Hard to let go of anger and hurt where mom is concerned

Unfortunately, I am one of those women, and I know a lot of us, who somehow can't seem to get over our anger and hurt where our mothers are concerned, and who are determined to do better with our own daughters. We don't, of course. We fall into exactly the same patterns, or new ones equally damaging, and watch ourselves do it as helplessly as bystanders at a curbside shooting. Now, when I speak to similarly angry women whose mothers are still alive, I press upon them this advice: try again, and this time, listen better.

Sally Mann, Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2015), p. 196

The irrational shame of unemployment

When I first saw unemployed men at close quarters, the thing that horrified and amazed me was to find that many of them were ashamed of being unemployed. I was very ignorant, but not so ignorant as to imagine that when the loss of foreign markets pushes two million men out of work, those two million are any more to blame than the people who draw blanks in the Calcutta Sweep. But at that time nobody cared to admit that unemployment was inevitable, because this meant admitting that it would probably continue. The middle classes were still talking about "lazy idle loafers on the dole" and saying that "these men could all find work if they wanted to," and naturally these opinions percolated to the working class themselves.

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1958), p. 85 (1st U.S. ed.; pub. in England in 1937)