Peter Shaffer Quotes

Painful events leave scars, true, but it turns out they're largely erasable. Jill Bolte Taylor, the neuroanatomist who had a stroke that obliterated her memory, described the event as losing '37 years of emotional baggage.'

I'll tell you, when you have wounds that are as deep as were caused by the genocide, the first thing you do is try to create some way to pull the wound together. And it may be artificial until the skin grows back.

He only wishes there were something that would heal the scars in his mind, which he can still feel. He sees his mind now as an archipelago of islands that he labors to build bridges between - and while he's had great success engineering the most spectacular of bridges, he suspects there are some islands that he'll never reach.

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, Raze out the written troubles of the brain

later down the road of life, i made the discovery that salt water was also good for the mental abrasions one inevitably acquires on land.

What deep wounds ever closed without a scar? The hearts bleed longest, and heals but to wear That which disfigures it.

I can heal the scars on your body, but I can’t heal the scars of the soul. Not yours, not mine. You have to learn to live with them. You have to choose to live beyond them

It took me a very long time to heal. It was a shock to my system.

You know, the mind is a remarkable thing. Just because you can't see the wound doesn't mean it isn't hurting. It scars all the time, but it heals.

I'm able to laugh now, because I've gone through a lot of mental and physical therapy to heal over the years, my music's been wonderful for me. But I was a shell of my former self at one point. I was not myself. To be fair, I was about 19, so ... I went to Catholic school and all this crazy stuff happened, and I was going, 'Oh, is this just the way adults are?' I was very naive.

Trauma is survivable, but often not much more. It kills you while allowing you to still live.

I'm lucky to be alive. It took three years of therapy to recover but I did it.

The damage can fester under layers of time and change, and an ignorant, thoughtless remark can easily reopen the wound.

There are those hearts, reader, that never mend again once they are broken. Or if they do mend, they heal themselves in a crooked and lopsided way, as if sewn together by a careless craftsman. Such was the fate of Chiaroscuro. His heart was broken. Picking up the spoon and placing it on his head, speaking of revenge, these things helped him to put his heart together again. But it was, alas, put together wrong.

Certain experiences you can't survive, and afterward you don't fully exist, even if you failed to die.

Rejection kills, disappointment only maims.

The brain heals the past like an injury.

A wound in a young heart is like a wound in a young tree. It does not grow out. It grows in.

One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual.

Losing a parent is something like driving through a plate-glass window. You didn't know it was there until it shattered, and then for years to come you're picking up the pieces -- down to the last glassy splinter.

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

Doctoring her seemed to her as absurd as putting together the pieces of a broken vase. Her heart was broken. Why would they try to cure her with pills and powders?

A decade of cutting away dead flesh, cauterizing old scars ripped open over and over and still it is not enough.

New York, home of the vivisectors of the mind, and of the mentally vivisected still to be reassembled, of those who live intact, habitually wondering about their states of sanity, and home of those whose minds have been dead, bearing the scars of resurrection.

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