115 Trauma Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

'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.'

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

'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.'

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.

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.

'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.

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.

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.'

The guy was dead as hell. He lay on the floor in his pajamas with his brains scattered all over the rug and my gun was in his hand. I kept rubbing my face to wipe out the fuzz that clouded my mind but the cops wouldn't let me. One would pull my hand away and shout a question at me that made my head ache even worse and another would slap me with a wet rag until I felt like I had been split wide open.

She begged me to say something, but I let her squeeze it out herself. ' The police came again, but Berga wouldn't tell them anything.' The tongue moistened the lips again. The scarlet was starting to wash away and I could see the natural tones of of wet flesh. ' The other men came... they were different from the police. Federal men, I think. They took her away. Before she came back...Those men came.' She put something into the last three words that wasn't in the others, some breathless, nameless fear. Her hands were tight balls with the nails biting into the palms. A glassiness had passed over her eyes while she thought about it, then vanished as if afraid it had been seen.

[Public school is a place] where the sensitive experience a horrified dissociation from reality that can sometimes never fade away.

When I got up again, I'd shed the only part of me that had ever thought I'd find words for even the smallest bit of life.

My generation is haunted by the images of the Jewish children in the ghettos and the concentration camps. The crimes committed against them caused us grieve that haunts us through our lives. But for the very same raison d'etre we feel outraged by the images of persecuted Palestinian children, and this time it is Israel that is responsible for the offenses.

I'm from that part of the country. I was born in Mobile. Ala. and grew up in South Carolina. I have family in Miss. Having gone through a number of hurricanes myself, none obviously as devastating as this one, one of the things you forget about is that at least as a parent, you're able to understand what has transpired in your life. But for a one- or two-year-old, it's a completely different level of devastation because everything that they know and have ever known is gone.

He would go to minister the girl ... For in her brilliance, her isolation, her pain, her guilt, he saw his own stolen childhood and the seeds of pain that lived with him still.

Only when she stopped being dead, only these few weeks with [him] in the house did she understand how dead she had been. Lost in her guilt, her shame, her pain, her losses. Now that she had learned again to love and hope, now that she was no longer as ashamed or guilty, of course it was the very joy that was killing her again.

Our men taking part in the executions suffered more from nervous exhaustion than those who were to be shot.

This book is the account of a personal experience - so personal that for four years I could not bring myself to write it. It is different from anything else I have ever written. My er books have been factual, impersonal narratives of my expeditions and flights. This book, on the other hand, is the story of an experience which was in considerable part subjective. I very nearly died before it was over.

When I was younger I took jazz, but the teacher yelled at me and I never went back, ever again!

The sense of not having the whole story that comes from living close up to traumatic events.

You become hard when you carry out such orders.

Boot-faced cats aren't born but made, often because they've tried to outstare or occasionally rape a speeding car and have been repaired by a vet who just pulled all the bits together and stuck the stitches in where there was room.

A mind that has confronted ruin for years Is half or more a ruined mind.

I was a stricken deer that left the herd Long since.

My suffering had left me sad and gloomy.

He smiled at her, and she felt uncomfortable as she always did when he showed her affection as opposed to lust. Lust she expected from a man but not affection. The men in her life, her brothers and father, had not been affectionate; and lust would have been inappropriate, though she saw them direct that at other women, usually women of low rank, ripe to be used and cast aside

I thank God, I shall never again visit a slave-country. To this day, if I hear a distant scream, it recalls with painful vividness my feelings, when passing a house near Pernambuco, I heard the most pitiable moans, and could not but suspect that some poor slave was being tortured, yet knew that I was as powerless as a child even to remonstrate. I suspected that these moans were from a tortured slave, for I was told that this was the case in another instance. Near Rio de Janeiro I lived opposite to an old lady, who kept screws to crush the fingers of her female slaves. I have stayed in a house where a young household mulatto, daily and hourly, was reviled, beaten, and persecuted enough to break the spirit of the lowest animal. I have seen a little boy, six or seven years old, struck thrice with a horse-whip (before I could interfere) on his naked head, for having handed me a glass of water not quite clean; I saw his father tremble at a mere glance from his master's eye. These latter cruelties were witnessed by me in a Spanish colony, in which it has always been said, that slaves are better treated than by the Portuguese, English, or other European nations. I have seen at Rio de Janeiro a powerful negro afraid to ward off a blow directed, as he thought, at his face. I was present when a kind-hearted man was on the point of separating forever the men, women, and little children of a large number of families who had long lived together. I will not even allude to the many heart-sickening atrocities which I authentically heard of; - nor would I have mentioned the above revolting details, had I not met with several people, so blinded by the constitutional gaiety of the negro as to speak of slavery as a tolerable evil. Such people have generally visited at the houses of the upper classes, where the domestic slaves are usually well treated, and they have not, like myself, lived amongst the lower classes. Such inquirers will ask slaves about their condition; they forget that the slave must indeed be dull, who does not calculate on the chance of his answer reaching his master's ears.

He touched me... Control myself and try to act As if I remember my name But he touched me...he touched me... And suddenly nothing is the same!

When they carried Jack in, Hill threw his coat over Jack's head, and I held his head to throw the coat over it. It wasn't repulsive to me for one moment - nothing was repulsive to me -

Something traumatic happened to me when I was younger. I was with this old black woman, and she was very wise, very Alice Walker, The Color Purple... She looked at me and she says, 'Baby...you know I used to be able to fly but I can't fly no more, baby. But baby, you...? You too fat to fly.'

But what's it really done? Where have we really come to? Lying in a hospital bed in Munich, Germany, watching my ear being thrown out into a garbage can, not being able to take it on the trip back because I don't know the German word for formaldehyde, and having a nurse walk into my room, looking at that piece of my body that's laying in the bottom of the garbage, and saying 'es ist alles ein Schauspiel', which means it's all a big joke. Excuse me, I didn't know, do you open up the lungs of a smoker and say 'oh my golly, I thought smoking was supposed to be good for you?!' Do you open up Terry Funk's non functioning liver and say, 'Oh! I didn't know that four decades of heavy drinking took this kind of toll?!' So if they show that much respect to the patients, then what made me any different? Because I was a wrestler. And professional wrestling will never be respected, no matter how many teeth I lose, no matter how many ears I lose, no matter how many brain cells have to die!'

What [he] felt for her was genuine, and not just for love of her perfect flesh. I know [him] truly, and I know that when he loved his bride it was not a queen he loved, but rather the girl as she might have been if she had not been destroyed in her childhood

Poor beauty. May I not pity her, of all people? She loved him, but she had only learned one way to show her love - through cruelty and abuse

He was wild the way a mistreated dog becomes wild, not because it loves freedom, but because it has lost trust

At that point, if I had consciously realized what I was already planning to do, if I had admitted my rage, my feelings of betrayal, then my conditioning would have kicked in and I would have either suppressed those feelings or gone mad

Once the experience of war makes visible the possibility of death that lies locked up in each moment, our thoughts cannot travel from one day to the next without meeting death's face. The mind is then strung up to a pitch it can stand for only a short time; but each new dawn introduces the same necessity; and days piled on days make years. On each one of these days the soul suffers violence. Regularly, each morning, the soul castrates itself of aspiration, for thought cannot journey through time without meeting death on the way. Thus war effaces all conceptions of purpose or goal, including even its own 'war aims.' It effaces the very notion of war's being brought to an end. Consequently, nobody does anything to bring this end about. In the presence of an armed enemy, what hand can relinquish its weapon? The mind ought to find a way out, but the mind has lost all capacity to so much as look outward. The mind is completely absorbed in doing itself violence. Always in human life, whether war or slavery is in question, intolerable sufferings continue, as it were, by the force of their own specific gravity, and so look to the outsider as though they deprived the sufferer of the resources which might serve to extricate him. [p.181]

I hear the doctor standing over me screamin I can make it/Got a body full of bullet holes layin here naked

I'm having nightmares, homicidal fantansies/I wake up stranglin, danglin my bed sheets/I call the nurse cause it hurts, to reminisce/How did it come to this? I wish they didn't miss

we thug niggaz and we came in packs/Every one of niggaz strapped sippin on 'yaq (Cognac)/In the back, my AR-15/Thuggin till I die, these streets got me cravin thorazine

Perhaps I was addicted to the dark-side/somewhere inside my childhood, witness my heart die

My pulse rushing, see me clutching into insanity/They shot at my cousin, now we bustin at they whole family

You know something? I'm sorry that you didn't get raped.

No, the fact that -you- don't wanna wear a thong is because you're still afraid of 9/11!

My mother would torture me for at least eight hours a day for a solid year once, using a variety of ice-water enimas, burning me with matches, burning me with cigarettes, even at one point hanging me up-side down for about six hours, burying me, using me as a float when we were in a ship wreck-- she actually used me as a life preserver, she just wrapped me around herself and didn't care whether I breathed or not, tried to use me one time to stop up a leaky gas valve in our kitchen, just said, 'Put your lips over that thing.'

My family was a bunch of drunks, when I was six I came up missing, they put my picture on a bottle of scotch.

They were gunning the motorcycles. There were these little backfires. There was one noise like that. I thought it was a backfire. Then next I saw Connally grabbing his arms and saying 'no, no, no, no, no,' with his fist beating. Then Jack turned and I turned. All I remember was a blue-gray building up ahead. Then Jack turned back so neatly, his last expression was so neat... you know that wonderful expression he had when they'd ask him a question about one of the ten million pieces they have in a rocket, just before he'd answer. He looked puzzled, then he slumped forward. He was holding out his hand ... I could see a piece of his skull coming off. It was flesh-colored, not white-he was holding out his hand ... I can see this perfectly clean piece detaching itself from his head. Then he slumped in my lap, his blood and his brains were in my lap ... Then Clint Hill [the Secret Service man], he loved us, he made my life so easy, he was the first man in the car ... We all lay down in the car ... And I kept saying, Jack, Jack, Jack, and someone was yelling 'he's dead, he's dead.' All the ride to the hospital I kept bending over him, saying 'Jack, Jack, can you hear me, I love you, Jack.'

I was sent to Treblinka, Minsk, Lemberg and Auschwitz. When I see the images before my eyes, it all comes back to me ... Corpses, corpses, corpses. Shot, gassed, decaying corpses. They seemed to pop out of the ground when a grave was opened. It was a delirium of blood. It was an inferno, a hell, and I felt I was going insane.

When I arrived at the place of the execution, the gunmen fired into a pit the size of several rooms. They fired from small submachine guns. As I arrived, I saw a Jewish woman and a small child in her arms in the pit. I wanted to pull out the child, but then a bullet smashed the skull of the child. My driver wiped brain particles from my leather coat.

Because I have seen hell, death and the devil, because I had to watch the madness of destruction, because I was one of the many horses pulling the wagon and couldn't escape left or right because of the will of the driver, I now feel called upon and have the desire, to tell what happened.

His face was blue, on his fingers Flecks of green. 'This is my father', I thought.

The sons of torture victims make good terrorists.

I've heard that story about kids are high naturally, but I've seen kids that aren't high, kids who've had the high taken out of them.

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

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)

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)

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...'

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.'

...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.