Chris Bohjalian Quotes

At some point people either had to throw off the wounds of their childhood or go through life permanently crippled

But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes. The heart of a hurt child can shrink so that forever afterward it is hard and pitted as the seed of a peach. Or again, the heart of such a child may fester and swell until it is a misery to carry within the body, easily chafed and hurt by the most ordinary things.

Adults are just children sometimes. But evil, hurt children.

If you don't heal the wounds of your childhood, you bleed into the future.

But I don't think I've grown up to be a damaged adult.

Many of our deepest motives come, not from an adult logic of how things work in the world, but out of something that is frozen from childhood.

When you're a kid it's people's cruelty that makes you cry, then when you're an adult it's their kindness.

One of the pitfalls of childhood is that one doesn't have to understand something to feel it. By the time the mind is able to comprehend what has happened, the wounds of the heart are already too deep.

But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes.

We tend to think of orphans as being the protagonist of stories we read when we're kids, and yet here you are: you're an adult, you're supposed to manage, you're supposed to get over it, you're supposed to go on with your life, and you feel like a lost child.

Everyones childhood plays itself out. No wonder no one knows the other or can completely understand.

There are some of us who in after years say to Fate, 'Now deal us your hardest blow, give us what you will; but let us never again suffer as we suffered when we were children.' The barb in the arrow of childhood's suffering is this: its intense loneliness, its intense ignorance.

It was childish to feel disappointed, but childishness comes almost as naturally to a man as to a child.

I am convinced that most people do not grow up ... our real selves, the children inside, are still innocent and shy as magnolias.

Man's maturity: to have regained the seriousness that he had as a child at play.

A lot of us grow up and we grow out of the literal interpretation that we get when we're children, but we bear the scars all our life. Whether they're scars of beauty or scars of ugliness, it's pretty much in the eye of the beholder.

He carried his childhood like a hurt warm bird held to his middle-aged breast.

For a long time, I couldn't cry on stage. I cried very rarely as a child.

I was a sensitive kid.

I always have felt that I was six years old.

When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.

I wonder if I can write this history, or if on every page there will be some sneaking show of a bitterness I thought long dead. I think myself cured of all spite, but when I touch pen to paper, the hurt of a boy bleeds out with the sea-spawned ink, until I suspect each carefully formed black letter scabs over some ancient scarlet wound.

Funny how internal scars never healed. They were the souvenirs of the past.

In youth the life of reason is not in itself sufficient; afterwards the life of emotion, except for short periods, becomes unbearable.

When I was a child I experienced moments of not wanting to see the ugliness, not wanting to see not being wanted. This lack of love went into my eyes and into my mind.