Sonia Johnson Quotes

He tunneled into stories where weak men changed into strong half-animals or used eye beams or magic hammers to power through steel or climb up the sides of skyscrapers. He was the Hulk when angry and Spidey the rest of the time. When he felt his heart hurt he turned into something stronger than a little boy, and he grew up this way. A heart that flashed from heart to stone, heart to stone. As I watched I thought of what Grandma Lynn liked to say when Lindsey and I rolled our eyes or grimaced behind her back. "Watch out what faces you make. You'll freeze that way.

I laugh when I see people in pain. Sometimes I think it is a defense mechanism from childhood, where you're in so much pain you have to laugh. It is a survival mechanism.

If someone has gone through a lot of emotional pain, including the loss of loved ones, that person may try to build a shell around his or her feelings to protect him- or herself from the pain.

Time didn't heal, but it anesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much.

It was a maddening image and the only way to whip it was to hang on until dusk and banish the ghosts with rum.

Blessed be shock. Blessed be the part of us that protects us from too much pain and sorrow. At the heart of life is a fusebox.

The body shuts down when it has too much to bear; goes its own way quietly inside, waiting for a better time, leaving you numb and half alive.

The thing about wounded people is wounded people are scared that those wounds are going to end up killing them. They pretend like they're not there, or they ignore them.

Thinking about suicide is a potent consolation: it helps us to get through many a bad night.

You could stab a knife right through my heart and you'd be too late.

The only thing he could do to stay alive was not to allow himself the anguish of that memory. He erased it from his mind, although from time to time in the years that were left to him he would feel it revive, with no warning and for no reason, like the sudden pang of an old scar.

The violence of sorrow is not at the first to be striven withal; being, like a mighty beast, sooner tamed with following than overthrown by withstanding.

According to Madam Pomfrey, thoughts could leave deeper scars than almost anything else.

Anger is a passion, so it makes people feel alive and makes them feel they matter and are in charge of their lives. So people often need to renew their anger a long time after the cause of it has died, because it is a protection against helplessness and emptiness just like howling in the night. And it makes them feel less vulnerable for a little while.

She plays music to heal herself, but nothing can heal her brokenness.

This was something she would keep hidden within herself, maybe in place of the knot of pain and anger she had been carrying under her breastbone...a security blanket, an ace up her sleeve. She might never use it, but she would always feel its presence like a swelling secret stone, and that way when she let go of the rage, she would not feel nearly as empty.

She could not trust herself to hope—but without hope, she realized, she had no reason to go on.

I've overcome the blow, I've learned to take it well. I only wish my words could just convince myself that it just wasn't real. But that's not the way it feels.

She smiles through a thousand tears, and harbors adolescent fears. She dreams of all that she can never be, she wades in insecurity.

Don't say mourning. It's too psychoanalytic. I'm not mourning. I'm suffering.

Shame produces trauma. Trauma produces paralysis.

He knows that you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy.

Depression is like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind. You just got to be careful not to touch it where it hurts. It's always there, though.

He was healthier than the rest of us, but when you listened with the stethoscope you could hear the tears bubbling inside his heart.