Quotes About Trauma

You could argue that Liesel Meminger has it easy. She did have it easy compared to Max Vandenburg. Certainly, her brother practically died in her arms. Her mother abandoned her. But anything was better than being a Jew.

Liesel was sure her mother carried the memory of him, slung over her shoulder. She dropped him. She saw his feet and legs and body slap the platform.

In the last months of the war, when I raped in uniform – we were, by then, so full of death (and the destruction of everything we had and knew) that the act of love, even in travesty, felt like a spell against the riot of murder.

Only parents and torturers and the janitors of holocausts are asked to stand the sound of so much human grief.

war often wounds the soul as deeply as it does the body, sometimes more so.

a private hell was something you lived with alone, even when someone else's casual questions nudged old, raw wounds within yourself.

N O T H I N G I would like to write one of those sophisticated stories in which even though nothing much happens there's lots to write about. That can't be done in Kashmir. It's not sophisticated, what happens here. There's too much blood for good literature. Q 1: Why is it not sophisticated? Q 2: What is the acceptable amount of blood for good literature? y

In remote border areas, near the Line of Control, the speed and regularity with which the bodies turned up, and the condition some of them were in, wasn't easy to cope with. Some were delivered in sacks, some in small polythene bags, just pieces of flesh, some hair and teeth. Notes pinned to them by the quartermasters of death said: 1kg, 27 kg, 500 g.

When his bouts of violence began to include the

Someone else said she was a rapevictim (which was a word in every language).

was once on trauma duty when a young man about twenty years old was rolled in, shot in the buttock.

Having already done more harm than the bullet had

He looked like the victim of a forceps delivery.

rape is not aggressive sexuality, it is sexualized aggression.

I seen a man grab hold to a fellow and cut off his arm. Cut it off at the shoulder. He had to work at it a while...but he cut it clean off. The man looked down saw his arm gone and started crying. After that he more dangerous with that one arm than the other man is with two. He got less to lose. There's a lot of one-arm men walking around.

But then, look at me. My brain is incorrectly formed, and I'm shaped like a tube. Plus, I'm an alcoholic, a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, was raised in a cult and have no education. So, really, if you think about it, the only thing that separates me from the guy with the stinky foot and no teeth is a book deal and some cologne.

After I cut off his penis, I sautéed it in rosemary butter and ate it But did you go to a meeting afterwards? Yes I wouldn't worry about it, then.

Normal people hadn't been molested or reared by a clinically psychotic mother, an alcoholic father, or a perversely mad psychiatrist who wore a Santa hat and performed toilet bowl readings. These were normal people, and I lived among them now. I thought, This must be what I want.

The fact that at the core of emotional disorders is the birth trauma, a process of life and death, explains the intensity and depth that otherwise would be incomprehensible.

I saw something nasty in the woodshed.

Mortality on the Atlantic produced a crisis of enormous proportions, as Africans labored under the cumulative weight of these deaths that remained unresolved. . . . Entrapped, Africans confronted a dual crisis: the trauma of death, and the inability to respond appropriately to death. This indirect violence, arguably, was the most abject experience of the captives' Atlantic crossing.

That scared me a lot. It scared me how much it scared me. Being punished for something you did not do. Or being an innocent victim. It's just something that I never want to experience.

It's like if I blamed my Aunt Helen, I would have to blame her dad for hitting her, and the friend of the family that fooled around with her when she was little. And the person that fooled around with him. And God for not stopping this and things that much worse. And I did do that for a while, but then I just couldn't anymore. Because it wasn't going anywhere. Because it wasn't the point.

He said that it was a very bad accident, and my Aunt Helen was definitely killed instantly. In other words, there was no pain. There was no pain anymore.