Trauma Recall Quotes

We have to go back to the memories of 9-11. If that memory doesn't do anything to you as an American, then you're not really that sensitive a human being.

I spent several years in a north Vietnamese prison camp in the dark, fed with scraps. Do you think I want to do that all over again as vice president of the United States?

My mother always says that fear and pain are immediate, and that, when they're gone we're left with the concept, but not the true memory.

It's true. somewhere inside us we are all the ages we have ever been. We're the 3 year old who got bit by the dog. We're the 6 year old our mother lost track of at the mall. We're the 10 year old who get tickled till we wet our pants. We're the 13 year old shy kid with zits. We're the 16 year old no one asked to the prom, and so on. We walk around in the bodies of adults until someone presses the right button and summons up one of those kids.

Memories are like mulligatawny soup in a cheap restaurant. It is best not to stir them.

I've worked hard to remember it...The problem is I'm not sure what's real memory and what's my brain filling in details, like a guy whose heart stops and he thinks he sees a bright light. Except I'm sure of my bright light.

The memory represents to us not what we choose but what it pleases.

Algaliarept varied its shape, sifting through my mind without me even knowing to choose what scared me the most. Once it had been Ivy. Then Kisten —until I had pinned him in an elevator in a foolish moment of vampire-induced passion. It's hard to be scared of someone after you've French-kissed him.

The last time I was this scared, I peed myself." "The last time I was this scared," Radar says, "I actually had to face a Dark Lord in order to make the world safe for wizards.

I'd drown in a sea of tears if I lived my life ruminating on the past. I would undoubtedly revise memories to be more joyful that they were, or ever have been.

I don't know where the idea originated that memoir writing is cathartic. For me, it's always felt like playing my own neurosurgeon, sans anesthesia.

Birth is the scariest event of most peoples' lives. You have to feel safe enough in your own mind before you can remember your own birth.

So much had happened that morning. Yet it was this image, this moment, that i kept going back to hours later, after we'd made it safely to the walkway and gone our separate ways to classes. How it felt to have the world moving beneath me, a hand gripping mine, knowing if i fell, at least i wouldn't do it alone.

I don't know where the idea originated that memoir writing is cathartic. For me, it's always felt like playing my own neurosurgeon, sans anesthesia. As a memoirist, you have to crack your head open and examine every uncomfortable thing in there.

I remember nothing of this, no ambulance rides, nothing. Nothing between switching out the bedside lamp and the sudden indignity of rebirth: the slaps, the brightness, the tubing, the speed, the urgent insistence that I be choked back into breathing life. I have felt so sorry for babies ever since.

People who have escaped from poverty are like old soldiers. In later years they recount the little, amusing incidents that happened infrequently, and conveniently forget the long, unrelieved stretches of misery and boredom.