Trauma Quotes

“I have supped full with horrors.”

“The bird that hath been limed in a bush, with trembling wings misdoubteth every bush.”

“As for the bishop, the sight of the guillotine was a great shock to him, from which he recovered only slowly.”

“I don't have to talk about whether or not I got raped in jail.”

“The drama and the trauma of the relationship you have when you're 16 can mirror the one you have when you're 26. Life repeats itself.”

“I'm scared of myself. I think I'd be a bad driver. I'm scared of cars, period. I've had too many friends killed now, and I've seen too many people killed in my life when I drove across the country when I was 12. I'm sure that has a lot to do with it. If you see a few real dead bodies with brains on the pavement, it does a lot to change your attitude. It means you can get it too. I've had a lot of relatives killed. I've had a lot of dear friends killed. It's stupid. The whole activity is stupid.”

“The inability to forget is far more devastating than the inability to remember.”

“Comedy can be a cathartic way to deal with personal trauma.”

“I did an event in Washington, and it was like we lifted a sea.Immediately after [9/11], there was a stunned shock - kind of this feeling of "What do we do now?" I started performing, and there was a catharsis in the laughing. People started to be able to laugh again. Laughter can be many things - sometimes a medicine, sometimes a weapon, depending on.”

“After I got shot, you want to know the very first thing that entered my mind? The U.S. Mint. I am coin in the U.S. Army. Now, I have two small holes in me. I'm no longer perfectly culled. Do you want to know the very last thing that entered my mind, You.”

“Now as he watched Katie toying with a ring that wasn't there, he felt his old investigative instincts kick in. There'd been a husband, he thought; her husband was the missing element. Either she was still married or she wasn't, but he had an undeniable hunch that Katie was still afraid of him.”

“If you don't heal the wounds of your childhood, you bleed into the future.”

“That was the dirty secret associated with her past. Not that she'd been abused but that somehow she felt that she deserved it because she'd let it happen. Even now, it shamed her, and there were times when she felt hideously ugly, as though the scars that had been left behind were visible to everyone.”

“It's still scary every time I go back to the past. Each morning, my heart catches. When I get there, I remember how the light was, where the draft was coming from, what odors were in the air. When I write, I get all the weeping out.”

“At one time in my life, from the time I was seven until I was about 13, I didn't speak. I only spoke to my brother. The reason I didn't speak: I had been molested, and I told the name of the molester to my brother who told it to the family.”

“I was raped when I was very young. I told my brother the name of the person who had done it. Within a few days the man was killed. In my child's mind--seven and a half years old--I thought my voice had killed him. So I stopped talking for five years.”

“I'm not used to sensitivity any more. When I see people cry when I lose, save your tears. I don't know how to handle people crying any more. I lost my sensitivity like that. Please, you embarrass me when you cry because I don't know what to do when you cry. I don't know what to say.”

“I want to be braver and more honest about my life. When you're sexually abused, there's a lot of damage.”

“The only lasting trauma is the one we suffer without positive change.”

“My father was a mean, controlling and manipulative person for most of his life. He was unpredictable and unstable.”

“I was mentally, emotionally and verbally abused by my father as far back as I can remember until I left home at the age of eighteen”

“I was in a terrible mess in my childhood.”

“My father was a mean, controlling and manipulative person for most of his life. He was unpredictable and unstable. As a result, the atmosphere of our home was super-charged with fear because you never knew if what you did would make him mad or not.”

“I think middle-class people have the biggest trauma if they have nice imagey parents, all smiling and dolled up.”

“When I was a child I experienced moments of not wanting to see the ugliness, not wanting to see not being wanted. This lack of love went into my eyes and into my mind.”