Selected trauma quotes

1. I turned vegetarian after 9/11. A friend of mine came back from New York and said that he couldn't stand the smell of burnt flesh. It immediately reminded me of a barbecue.

2. I haven't had that good a time in ages. Since September 11, really. I just felt so happy, it was like the sun came out of the clouds for me. I love Italy.

3. When shall we see poets born? After a time of disasters and great misfortunes, when harrowed nations begin to breathe again. And then, shaken by the terror of such spectacles, imaginations will paint things entirely strange to those who have not witnessed them.

4. The scars left from the child's defeat in the fight against irrational authority are to be found at the bottom of every neurosis.

5. My problem was that I felt ashamed of feeling sad or angry. Now, I don't hide my vulnerability in my lyrics. There's no way I was going to get raped and not get something out of it. I learned about power and hope and forgiveness. I like who I am now and I wouldn't be who I am if that hadn't happened.

6. You may well ask why I write. And yet my reasons are quite many. For it is not unusual in human beings who have witnessed the sack of a city or the falling to pieces of a people to set down what they have witnessed for the benefit of unknown heirs or of generations infinitely remote; or, if you please, just to get the sight out of their heads.

7. I have suffered two grave accidents in my life, one in which a streetcar knocked me down... The other accident is Diego.

8. Communists are people who fancied that they had an unhappy childhood.

9. I've enjoyed the accommodations offered by police departments from Florida to Hawaii. Any time I saw a badge, something in me would snap.

10. History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

11. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage.

12. Nazi Germany was so destructive to Judaism not only for the loss of life, but because many who survived began to see the practice of Judaism as somewhat of a health hazard.

13. The Nazi murder squads just wouldn't waste a bullet on a child. I just couldn't process that. I couldn't handle it.

14. Ender stepped under the water and rinsed himself, took the sweat of combat and let it run down the drain. All gone, except they recycled it and we'll be drinking Bonzo's blood water in the morning. All the life gone out of it, but his blood just the same, his blood and my sweat, washed down in their stupidity or cruelty or whatever it was that made them let it happen.

15. For a decade Americans have been steeped in the rhetoric of 'zero tolerance' and the faith that virtually all problems from drug addiction to lousy teaching can be solved by pouring on the punishment. Even without a Commander in Chief who pledges to rid the world of evildoers, smoke them out of their holes and the like, we would be vulnerable to the temptation to brush aside frustrating complexities and relieve intolerable fear (at least for the moment) by settling on one or more scapegoats to crush. To imagine that trauma casts out fantasy is a dangerous mistake.

16. Look at Jewish history. Unrelieved lamenting would be intolerable. So, for every ten Jews beating their breasts, God designated one to be crazy and amuse the breast-beaters. By the time I was five I knew I was that one.

17. 'If the first casualty of war is innocence, then perhaps with each bullet fired, bomb detonated, leader overthrown, wall built, economy destroyed and family member killed, we are not creating goodwill and harmony, but rather another child who believes violence is the only means to bring about change in the world.'

18. Shoot the bitch and write a book. That's what I did.

19. When you find yourself locked onto an unpleasant train of thought, heading for the places in your past where the screaming is unbearable, remember there's always madness. Madness is the emergency exit.

20. I have been afraid of putting air in a tire ever since I saw a tractor tire blow up and throw Newt Hardbine's father over the top of the Standard Oil sign. I'm not lying. He got stuck up there. About nineteen people congregated during the time it took for Norman Strick to walk up to the Courthouse and blow the whistle for the volunteer fire department. They eventually did come with the ladder and haul him down, and he wasn't dead but lost his hearing and in many other ways was never the same afterward. They said he overfilled the tire.

21. Born down in a dead man's town; The first kick I took was when I hit the ground. You end up like a dog that's been beat too much 'Til you spend half your life just covering up.

22. My father rarely spoke of life before [he left Cuba]. About prison, he jsut said, 'That man is a genius at PR.' Castro would come to the jail in the middle of the night and ask the prisoners, 'What are you doing here? Don't you see we're trying to do the right thing?' The reason I'm not more political is because I have music. And from a young age, I needed it. After prison, my father came to America, joined the Army, fought in Vietnam -- and was exposed to Agent Orange. He died a slow, horrible death. Music was my escape.

23. The bloody massacre in Bangladesh quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the assassination of Allende drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the war in the Sinai Desert made people forget Allende, the Cambodian massacre made people forget Sinai, and so on and so forth until ultimately everyone lets everything be forgotten. In times when history still moved slowly, events were few and far between and easily committed to memory. They formed a commonly accepted backdrop for thrilling scenes of adventure in private life. Nowadays, history moves at a brisk clip. A historical event, though soon forgotten, sparkles the morning after with the dew of novelty. No longer a backdrop, it is now the adventure itself, an adventure enacted before the backdrop of the commonly accepted banality of private life.

24. My mother groan'd! my father wept. Into the dangerous world I leapt: Helpless, naked, piping loud: Like a fiend hid in a cloud.

25. Brain gets bent, heart gets broken You can't jump off once the pages turn School is out but never over That's the only lesson you can learn

26. Indians scattered on dawn's highway bleeding Ghosts crowd the young child's fragile eggshell mind. Me and my mother and father, and a grandmother and a grandfather. were driving through the desert, at dawn, and a truck load of Indian workers had either hit another car, or just - I don't know what happened - but there were Indians scattered all over the highway, bleeding to death. So the car pulls up and stops. That was the first time I tasted fear. I musta' been about four - like a child is like a flower, his head is just floating in the breeze, man. The reaction I get now thinking about it, looking back - is that the souls of the ghosts of those dead Indians... maybe one or two of 'em... were just running around freaking out, and just leaped into my soul. And they're still there.

27. Interviewer: I read a post on the Internet from a young girl who had been victimized by someone and her position was like, 'I can talk about this now because Fiona Apple can talk about what happened to her.' Do you look at yourself as a role model for women and girls who've had this experience? Fiona: That's the only reason I ever brought the whole rape thing up. It's a terrible thing, but it happens to so many people. I mean, 80 percent of the people I've told have said right back to me, 'That happened to me too.' It's so common, and so ridiculous that it's a hard thing to talk about. It angers me so much because something like that happens to you and you carry it around for the rest of your life. No matter how much therapy you go through, no matter how much healing you go through, it's part of you. I just feel that it's such a tragedy that so many people have to bear the extra burden of having to keep it secret from everyone else. As if it's too icky a subject to burden other people with and everyone's going to think you're a victim forever. Then you've labeled yourself a victim, and you've been taken advantage of, and you're ruined, and you're soiled, and you're not pure, you know. If I'm in a position where people are looking up to me in any way, then it's absolutely my responsibility to be open and honest about this, because if I'm not, what does that say to people? It doesn't change a person -- well, it does change a person but it doesn't take anything away from you. It can only strengthen you. It has made me so angry in the past. Like I wanted to say it to somebody. I really wanted somebody to connect with, somebody to understand me, somebody to comfort me. But I felt like I couldn't say anything about because it was taboo to talk about.

28. Our most effective terrorists, whether they are armed with bombs or with poetry, hardly escape from infancy.

29. I was in a state of witless shock, as though flames had suddenly enwrapped and paralyzed me so that for a moment I had no mind, no memory.

30. the little death. What would or could be left of a human being after such an experience?

31. Been through Hell? Whaddya bring back for me?

32. Many Franks of the sixteenth generation were killed in the muck of the trenches, he died not once but many times, developing an obsessive dread of war which never left him. By the time the Americans entered the war, he was turning his many thoughts to politics.

33. You expect to break me? Impossible! You broke me years ago. You killed me years ago...

34. 'I am the one you saw to-day, who fell Senseless before you, hearing a certain bell: A bell that broke great memories in my brain.' 'I am the one who passed unnoticed before you, Invisible, in a cloud of secret pain.'

35. Interviewer: Has Davey's monster in his neck surfaced recently? And what's his name? Davey: He doesn't have a name. He's gone. Forever. Interviewer: Would you care to elaborate as to what the monster in the neck actually was? Davey: It's just gone. Yeah it's just gone. It's gone. Interviewer: I'm getting the distinct impression that you really don't want to talk about the monster in your neck. Davey: Yeah.

36. 'I shall never forget that event - a boy was brutally killed by a Cossack with his sabre.'

37. Beneath the pressure of torments such as these, the feeble remnant of the good within me succumbed. Evil thoughts became my sole intimates - the darkest and most evil of thoughts. The moodiness of my usual temper increased to hatred of all things and of all mankind; while, from the sudden, frequent, and ungovernable outbursts of a fury to which I now blindly abandoned myself, my uncomplaining wife, alas! was the most usual and the most patient of sufferers.

38. 'Doubtless,' said I, 'what it utters is its only stock and store, Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore.

39. Now here's another example of overprotection. Did you ever notice on the TV news, every time some guy with an AK-47 strolls onto a schoolyard and kills three or four kids and a couple of teachers, the next day, the next day, the school is overrun with counselors and psychiatrists and grief counselors and trauma therapists trying to help the children cope? Shit, when I was in school, someone came to our school and killed three or four of us, we went right on with our arithmetic. 35 classmates minus 4 equals 31. We were tough. We were tough.

40. About a week after it [my bus accident] happened, I said to myself: 'Enough of this. I mean: you can't just let life land on you. Bad things happen of course, but you have to take control of your life.'

41. I must have looked like a ghost, Cause' something frightened me. And since then I've been so good at vanishing.

42. We lived in a small house, and nobody argued in a whisper. We were exposed to [my parents'] violent outbursts against each other. That stuff sticks. (2004)

43. It was just a nightmare you never recover from. You're watching this thing go down, and you have no arms, no legs, no tongue; you're just an amoeba. There's nothing you can do. (2003)

44. I was given five injections. That evening I developed extremely high fever. I was trembling. My arms and my legs were swollen, huge size. Mengele and Dr. Konig and three other doctors came in the next morning. They looked at my fever chart, and Dr. Mengele said, laughingly, 'Too bad, she is so young. She has only two weeks to live...'

45. Jack Reacher stayed alive, because he got cautious. He got cautious because he heard an echo from his past. He had a lot of past, and the echo was from the worst part of it.

46. My mother was killed in a plane crash, so I hate travelling in planes. Death is so unexpected. I would actually rather stay at home and not go anywhere.

47. He had a battered face that looked as if it had been hit by everything but the bucket of a dragline. It was scarred, flattened, thickened, checkered, and welted. It was a face that had nothing to fear. Everything had been done to it that anybody could think of.

48. I was traumatized into writing by war events. By going through a war in a combat situation and feeling the desperate sense of terrible need for some sort of therapy. To get it out of my gut, write it down. This is the way it began for me.

49. In horror, in terror, she accepted the metamorphosis - gnat, foam, ant, until death. And it's only the beginning, she thought. She stood motionless, as if it were possible to play tricks with time, possible to stop it from following its course. But her hands stiffened against her quivering lips. When the bells began to sound the hour she let out the first scream.

50. I don't think there was anything in my brain right then except the usual background static - the kind you get on your radio when it's turned up all the way and tuned to no station at all. My brain had checked to the power, so to speak; the little guy wearing the Napoleon hat inside was showing aces and betting them.

51. There isn't any division of time to express the marrow of our lives, the time between the explosion of lead from the muzzle and the meat impact, between the impact and the darkness. There's only barren instant replay that shows nothing new. I shot her; she fell; and there was an indescribable moment of silence, an infinite duration of time, and we all stepped back, watching the ball go around and around, ticking, bouncing, lighting for an instant, going on, heads and tails, red and black, odd and even...I think that moment ended. I really do. But sometimes, in the dark, I think that hideous random moment is still going on, that the wheel is even yet in spin, and I dreamed all the rest. What must it be like for a suicide coming down from a high ledge? I'm sure it must be a very sane feeling. That's probably why they scream all the way down.

52. It may be that nothing in the world is so hard to comprehend as a terror whose time has come and gone - which may be why parents can scold their children for their fear of the boogeyman, when as children themselves they had to cope with exactly the same fears (and the same sympathetic but uncomprehending parents). That may be why one generation's nightmare becomes the next generation's sociology, and even those who have walked through the fire have trouble remembering exactly what those burning coals felt like.

53. It's probably wrong to believe there can be any limit to the horror which the human mind can experience. On the contrary, it seems that some exponential effect begins to obtain as deeper and deeper darkness falls - as little as one may like to support the idea that when the nightmare grows black enough, horror spawns horror, one coincidental evil begets other, often more deliberate evils, until finally blackness seems to cover everything. And the most terrifying question of all may be just how much horror the human mind can stand and still maintain a wakeful, staring, unrelenting sanity. That such events have their own Rube Goldberg absurdity goes almost without saying. At some point, it all starts to become rather funny. That may be the point at which sanity begins either to save itself or to buckle and break down; that point at which one's sense of humor begins to reassert itself.

54. Finally, she broke her silence and spelled it out to Dr. Burkley. Kneeling, John Kennedy's personal physician indicated her ghastly skirt with a trembling hand. 'Another dress?', he suggested diffidently. 'No', she whispered fiercely, 'Let them see the horror.'

55. ...I realized that once people are broken in certain ways they can't ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one.