Lingering Effects Quotes

Words are really powerful. I don't believe that axiom at all - words can absolutely hurt you. Words can wound. They can do a lot of damage. I think they can do way more damage than sticks and stones. I'll take sticks and stones.

I did not think that I was angry, but clearly anger was reflected in my writing. I did not think that I had been affected emotionally, but it was clear from my writing that I was still very emotional about the trial some six months after it ended.

Sometimes people don't know what is behind the words they use. But an innocent little remark at school can affect you later in life.

I am never free of the past. I have made it crystal clear that I believe the past is part of the present which becomes part of the future.

A broken bone can heal, but the wound a word opens can fester forever.

Life... is not simply a series of exciting new ventures. The future is not always a whole new ball game. There tends to be unfinished business. One trails all sorts of things around with one, things that simply won't be got rid of.

The dead drug leaves a ghost behind. At certain hours it haunts the house.

The book says we may be through with the past but the past ain't through with us.

When it was over, it was not really over, and that was the trouble.

No one escapes from the past without bearing some of its burdens.

An unrectified case of injustice has a terrible way of lingering, restlessly, in the social atmosphere like an unfinished question.

Words can be said in bitterness and anger, and often there seems to be an element of truth in the nastiness. And words don't go away, they just echo around.

History never really says goodbye. History says, 'See you later.'

If you are still being hurt by an event that happened to you at twelve, it is the thought that is hurting you now.

It is foolish to pretend that one is fully recovered from a disappointed passion. Such wounds always leave a scar.

I think you always take away a little bit of a character with you, and it kinda like hangs on you for a bit, and then as time kind of goes and wears off a little bit.

The incidence of memory is like light from dead stars whose influence lingers long after the events themselves.

You will remember when a bird crashed through the window and fell to the floor. You will remember, those of you who were there, how it jerked its wings before dying, and left a spot of blood on the floor after it was removed. But who among you was first to notice the negative bird it left in the window? Who first saw the shadow that the bird left behind, the shadow that drew blood from any finger that dared to trace it, the shadow that was better proof of the bird's existence than the bird ever was?

Language exerts hidden power, like the moon on the tides.

Your past is not your past if it's still impacting your present.

I got stuff that's going to hurt for the rest of my life.

We may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us.

I believe - what did Faulkner say? "The past is not even past."

There is no escape from yesterday because yesterday has deformed us, or been deformed by us. The mood is of no importance. Deformation has taken place.

Sometimes it seems unfair that events so old can reach forward through the years, sinking claws into one's life and twisting all that follows it. Yet perhaps that is the ultimate justice: we are the sum of all we have done added to the sum of all that has been done to us. There is no escaping that, not for any of us.