Tatiana de Rosnay Quotes

Oftentimes, discussion of war gets flattened to a discussion of trauma.

As crime writers, we put these characters, year after year, book after book, through the most horrendous trauma, dealing with grief and death and loss and violence. We can't pretend that these things don't affect these characters; they have to. If they don't, then you're essentially writing cartoons.

Countries and individuals do not change unless they undergo a trauma.

We are created by being destroyed.

Cursing themselves in ragged dreamsfire has singed the edges of,they know a slow dying the fields have come to terms with.Shimmering fans work against the heat& smell of gunpowder, making moneyfloat from hand to hand. The next momenta rocket pushes a white fistthrough night sky, & they scatter like birds& fall into the shape their liveshave become.

What is plucked will grow again, What is slain lives on, What is stolen will remain-- What is gone is gone.

She felt as if the mosaic she had been assembling out of life's little shards got dumped to the ground, and there was no way to put it back together.

Loss either teaches you to persist in the face of suffering, or hardens you into a bitter cynic. Sometimes, it does a little of both.

I know," she said, guessing my thoughts. "I know exactly how you feel." "Does it get easier?" I asked. Unlike Sydney, Olena had an answer. "Yes. But you'll never be the same.

But the sky was never quite the same shade of blue again.

So that's how we live our lives. No matter how deep and fatal the loss, no matter how important the thing that's stolen from us--that's snatched right out of our hands--even if we are left completely changed, with only the outer layer of skin from before, we continue to play out our lives this way, in silence. We draw ever nearer to the end of our allotted span of time, bidding it farewell as it trails off behind. Repeating, often adroitly, the endless deeds of the everyday. Leaving behind a feeling of immeasurable emptiness.

When people kill themselves, they think they're ending the pain, but all they're doing is passing it on to those they leave behind.

But what a cruel thing is war to separate and destroy families and friends.

In a healthy individual, a broken bone that has healed properly is strongest where it was once broken. You have not lost any life, Henry told himself. You will still get your fair share of years. Yet the quality of his life changed. Once you've been struck by violence, you acquire companions that never leave you entirely: Suspicion, Fear, Anxiety, Despair, Joylessness. The natural smile is taken from you and the natural pleasures you once enjoyed lose their appeal.

I stood still, vision blurring, and in that moment, I heard my heart break. It was a small, clean sound, like the snapping of a flower's stem.

The hurt affects your ability to go forward.

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.

you never forget your first fall.

So to really be able to dive into what does it mean to be broken by an experience, and I developed it just through research and talking and understanding the truth of what it means to lose everything.

She lost much of her appetite. At night, an invisible hand kept shaking her awake every few hours. Grief was physiological, a disturbance of the blood. Sometimes a whole minute would pass in nameless dread - the bedside clock ticking, the blue moonlight coating the window like glue - before she'd remember the brutal fact that had caused it.

To save myself, I destroyed another, and in doing so, I destroyed myself.

By then Esthappen and Rahel had learned that the world had other ways of breaking men. They were already familiar with the smell. Sicksweet. Like old roses on a breeze.

Ethan thought he was doing the right thing. He knew it was crazy. And he didn’t want to go, but he had to anyway. Ethan was like that. Even if he was dead. He saved the world, but he shattered mine. What now?

He saved the world, but he shattered mine.

I'm scared of myself. I think I'd be a bad driver. I'm scared of cars, period. I've had too many friends killed now, and I've seen too many people killed in my life when I drove across the country when I was 12. I'm sure that has a lot to do with it. If you see a few real dead bodies with brains on the pavement, it does a lot to change your attitude. It means you can get it too. I've had a lot of relatives killed. I've had a lot of dear friends killed. It's stupid. The whole activity is stupid.