Psychological Damage Quotes

A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves.

If you stare into the Abyss long enough the Abyss stares back at you.

I came from a dysfunctional family - very dysfunctional. And my father used to find great humor in throwing me down the stairs.

Some people say torture doesn’t work. I do not know whether it does or not. … The reality is the effect it has on you. When you become the torturer, something happens to that force … it has a corrosive effect over time. You move down a path that is difficult to come back from.

Every father is given the opportunity to corrupt his daughter's nature, and the educator, husband, or psychiatrist then has to face the music. For what has been spoiled by the father can only be made good by a father, just as what has been spoiled by the mother can only be repaired by a mother. The disastrous repetition of the family pattern could be described as the psychological original sin, or as the curse of the Atrides running through the generations.

Hate hurts the hater more'n the hated.

The unfed mind devours itself.

The loss of my childhood was the price for becoming the youngest world champion in history. When you have to fight every day from a young age, your soul can be contaminated. I lost my childhood. I never really had it. Today I have to be careful not to become cruel, because I became a soldier too early.

Hate destroys the hater.

Sometimes, however, this sense of isolation, like acid spilling out of a bottle, can unconsciously eat away at a person’s heart and dissolve it.

It was horrifying. You wouldn't believe how people are treated there. You could see that these people had withdrawn so far that they just lived in their own minds. They did terrible things to themselves.

There are those hearts, reader, that never mend again once they are broken. Or if they do mend, they heal themselves in a crooked and lopsided way, as if sewn together by a careless craftsman. Such was the fate of Chiaroscuro. His heart was broken. Picking up the spoon and placing it on his head, speaking of revenge, these things helped him to put his heart together again. But it was, alas, put together wrong.

Once the pathological low self-esteem goes, that's when things go downhill.

I was raped when I was very young. I told my brother the name of the person who had done it. Within a few days the man was killed. In my child's mind--seven and a half years old--I thought my voice had killed him. So I stopped talking for five years.

The sword the body wounds, sharp words the mind.

Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.

What if I had been born during a war and I lived in an occupied city, and people were being taken out and shot every day? Everything would be different - even after the war ended, my future would be very different. Look at what these poor people in Aleppo are going through. The children, the ones who survive, are going to be absolutely altered by what they live through, and you and I, luckily, have never had to deal with that.

We're no longer young men. We've lost any desire to conquer the world. We are refugees. We are fleeing from ourselves. From our lives. We were eighteen years old, and we had just begun to love the world and to love being in it; but we had to shoot at it. The first shell to land went straight for our hearts. We've been cut off from real action, from getting on, from progress. We don't believe in those things any more; we believe in the war.

Whatever had happened to him [Newt] out there — maybe even related to his lingering ankle injury — had been truly awful.

The only problem with seeing too much is that it makes you insane.

She just kept hitting me in the head with her fists, over, and over and over.

A lot of things you do to cover up insecurities can be just as harmful to you as anything else.

After the war [WW I], the soul of the people will be so maimed and so injured that it is horrible to think of.

She tortured everybody around her, but only because she was more tortured than anyone.

This agency forbade the speaking of Indian languages, prohibited the conduct of traditional religious activities, outlawed traditional government, and made Indian people ashamed of who they were. Worst of all, the Bureau of Indian Affairs committed these acts against the children entrusted to its boarding schools, brutalizing them emotionally, psychologically, physically, and spiritually. Even in this era of self -determination, when the Bureau of Indian Affairs is at long last serving as an advocate for Indian people in an atmosphere of mutual respect, the legacy of these misdeeds haunts us.