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50 Quotes About Toxic Mothers to Validate the Wound You Were Never Supposed to Name
Annie Wright therapy related image
Annie Wright therapy related image


Soft light through a window, a woman sitting quietly with her hands folded. Annie Wright trauma therapy for driven women.

50 Quotes About Toxic Mothers to Validate the Wound You Were Never Supposed to Name

SUMMARY

The mother wound is one of the most profound and most silenced injuries a woman can carry. When the person who was supposed to be your first safe relationship was instead a source of harm, the grief runs ancient and the shame runs deep. This collection of 50 curated quotes about toxic mothers, the mother wound, and mother-daughter trauma is for driven, ambitious women who are ready to name what happened, honor the grief of what was missing, and begin building the mothering they always deserved. Inside themselves.

Last reviewed: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT

The Wound You Were Never Supposed to Name

She shows up to our first session with a Yeti tumbler she hasn’t touched, her coat still on. It’s a Wednesday in October, late afternoon, the kind of thin gray light that makes everything look provisional. Camille is forty-four. A surgeon. She spent twenty minutes in her car in the hospital parking structure before driving here, and she almost didn’t come at all.

She tells me this matter-of-factly, like she’s reporting a lab result. “I almost canceled,” she says. “I’ve been telling myself I don’t need to be here. That I turned out fine.” She pauses. Then, quieter: “But I’m not fine. I haven’t been fine. And I think it started with her.”

In my work with driven, ambitious women over 15+ years of clinical practice, the most consistently difficult disclosure isn’t about romantic betrayal or professional failure. It’s this one. The mother. The specific quality of protection a woman extends to the woman who raised her, even when that woman was the source of real harm.

Because there is a particular cultural prohibition against naming your mother as toxic. Against saying: the person who was supposed to be my most fundamental safe harbor was not safe. Against acknowledging that the most foundational relationship of your early life caused damage that you’re still living inside. The prohibition runs so deep that even the most psychologically sophisticated women often can’t get the words out without something that feels like self-betrayal. Like they’re the ones doing something wrong.

These 50 quotes are offered as an act of naming. Curated from researchers, clinicians, poets, and memoirists who have looked directly at this experience and found language for it. They say, without apology, what many women have never been permitted to say aloud. They validate the wound without requiring it to be justified. They honor the complexity of loving someone who hurt you.

I’ve organized them into seven themed sections, each reflecting a different layer of the mother wound experience. Some quotes will land immediately. Others might not make sense for six more months, when your healing has shifted. Keep the ones that fit. Return to them when you need a tether.

DEFINITION
THE MOTHER WOUND

A concept developed and named by Bethany Webster, author and mother wound researcher, describing the pain of being a woman in patriarchal cultures, passed down through generations of women as unprocessed grief, shame, and disconnection from one’s own power. Webster frames the mother wound as both an individual and systemic phenomenon: the harm that occurs in the specific mother-child relationship is embedded within a larger cultural system that devalues women’s needs and makes it uniquely difficult for women to individuate from their mothers.

In plain terms:

The mother wound isn’t just about your specific mother. It’s about what she was handed by her own mother, by her culture, by a world that shaped her before she became yours. Understanding that doesn’t excuse the harm. It does make it possible to hold the complexity without splitting into either pure blame or complete denial.

A note before you begin: This content is psychoeducational in nature and is not a substitute for professional mental health treatment. If you’re in crisis or struggling with active suicidal ideation, please contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988.


On the Truth You Couldn’t Say

The first act of healing the mother wound is simply naming it. Not explaining it, not justifying it. Not preemptively defending yourself against the person you know will push back when you do. Just naming what is real. These seven quotes do that work. Directly, without softening.

Alice Miller, PhD, Swiss psychologist and author of The Drama of the Gifted Child, spent her career documenting how children adapt to unavailable or harmful parents by suppressing their own reality. Her insight was precise: the damage isn’t only what happened. It’s the prohibition against naming it.

“The truth about our childhood is stored up in our body, and although we can repress it, we can never alter it. Our intellect can be deceived, our feelings manipulated, our perceptions confused, and our body tricked with medication. But someday the body will present its bill.”

Alice Miller, PhD, Swiss psychologist and author of The Drama of the Gifted Child

“The most important thing to remember is this: to be ready at any moment to give up what you are for what you might become.”

Karyl McBride, PhD, therapist and author of Will I Ever Be Good Enough? Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers

“In toxic families, secrets are more important than truth. And everyone, consciously or not, is recruited to keep those secrets.”

Dr. Susan Forward, therapist and author of Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life

“Children who are not loved for who they are become adults who cannot love themselves.”

Jasmin Lee Cori, MS LPC, therapist and author of The Emotionally Absent Mother

“The compulsion to reenact trauma is not a character flaw. It is the body’s attempt to complete what was never resolved.”

Dr. Christina Reese, therapist and author of The Trauma Treatment Handbook

“You have to be willing to see the truth about the person who raised you. Not to punish her. To free yourself.”

Bethany Webster, author and mother wound researcher

“I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.”

Anaïs Nin, diarist and author

What I see in driven, ambitious women doing this naming work is a particular exhaustion. The exhaustion of having tried every other way to make peace with what happened. Every reframe, every compassionate reading of their mother’s limitations, every attempt to be understanding. The relief doesn’t come from understanding more. It comes from letting themselves simply say what is true.


On the Body Remembers

Somatic truth is one of the hardest concepts to receive for driven women who have built their lives on cognitive mastery. The mother wound doesn’t live only in memories. It lives in the body’s bracing before a phone call. In the tightening of the chest when she says something dismissive. In the nausea that arrives with the plane ticket home for the holidays.

Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher and author of The Body Keeps the Score, has documented how early relational trauma reorganizes the nervous system at a level that intellectual understanding alone cannot reach. These eight quotes name what the body knows before the mind catches up.

“The body keeps the score: if the memory of trauma is encoded in the viscera, in heartbreaking and gut-wrenching emotions, in autoimmune disorders and skeletal/muscular problems, and if mind/brain/visceral communication is the royal road to emotion regulation, this demands a radical shift in our therapeutic assumptions.”

Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher, author of The Body Keeps the Score

“Because we were never allowed to be angry with our mothers, we turned the anger on ourselves.”

Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Chronology of Water

“The body always leads us home, if we can simply learn to trust sensation and stay with it long enough for it to reveal appropriate action, healing, or guidance.”

Pat Ogden, PhD, founder of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy

“She was a girl who knew how to be happy even when she was sad. And that’s important.”

Marilyn Monroe, as quoted in Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters

“Children need to be seen. Not just the parts of them that are easy to love, but all of them.”

Jasmin Lee Cori, MS LPC, therapist and author of The Emotionally Absent Mother

“My mother’s body was a country I had to leave to save my own life.”

Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts

“I have a memory of standing in the kitchen, watching her hands move over the stove, and understanding for the first time that she was not thinking about me at all.”

Mary Karr, memoirist and author of The Liar’s Club

“Don’t surrender all your joy for an idea you used to have about yourself that isn’t true anymore.”

Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild

A NOTE FROM CLINICAL PRACTICE

Camille, continued

Camille keeps her coat on for the first three sessions. She tells me, at our fourth meeting, that she finally figured out why. “It’s the coat,” she says. “As long as I have it on, I can leave. I haven’t decided yet if I’m staying.”

What she means, I understand, isn’t staying in my office. She means staying in the work. Staying in the part of herself that knows something she’s been trained, since childhood, to unknow.

She describes her body’s response to her mother’s weekly calls in clinical language, the way surgeons do, the way women who have learned to narrate themselves from outside themselves do. “Elevated heart rate. Shortened breathing. I find myself gripping things.” She pauses. “I didn’t realize for years that those were fear responses. I thought it was just how I was.”

She still hasn’t taken off her coat. But she’s asking the right question.


On What Was Missing

The grief of the mother wound is a particular kind of grief: mourning not a loss but an absence. Mourning what was never there rather than what was taken away. There is no cultural container for this grief. No funeral, no casserole, no acknowledged death. Just the quiet, ancient ache of not having been seen.

Karyl McBride, PhD, therapist and author of Will I Ever Be Good Enough?, writes that daughters of narcissistic mothers often spend decades trying to earn love that was never on offer, because the alternative, accepting the absence, is too devastating to face.

“Daughters of narcissistic mothers never feel loved for who they are. They feel loved for what they do, what they look like, or what they accomplish.”

Karyl McBride, PhD, therapist and author of Will I Ever Be Good Enough? Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers

“A mother’s love for her child is like nothing else in the world. It knows no law, no pity, it dares all things and crushes down remorselessly all that stands in its path.”

Agatha Christie, author of The Hound of Death

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a mother and a daughter are often at war.”

Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist

“The unloved child does not stop wanting love. She stops believing she is worth it.”

Jasmin Lee Cori, MS LPC, therapist and author of The Emotionally Absent Mother

“She was like the moon, part of her was always hidden.”

Dia Reeves, author of Slice of Cherry

“My mother wanted me to be her wings, to fly as she never quite had the courage to do. I love her for that. I love the fact that she wanted to give birth to her own wings.”

Erica Jong, author of Fear of Flying

“I am not my mother’s wound, though I carry it with me.”

Adrienne Rich, poet and author of Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution

“There is a great deal of unmothering that happens in the world. It is a grief that never gets a name.”

Glennon Doyle, author of Untamed

Elaine, a venture capitalist I’ve worked with for several years, described this grief as “grieving someone who is still alive.” Her mother calls every morning. Elaine doesn’t pick up most of those calls. She told me, “I don’t know how to grieve a person who’s still there. Still calling. Still not seeing me.” This is the particular quality of the mother wound grief, and it has no cultural container. These quotes offer one.


On Estrangement and Limits

Estrangement from a parent is one of the most misunderstood decisions a woman can make. The cultural narrative treats it as a failure of forgiveness. In my clinical experience, it’s almost always an act of survival. And often, the decision to create distance comes only after years of trying every possible alternative.

Lindsay C. Gibson, PsyD, psychologist and author of Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, is clear that emotional distance is not the same as abandonment. The woman who reduces contact is not punishing her mother. She’s protecting a self that was never adequately protected.

“Healing yourself is connected with healing others. You cannot separate the two.”

Yoko Ono, artist and peace activist

“Emotionally immature parents see their children as sources of supply for their own emotional needs, rather than as people with their own needs.”

Lindsay C. Gibson, PsyD, psychologist and author of Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents

“You teach people how to treat you by what you allow, what you stop, and what you reinforce.”

Tony Gaskins, author and speaker

“Not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die.”

Anne Lamott, author of Traveling Mercies

“You don’t have to set yourself on fire to keep other people warm.”

Penny Reid, author

“Family is supposed to be our safe haven. Very often, it’s the place where we find the deepest heartache.”

Iyanla Vanzant, author and life coach

If you’re navigating the question of limits, reduced contact, or estrangement, know that there is no universal right answer. What I see consistently in my work is that the women who feel most at peace are the ones who made their decision deliberately, rather than reactively, and who have the support of a skilled clinician while doing so. Individual therapy that understands mother wound dynamics is not a luxury in this process. It’s a structural support.


On Mothering Yourself

Reparenting is ultimately what the mother wound asks of you. Not repairing the original relationship, not transforming your mother into someone different, but learning to become, for yourself, the mother you needed and didn’t receive. This is the heart of the work. It’s also the most unfamiliar territory.

What did a good mother do? She noticed when you were upset and asked about it, rather than dismissing it. She celebrated your achievements without making them about herself. She let you be different from her without experiencing that difference as an attack. She told you the truth. Fixing the Foundations addresses exactly this process: rebuilding the psychological foundation that a difficult early relationship couldn’t provide.

“Reparenting yourself means giving yourself the love, safety, and validation that your mother was incapable of providing.”

Nicole LePera, PsyD, psychologist and author of How to Do the Work

“You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.”

Sharon Salzberg, meditation teacher and author of Lovingkindness

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Mary Oliver, poet and author of The Summer Day

“You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”

Mary Oliver, poet and author of Wild Geese

“I am not afraid of my truth anymore, and I will not omit pieces of myself to make you comfortable.”

Alex Elle, author of After the Rain

“You are your own greatest resource. The most powerful thing you can do is learn to trust yourself again.”

Dr. Christina Reese, therapist and author of The Trauma Treatment Handbook

“Owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing that we’ll ever do.”

Brené Brown, PhD, research professor and author of Daring Greatly

The last quote here is one I return to often. For driven, ambitious women who have spent their lives proving their worth through achievement, the idea of loving themselves through the unresolved and imperfect story is genuinely counter-conditioning. It goes against everything they were rewarded for. That’s not a character defect. That’s a learned system. And learned systems can be unlearned.


On the Slow Reclamation

Healing the mother wound is not an event. It’s a reclamation. A slow, imperfect, ongoing process of taking back the parts of yourself that the wound required you to abandon. Your anger. Your needs. Your capacity to believe that you were worth protecting.

Anne Sexton and Sharon Olds are two poets who wrote unflinchingly about their mothers and the complicated inheritance of the mother-daughter relationship. Their work gave a generation of women permission to look clearly at what they had inherited.

“I stand in the ring in the dead city and tie on the red shoes. They are not mine. They are my mother’s. Her mother’s before.”

Anne Sexton, poet, from The Red Shoes

“The women come and go. Talking of Michelangelo. But I am here, in the room, alone with my mother’s ghost.”

Anne Sexton, poet

“I wanted to apologize to my body for all the years I fought against it, all the years I didn’t want it to be mine.”

Sharon Olds, poet and author of The Dead and the Living

“The wound is not the whole story.”

Toni Morrison, novelist and Nobel laureate

“If you are always trying to be normal, you will never know how amazing you can be.”

Maya Angelou, poet and author

“What I know for sure is that speaking your truth is the most powerful tool we all have.”

Oprah Winfrey

“Perhaps the most radical act a daughter of a toxic mother can perform is the act of knowing she deserved more.”

Bethany Webster, author and mother wound researcher

Of course you’re tired. The reclamation is slow, and it’s done largely in private, and nobody outside the work will necessarily see the daily effort it requires. The progress isn’t visible in the way promotions and publications are visible. It’s visible in the moment when you don’t collapse into guilt when she calls. When you don’t spend three days after Thanksgiving dissecting every sentence. Those moments count. They’re the work.


On Inheriting and Choosing

The final layer of the mother wound work is the question of inheritance: what you were handed, and what you choose to pass forward. For driven women who are also mothers, this is often the sharpest edge of the entire process. The fear of repeating patterns you never consciously chose.

Toni Morrison’s work returns again and again to this question of what moves through generations of women, what survives, what transforms. Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born is still the most honest examination of the ambivalence and complexity of the mother-daughter bond.

“She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.”

Toni Morrison, from Beloved

“To discover who you are as separate from your mother is the most important psychological task of the second half of life for women.”

Bethany Webster, author and mother wound researcher

“Motherhood, in the sense of an intense, reciprocal relationship with a particular child, is not intrinsic to female sexuality. It is, rather, one possible relationship between a woman and her sexuality.”

Adrienne Rich, poet and author of Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”

Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple

“I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it.”

Maya Angelou, poet and author

“We cannot choose our mothers. We can choose what we do with what they gave us.”

Dr. Susan Forward, therapist and author of Toxic Parents

“The wound that has been passed down does not have to be passed forward.”

Glennon Doyle, author of Untamed

A NOTE FROM CLINICAL PRACTICE

Elaine, on the question of passing it forward

Elaine is in her fifties. She has two adult daughters. When we first started working together, she would say, with a kind of rehearsed steadiness: “I didn’t do what my mother did to me. I know I didn’t.” She was right. She hadn’t.

But over months of sessions, something else emerged. The ways she’d been unavailable in different forms. The driven quality that had made her exceptional at her work and sometimes absent from her daughters in the particular ways they needed. She’d sit with that for a long time.

“I didn’t repeat the wound,” she said eventually. “I just passed forward a different version of it.” She paused. It was a February afternoon, pale winter light through the blinds. “Is that enough? That it was different?”

What I said: it’s a start. What matters now is what you do with that knowing. The cycle doesn’t have to end all at once. It ends in increments. In a generation that inherited less than the one before it. That’s how the wound stops moving forward.

The work of this section is not guilt. Guilt is the emotion of believing you’re bad. What’s available here is something more useful: grief and responsibility. Grief for what was handed to you and what you may have passed forward without meaning to. Responsibility for the choices you can still make now, today, about how you show up for the people who need you. You’re not condemned to the pattern. You’re the one who sees it clearly enough to interrupt it.


Both/And: You Can Grieve and Still Protect Yourself

The Both/And of the mother wound is this: you can love your mother AND hold her accountable for real harm. You can grieve the relationship you needed AND protect yourself from the ongoing relationship she offers. You can carry tenderness for the woman she was AND refuse to keep pretending that her version of events is the truth. None of these cancel each other. All of them are available simultaneously.

Elaine, over years of this work, has arrived at a relationship with her mother that is bounded, limited, and no longer organized around Elaine’s self-erasure. She answers calls twice a week. She stays on them for thirty minutes. She listens without pouring herself into the phone. She told me: “I can love her from here. I can’t love her from inside her.” That is the Both/And. The love is real. The limit is also real. Healing the mother wound doesn’t produce a story where everything resolves. It produces a story where you have choices you didn’t have before.


The Systemic Lens: The Myth of Maternal Perfection

The cultural prohibition against naming a mother as toxic is rooted in the myth of maternal perfection: the idealization of motherhood as the ultimate expression of unconditional love, and the corresponding cultural inability to acknowledge when that idealization fails. Bethany Webster writes extensively about how this myth serves patriarchal structures: if motherhood is idealized and women’s primary worth is tied to being good mothers, then acknowledging that a mother caused harm becomes a threat to the entire system.

The woman who names her mother as toxic isn’t just challenging her individual family. She’s challenging a cultural mythology with enormous stakes. That’s why the shame is so profound. The shame isn’t a personal failure. It’s the pressure of a system that requires her to stay silent to remain acceptable within it.

This is also why the healing carries cultural significance. Every woman who tells the truth about her early maternal experience, who refuses the cover story of “she did her best” when the best was genuinely harmful, contributes to a more honest conversation about what children actually need and what happens when they don’t receive it. Your story matters beyond your own healing. It matters to every woman who comes after you who will need to know that this is survivable. That it’s nameable. That she is not the problem.

The Strong & Stable newsletter holds this kind of conversation regularly. Naming what’s real for driven women navigating complicated family dynamics while building lives of meaning and integrity. The proverbial House of Life​ cannot be stable when the foundation beneath it was built on a lie about what happened in your earliest years. That’s not weakness. It’s physics.


If these quotes have brought up more than you’re currently equipped to process alone, that’s worth paying attention to. The intensity of your response is information about the depth of the wound. And depth of wound is a sign that you’d benefit from skilled support. You don’t have to do this work in isolation. A free consultation is a real first step if you’re not sure where to begin.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Q: Is it possible to have a relationship with my mother while also healing from her harm?

A: For some women, yes. With appropriate limits, emotional distance, and realistic expectations. The key question isn’t whether contact is possible, but whether contact with your mother causes ongoing harm that outweighs any benefit. This assessment is individual. Some women find carefully bounded contact workable. Others find that any contact reactivates the wound in ways that require years of additional healing to process. A therapist who understands mother wound dynamics can help you assess what makes sense specifically for you.

Q: Why does my mother’s criticism affect me so much more than anyone else’s?

A: Your mother’s voice was the original template for your relationship with yourself. The internal critic that calls you not enough is almost always a version of the earliest critical voices you internalized. When your mother criticizes you now, she’s activating a neural pathway formed during the most vulnerable period of your development. That’s not pathological sensitivity. That’s a predictable neurological response to an original wound.

Q: How do I stop seeking my mother’s approval even when I know intellectually it’s not coming?

A: The approval-seeking is a survival response, not a character flaw. It goes back to a time when having her approval was genuinely necessary for your safety and wellbeing. Stopping it isn’t primarily a matter of deciding to stop. It requires healing the underlying wound that makes her approval feel necessary. This usually involves grief work, reparenting practice, and therapeutic support to interrupt the automatic pattern.

Q: Can I heal the mother wound without my mother’s participation?

A: Yes. And for most women healing this wound, that’s the only available option, because toxic mothers rarely participate in genuine repair. The mother wound heals internally, not in the original relationship. What changes is not the dynamic with her. It’s your relationship to that dynamic, and your relationship to yourself. You can grieve fully, set whatever limits are necessary, and build a nourishing internal life, all without her involvement.

Q: How do I actually begin healing the mother wound?

A: The first step is naming what happened without minimizing it. The second is finding a skilled clinician who understands developmental and relational trauma. The third is building what was missing: a reliable internal source of self-worth that doesn’t depend on her recognition. In my clinical experience, structured work through a program like Fixing the Foundations accelerates this process meaningfully for driven women who’ve been trying to manage it alone.

Q: I feel like I should be over this by now. How long does healing the mother wound take?

A: There’s no timeline, and the “should be over it by now” message is itself often a version of your mother’s voice. The mother wound is not a situational grief with a predictable arc. It’s a foundational wound that shapes your nervous system and your relational patterns. Healing it takes as long as it takes. What I see consistently in my work is that meaningful, lasting shifts are possible at any age. You haven’t missed a window. You’re right on time.

Q: Is it possible to love my mother and still acknowledge that she hurt me?

A: Yes. This is the Both/And of the mother wound. Love and harm are not mutually exclusive. Many women I work with love their mothers genuinely while also carrying real wounds from how those mothers parented them. Holding both truths simultaneously is not confusion. It’s honesty. And it’s the only foundation from which real healing, rather than denial or rage alone, can begin.

Related Reading

  • Webster, Bethany. Discovering the Inner Mother: A Guide to Healing the Mother Wound and Claiming Your Personal Power. William Morrow, 2021.
  • McBride, Karyl. Will I Ever Be Good Enough? Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers. Free Press, 2008.
  • Gibson, Lindsay C. Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents. New Harbinger, 2015.
  • Forward, Susan. Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life. Bantam, 1989.
  • Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. W.W. Norton, 1976.
  • Cori, Jasmin Lee. The Emotionally Absent Mother: How to Recognize and Heal the Invisible Effects of Childhood Emotional Neglect. Experiment, 2010.

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Annie Wright, LMFT. Trauma therapist and executive coach

About the Author

Annie Wright, LMFT

LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · W.W. Norton Author

Helping ambitious women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.

Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist and trauma-informed executive coach with over 15,000 clinical hours. She works with driven, ambitious women, including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs, in repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. She is currently writing her first book, The Everything Years, with W.W. Norton.

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