Quotes About Trauma

The damaged loves the damaged.

She'd lived through something the rest of them could never imagine. So much torture and horror that she didn't need to tell people about it. She'd never need drama or joy or pain ever again.

Each wedding picture was less of a memento than a scar. Proof of some horror movie scenario Katherine Kenton has survived.

Yeah, parents will always fuck you up.

The way my face is without a jaw, my throat just ends in sort of a hole with my tongue hanging out. Around the hole, the skin is all scar tissue: dark red lumps and shiny the way you'd look if you got the cherry pie in a pie eating contest. If I let my tongue hang down, you can see the roof of my mouth, pink and smooth as the inside of a crab's back, and hanging down around the roof is the white vertebrae horseshoe of the upper teeth I have left.

Stabbing, Mitzi could write a book about. For example, why some killers kept stabbing for so long. Only the first thrust is intended to inflict pain. The subsequent twenty, thirty, forty stab wounds are to resolve the suffering.

Ricky tasted something he hadn't experienced since childhood: the panic of losing the hand of a guardian. In this case the lost parent was his sanity. Somewhere

One day a pickaninny was happy and the next the light was gone from them; in between they had been introduced to a new reality of bondage.

Here's one delusion: that we can escape slavery. We can't. Its scars will never fade.

How to undo slavery's injury to the mental faculties–so many freed men continued to be enslaved by the horrors they'd endured.

Their daddies taught them how to keep a slave in line, passed down this brutal heirloom.

The ruthless engine of cotton required its fuel of African bodies. Crisscrossing the ocean, ships brought bodies to work the land and to breed more bodies. The

För det är vad man gör när man tar någons barn – stjäl deras framtid.

Cora remembered Caesar's words about the men at the factory who were hunted by the plantation, carrying it here despite the miles. It lived in them. It still lived in all of them, waiting to abuse and taunt when chance presented itself.

that's what you do when you take away someone's babies—steal their future. Torture them as much as you can when they are on this earth, then take away the hope that one day their people will have it better.

He heard the sound of teeth splintering.

Sometimes he felt as if the rubber bullet had been travelling a whole decade.

Life in a concentration camp tore open the human soul and exposed its depths.

The most painful part of beatings is the insult which they imply.

Thank heaven, Sigmund Freud was spared knowing the concentration camps from the inside. His subjects lay on a couch designed in the plush style of Victorian culture, not in the filth of Auschwitz.

for the war gave us the war of nerves and it gave us the concentration camp.

La Segunda Guerra Mundial enriqueció nuestros conocimientos con los estudios sobre «psicopatología de las masas» (si se me permite parafrasear el título del libro de LeBon), pues nos legó la guerra de nervios y la experiencia imborrable de los campos de concentración.

Disgust, horror and pity are emotions that our spectator could not really feel anymore. The sufferers, the dying and the dead, became such common place sights to him after a few weeks of camp life that they could not move him anymore.

Las reacciones descritas de la primera fase quedaban atrás a los pocos días, en el escaso tiempo que necesitaba un prisionero para entrar en la segunda fase: la de la apatía generalizada que lo llevaba a una especie de muerte emocional.