Quotes from Jessica Stern

I can still bring into my body the joy I felt at seeing the first trillium of spring, which seemed to be telling me, "Never give up hope, spring will come."

Some people's lives seem to flow in a narrative; mine had many stops and starts. That's what trauma does. It interrupts the plot. You can't process it because it doesn't fit with what came before or what comes afterwards.

This book is a memoir - not of specific life events, but of the processes of dissociation, and of re-enlivening emotions that are shameful to admit or even to feel. It is an account of the altered states that trauma induces, which make it possible to survive a life-threatening event but impair the capacity to feel fear, and worse still, impair the ability to love.

I can still bring into my body the joy I felt at seeing the first trillium of spring, which seemed to be telling me, "Never give up hope, spring will come.

I have listened and I have been quiet all my life. But now I will speak.

I believe the best revenge is to live.

What is courage?" I ask. "Bearing witness. That is a form of courage.

My breathe would catch at the sight of violets-so common in the woods at home, so surprising in the mountains. The violet's message was "Keep up your courage, stay true to what you believe in." p264

You are significantly more likely to die in a car accident, especially if you fail to wear a seat belt, than to be attacked by ISIS. Wear your seat belt

After a series of traumas, one can lose the capacity to feel fear appropriately.

Here is what I think now, reading what I wrote down for the police at age fifteen, right after I was raped. I was a good girl. Always a good girl, even when I was bad. I did my homework. If I can only be good enough, someone will eventually notice that I am trying so hard, exhausting myself with my effort to be good. This is true even today.

Why does the threat of violent death alter some of us, even if subtly, forever? Why does it make us unusually numb or calm when we ought to feel terrified? Why do scents or sounds trigger in some of us a feeling of terror or unbearable dread, even in situations where we know, at least, intellectually, that we are perfectly safe?

That man penetrated me with his shame. Shame, I realize now, is an infectious disease. Shame can be sexually transmitted.

But in the mountains, I was forgiven. And my dad was forgiven, too.

Killing civilians and destroying infrastructure are not typically a terrorist organization's end goals. Rather, they are a means to provoke a political reaction.

When I asked my father whether he thought that it was possible that his mother was raped behind that closed door, he said, "She had washer-woman knees. No one could possibly think of her as a sexual object. Besides," he explained, "she would have told my sisters, and they would have told me." I am not so sure. Maybe someone needed to ask her. Someone needed to want to know, to be able to hear the answer.

Other flowers came at the end of the summer, but by then the winter sadness had already dissipated, and the effect of the blooms was not the same.

there is a distinction between understanding and sympathizing.

when it comes to coping with evil, ignorance is our worst enemy.

based on them, I was later to learn, make all sides involved in the war look even worse than we believed them to be at the time, including Western governments

I have listened and I have been quiet all my life. But now I will speak.