Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

When a condition or a problem becomes too great, humans have the protection of not thinking about it. But it goes inward and minces up with a lot of other things already there and what comes out is discontent and uneasiness, guilt and a compulsion to get something--anything--before it is all gone.

Medically speaking, there is no such thing as a nervous breakdown. Which is very annoying to discover when you're right in the middle of one.

In my time, I've gotten the chance to play a few different people who are younger and have been rejected by their parents, and I think a lot of times that results in them really seeking help, even subconsciously doing so.

Shame--what happened when my mother, the dragon, huffed and puffed and blew my self down.

She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone to so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn't really like life at all.

Seeing your mother naked is not something you easily recover from. Seeing your mother naked and jumping from one side of a king-sized bed to the other with a nurse's hat on while your father, who is also naked, is chasing her with a bandanna around his neck, is reason to put yourself up for adoption.

I repeat his words in my head. What's going on? What's going on? Oh, well, since you asked, I got a bunch of tapes in the mail today from a girl who killed herself. Apparently, I had something to do with it. I'm not sure what that is, so I was wondering if I could borrow your Walkman to find out. 'Not much,' I say.

...grief can derange even the strongest and most disciplined of minds.

under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet, every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. we have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief. we have never seen a totally sane human being.

Mental wounds not healing, who and what's to blame. I'm going off the rails on a crazy train.

I have friends who have had PTSD, and you can get it from other things than war.

Flashbacks rarely involve language. Mine certainly didn't. They were visual, motor, and sensory, and they took place in a relentless, horrifying present.

Sometimes I feel like there are just too many things weighing on my mind at once, and I can't control my thoughts or even my body at times.

I grew up in a family of secrets; there was a lot of pathology in the family.

So it's sheer terror, but then, this is the whole reason that we went so long to Doctor Simons, was to get rid of all these... mixed feelings that we had.

You cannot get PTSD from reading a book or from hearing a story, even repeated stories over and over.

I thought there had to be something I could do because it seemed crazy that, in addition to the psychological tragedy each woman has to face, came also all the rest.

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

My mother had a lot of phobias. She's pregnant with me and she was a very phobic person. So I was born into phobia, basically.

When you go through a traumatic event, there's a lot of shame that comes with that. A lot of loss of self-esteem. That can become debilitating.

Post-traumatic stress disorder didn't surface as a condition until 1980... that fact was very relevant when I remember back to how these men behaved. A lot of walking on eggshells was required for wives and children.

I was so devastated by my second divorce that I had a nervous breakdown.

Posttraumatic stress is something that's always existed. I think that the earliest recording was during the Trojan War, but it's only recently that we're beginning to be aware of it.

The times in my life when I've been my thinnest, I've been a walking psycho wreck. Forget the fact that I was basically starving myself; skinny was usually due to some kind of loss. Death. Rejection. Divorce.

I'm very emotional; I think I may go mad in several years' time.