Quotes About Trauma

I feel no nostalgia for our childhood: it was full of violence.

I was stunned. Fernando looked out, still screaming horrible threats at his daughter. He had thrown her like a thing.

I wont write the details or try to capture the error and pain in wors. But believe me: what they did broke my body-mind. It shaped every part of my life. This is not a hyperbole, not a claim to perpetual victimhood nor a ploy for sympathy, but rather, an enraging truth.

Nobody is stronger, nobody is weaker than someone who came back. There is nothing you can do to such a person because whatever you could do is less than what has already been done to him. We have already paid the price.

My father says that surviving a war makes you either very bitter or very frivolous.

But if you stuck around long enough at the time, the dead and wounded piled up so quickly they squeezed one another off the narrow platforms of your memory.

After life is bent, torn, exploded, there are shattered pieces that do not heal for years, if at all. What is left are scars and something else—shame, I suppose, shame for letting it all continue.

Coming to terms with loss is a difficult, painful, and largely solitary process which may be delayed rather than aided by distractions. Any rituals which underline the fact that bereavement is a profoundly traumatic event are helpful.

entirely, and he could hear the boy's slow, labored breathing. God Almighty, he thought. He had seen some bad things; some pretty bad things in seventeen years of soldiering. Done them, too. At Werbomont

I think there's a tremendous split between people who've been through a war and people who haven't.

Many soldiers closed their minds to the suffering of the Belgians as they focused on the priority of killing the enemy. Those who did care were marked for life by the horrors that they witnessed. Villages

Bruises heal more quickly than emotional scars do.

I wondered at all the ways abuse invents us

I know this is insane, but I somehow wish I had been in Auschwitz with my parents so I could really know what they lived through! I guess it's some kind of guilt about having had an easier life than they did.

No matter what I accomplish, it doesn't seem like much compared to surviving Auschwitz.

I'm not talking about YOUR book now, but look at how many books have already been written about the Holocaust. What's the point? People haven't changed... Maybe they need a newer, bigger Holocaust.

Further, we have a tendency to assume that traumatic events, from accidents to illnesses to all kinds of personal loss, can only provoke pain and lingering problems, especially if we talk about them with others. However, this isn't generally the case.

It is often said of me - some intend it as a compliment, others as a complaint - that I write about a single subject: the Holocaust. I have no quarrel with that. Why shouldn't I accept, with certain qualifications, the place assigned to me on the shelves of libraries?

I got bullied a lot when I was a kid, and because of that I thought for the most part that I didn't really have a childhood - I had to grow up so quick and there was no real enjoyment in that for me.

The abandoned infant's cry is rage, not fear.

I'm very interested in dysfunction. I kind of realized in my first film that a character with so much rage that she didn't know where to put it was both heartbreaking and interesting to me.

On 'Heavy Rain,' the game started with something that happened to me when I lost my son, my six-year-old boy, in a mall. I was so scared. I was curious to see if I could create that impression, that fear, in a game, an interactive experience.

I was never taught how to raise a child, because I wasn't raised properly.

I ran away. I kept running away. Almost once a week, I'd run away from those schools. They'd catch me. They'd bring me back to the school, beat me. And it was - it was terrible.