Quotes About Recovery

My treatment ended in March/April of '08. It wasn't until the end of that summer that I started to feel I wasn't depressed. Even when I went on vacation to Saint Lucia, I was kind of depressed, even though it was such a beautiful place.

After a Paralympic Games, I usually take a few months off to enjoy life or go on a family vacation.

If you ask me, I think 12-step programs are perfectly valid, can be an enormous help. But it depends on the individual.

Why would I lose sleep when I really need valuable sleep just to recuperate and come back and do my job?

I was living out on Long Island in Baldwin, New York when Hurricane Sandy hit. With the storm surge, the whole first floor of our house was under about three feet of water. We lost a lot of valuable stuff - sentimental stuff like pictures and Christmas ornaments. Nobody expected flooding that bad.

Love of country, subordination of personal interests to the common good, concern and care for the helpless and the impoverished - these are among the lost and faded values that we seek to recover and revitalize as we commence our journey towards a better Philippines.

By putting downward pressure on interest rates, the Fed is trying to make financial conditions more accommodative - supporting asset values and lower borrowing costs for households and businesses and thus encouraging the spending that spurs job creation and a stronger recovery.

Feel fee to be a usin' anythin' in the house, an' if there be anythin' thet ya be needin', make a list. I go to town most saturdays fer supplies, an' I can be a pickin' it up then. When ya feel more yerself like, ya might want to come along an' do yer own choosin'.

I didn't know the exact trajectory of my breakdown, but I did know that I'd become weak, holding onto wildness, cherishing the idea of it the way you blow a dying fire.

It is said that books save lives, but I also say that empty sketchbooks save lives too. I filled up many, and there is no doubt they saved mine.

Perhaps it was as well that she had been unconscious for four weeks. She had missed the aftermath, the SO-1 reports, the recriminations, Snood and Tamworth's funerals. She missed everything...except the blame. It was waiting for her when she awoke...

You don't forget nightmares, but when they've been exposed to enough sunlight, they fade.

After the accident he lacked a sense of fully inhabiting his own life, as if he were still, somehow, tumbling through that tumbling air…He wasn't in despair, he was just tumbling, perpetually tumbling, relentlessly tumbling at the mercy of that terrible weightlessness and the betrayal of gravity…He was there, but he was always in that other place, the tumbling place, the place he was used to now.

Saved, rescued, but not quite so good as new...

When I began a diet a week before my stroke, I never dreamed of such a dramatic result.

As for myself, I am splintered by great waves. I am coloured glass from a church window long since shattered. I find pieces of myself everywhere, and I cut myself handling them.

Memory loss is one way of coping with damage.

You cannot disown what is yours. Flung out, there is always the return, the reckoning, the revenge, perhaps the reconciliation. There is always the return. And the wound will take you there.

I knew clearly that I could not rebuild my life or put it back together in any way. I had no idea what might lie on the other side of this place. I only knew that the before-world was gone forever.

Yes. Just pass me my leg will you? It's on top of the wardrobe where he threw it, and I think my right arm is leaning over by the wall. My head is in the gas oven but it will probably be all right, I'm told that green colour wears off. Unfortunately I threw my heart to the dogs. Never mind. No one will notice how much is missing from the inside, will they?

I wanted clothes about me because I felt I had been bone stripped. The solid knowable shape had gone.

They say every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it? By forgetting. We cannot keep in mind too many things. There is only the present and nothing to remember.

All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words.

The door had swung open. I had gone in. The room had no floor. I had fallen and fallen and fallen. But I was alive. And that night the cold stars made a constellation from the pieces of my broken mind.