Trauma Narrative Quotes

I remember feeling guilty that I had a good childhood. I thought everybody who is famous has to have a desperate childhood and work his way out of it, but I had a great one.

I didn't have this tortured childhood; I liked it.

There's a wide spectrum between a Navy SEAL hero-killer and a traumatized victim, but those are the archetypes - hashed and rehashed in the media, in popular culture, in the minds of people with a lot of preconceived notions but not much else.

'Say Her Name' was a book I never wanted to write and never expected to write. I wasn't trying to do anything except write a book for Aura - a book that I thought I had to write.

A true war story is never moral.

Many of our holidays revolve around traumas that happened to our people and how we must remember them in specific ways. The way these stories are told and what we take away from them can change, and do in certain contexts, but overall I am not sure whether Jews want to let go of the narrative of the victim.

The difference between movies and TV is that in TV you have to have a trauma every week, but that event may not be the biggest event in the characters' lives.

When we write about Auschwitz, we must know that Auschwitz, in a certain sense at least, suspended literature. One can only write a black novel about Auschwitz or - you should excuse the expression - a cheap serial, which begins in Auschwitz and is still not over.

I didn't use anybody's story. I used the context and the structure of the situation. People were so, so desperate to tell their story and begin to digest their experience - like turning it into a story - that after the fist few weeks I could go with a pad and pencil and take notes. People didn't seem at all bothered by that.

Sure, I went through my 'J'accuse' phase. I was so angry for so long, I could hardly have a conversation without getting into an argument. And it was only when I felt I could finally distance myself from my past that I began to write about what happened - not just to me, but to lots of young people. I think my story is a cautionary tale.

History is nothing except monsters or victims. Or witnesses.

I'm trying to be somebody on whom the experience is lost by supplanting it with its telling. I definitely do that in medical contexts, even in trivial ones.

My mother, Southern to the bone, once told me, “All Southern literature can be summed up in these words: ‘On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.’” She raised me up to be a Southern writer, but it wasn’t easy.

Testimony demands to be interpreted because of the dialectic of meaning and event that traverses it.

Our culture is bloodthirsty for stories about women in pain; we hunger for women to expose their traumas and to be rescued by the love of a good man.

Anyone's childhood can be an act of disablement if rehearsed and replayed and squinted at in a certain light. . .

Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.

I've read pretty broadly on the Holocaust - both fiction and non-fiction - and to me, 'The Lost Wife' is one of the best. The horrors of war serve as a backdrop to a love affair that spans a lifetime, and that love story stayed with me long after I put down the book.

After 'The Orphanage' and 'The Impossible,' 'A Monster Calls' is the perfect final chapter in a trilogy centred on the extraordinary strength of the mother-child bond.

The true story of how my husband, Stephen, and I exchanged our first 'I love you's' - chronicled in my 2012 memoir 'Brain on Fire' - occurred deep in a hallucinatory psychotic episode outside a crowded Maplewood, NJ, restaurant.

The problem is that young people have been conditioned to believe that any challenge or discomfort is cause for not only stress but also real trauma, something that inflicts psychosocial harm. They are told that any criticism of their actions or words is criticism of their identity. Too many young people are told that any and all discomfort they experience is a result of some overarching injustice to which they are unfairly subjected. This belief doesn’t foster a mind-set that allows these people to live and function well in an imperfect world.

Things happen in 'If This is a Man' that are beyond ordinary daily experience, but it is still us to whom they are happening, and the understanding Levi seeks is no different in kind from that sought by Shakespeare in 'King Lear', or Conrad in 'The Heart of Darkness'.

I guess the feminism in "Room" springs to mind most.

I just feel like if I start opening the door to talking about my university experience, then people just kind of... own everything. There was a lot of stuff a couple of years ago saying that I was bullied at Brown and awful things like that, none of which were true.

I was highly aware, in writing [the book] ROOM, that there are unsavoury aspects to our interest in such cases, and I thought it was rather honester to include discussion of media representation in the novel itself than to cling to the high moral ground by merely avoiding scenes of voyeurism, for instance.