Quotes About Trauma

The 'Horn 'OK' Pleassss' harassment incident and the mob attack there had sent me spiralling into a deep state of depression in 2008.

Both Mom and Dad were blackout, killer drinkers. Dad came to school football games drunk. I'd find Mom passed out in the bushes, scared and hiding.

There is research on the effects of 9/11, and you know, compared to the enormity of it, it didn't have a huge effect on people's mood. They were going about their business, mostly.

For too many families, the aftershock of the war in Afghanistan will be felt every day, most probably for the rest of their lives. I know because I've looked into the eyes and the faces of grieving mothers.

Most people's problems start as children when their parents, especially mothers, cause them to become angry.

For the most part they carried themselves with poise, a kind of dignity. Now and then, however, there were times of panic, when they squealed or wanted to squeal but couldn't, when they twitched and made moaning sounds and covered their heads and said Dear Jesus and flopped around on the earth and fired their weapons blindly and cringed and sobbed and begged for the noise to stop and went wild and made stupid promises to themselves and to God and to their mothers and fathers, hoping not to die.

Afterward, when the firing ended, they would blink and peek up. They would touch their bodies, feelings shame, then quickly hiding it. They would force themselves to stand. As if in slow motion, frame by frame, the world would take on the old logic - absolute silence, then the wind, then sunlight, then voices. It was the burden of being alive.

The bad stuff never stops happening: it lives in its own dimension, replaying itself over and over.

The side effects of combat can be unpredictable.

The human mind has a way of punishing itself for killing a fellow man. It remembers and relives the incident again and again.

I got PTSD from high school.

Certain kinds of trauma visited on peoples are so deep, so cruel, that unlike money, unlike vengeance, even unlike justice, or rights, or the goodwill of others, only writers can translate such trauma and turn sorrow into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination.

To Sethe, the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay.

Beloved wasn't interested. She said when she cried there was no one. That dead men lay on top of her. That she had nothing to eat. Ghosts without skin stick their fingers in her and said beloved in the dark and bitch in the light.

Beloved so agitated she behaved like a two-year-old.

Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn't like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn't think it up.

A shudder ran through Paul D. A bone-cold spasm that made him clutch his knees. He didn't know if it was bad whiskey, nights in the cellar, pig fever, iron bits, smiling roosters, fired feet, laughing dead men, hissing grass, rain, apple blossoms, neck jewelry, Judy in the slaughterhouse, Halle in the butter, ghost-white stairs, chokecherry trees, cameo pins, aspens, Paul A's face, sausage or the loss of a red, red heart

How long had childhood trauma hurtled him away from the rip and wave of life?

Certain kinds of trauma visited on peoples are so deep, so cruel, that unlike money, unlike vengeance, even unlike justice, or rights, or the goodwill of others, only writers can translate such trauma and turn sorrow into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination. A writer's life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity.

All five were profoundly shaken by the interwar catastrophe that struck their native Austria.

I wasn't a kid. I was thirteen: I had been raped, I had lost my front teeth and I had suffered disillusionment with life. But I knew there was something better: there was an outside – an outside of me. And somewhere that wasn't Margate. Yet I owe so much to that place I grew up, mainly because it is so beautiful. And what is so fantastic and beautiful is the sunset, and that is free.

She helplessly watched as he pressed the switchblade against the second joint. He let out a grunt, and the knife sliced through her finger, cutting it off.

The sentence, "She was hollow, as though something had chewed a hole in her body and the hole had grown infected," unless it's been used before by someone else in a story she cannot recall.

A part of growing up through a violent event like this is that the veil is pulled away and you are suddenly able to see the suffering in the eyes of other people.