehow much more frightening. "Now.”
― Elizabeth Hoyt, Duke of Sin

“Kit swiftly lifted Susannah up into his arms as it whipped past; she ducked her head in his chest.
Fortunately the adder's retreat was hasty and complete.
"It's all right," he said softly. "You're all right. It's gone."
Susannah said nothing for a time; just breathed swiftly in and out. She was warm and lithe in his arms; the faintest scent of lavender, and that mysterious sweetness of her own, the scent he'd discovered at the nape of her neck the day he'd caught her spying on him, rose up to him, released by the heat of her skin.
"It was a snake." Her voice, a trifle unsteady, was muffled against his shirt.
"It was, indeed," he said softly. Her breath had found a gap between the buttons of his shirt; it washed over his skin in a very nearly hypnotic rhythm. In... and out. In... and out. In... and---”
― Julie Anne Long, Beauty and the Spy

“And here I thought I would make this grand entrance, rescuing you. I'm not sure you needed rescuing.”
― Jennifer L. Armentrout, A Kingdom of Flesh and Fire

“We're on the highway!" Jess reports after a few minutes. "What lane should I be in?"
"The slow one."
"Which one is that?"
As far as rescue efforts go, we're less like Charlie's Angels and more like something Rowan Atkinson would star in. Someone hoots and speeds around us.
"The other one," I suggest.
Jess indicates and changes lanes with a little yelp.”
― Tallulah Lucy, Keyflame