David Grann Quotes

When you're traumatized, you pick out one thing you remember more than anything else.

Cancer is an emotional disease.

I think sometimes you go through an experience, and you don't feel the impact, especially in a war experience, until way past it.

Characters who experience great trauma will sometimes create an escape.

If you get an infection, you get a fever; the fever is your body dealing with the infection. If you get traumatized, your mind and your brain have a reaction to that trauma. If you're not dreaming about it, something's probably wrong.

I'm not a doctor - so I can't describe flashbacks well - but it is like you're living it again.

Over a period of 11 months, I was constantly afraid that Youth Care would lock me up. It was all a frightening and traumatic experience. So often, these terrible memories come to me. I can't ignore them.

I'm just trying to get back to normal life.

Self-indulgence is something to watch, but anything that helps you understand situations that are difficult to understand is good. If you're having some sort of emotional trauma, you need to find a person to talk to about it who says, 'This is quite normal; it's fine.'

The Marine Corps taught me how to kill, but it didn't teach me how to deal with killing.

I'm pretty good at remaining calm during an emergency. My house burned down when I was 12, which made me really pragmatic about what needed to be done. But I can be bad in that I compartmentalize a lot of emotions and push them away to deal with them at a later date.

A toothache, or a violent passion, is not necessarily diminished by our knowledge of its causes, its character, its importance or insignificance.

Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats.

I feel that the thing that probably aided me the most in that scene with the dog was the utilization and using an actual recreation, affective memory, if you want to call it, of pain.

My daughters have grown up knowing all about my kidnapping and the case and what happened.

After the 9/11 apocalypse happened in New York City, people, particularly New Yorkers, who breathed in the ash, or saw the results of that, have a tendency to keep seeing echoes and having flashbacks to it.

I have friends with post-traumatic stress - friends with post-traumatic stress who are, you know, highly successful, capable people.

One of the things you realize when you have a health crisis in your immediate family is that life does not stop so that you can go through that experience.

I feel often that we don't have the right language to talk about emotions in disasters. Everyone is on edge, of course, but it also pulls people away from a lot of trivial anxieties and past and future concerns and gratuitous preoccupations that we have, and refocuses us in a very intense way.

I was awfully curious to find out why I didn't go insane.

Across the Atlantic, commercial therapy of all kinds provides so many more comfortable outlets for people when they are under pressure. The English tradition is to get a grip, whereas the American version is to get in touch with your feelings, to say: 'I'm a good person. Isn't it terrible when bad things happen to people like me?'

Some days, 24 hours is too much to stay put in, so I take the day hour by hour, moment by moment. I break the task, the challenge, the fear into small, bite-size pieces. I can handle a piece of fear, depression, anger, pain, sadness, loneliness, illness. I actually put my hands up to my face, one next to each eye, like blinders on a horse.

If you live around dummies and fake blood for six months, it becomes a part of you. It's fake blood, but sometimes I still feel the real scent of blood, so it's more mentally collapsing, not only physical.

The shock of any trauma, I think changes your life. It's more acute in the beginning and after a little time you settle back to what you were. However it leaves an indelible mark on your psyche.

When you have a traumatic experience, you look at your mindset.