Andrea Dworkin Quotes

The first thought that will go through my mind in the morning when I open my eyes will be very much related to my current dreams, rather than to my past nightmares.

When you have a nightmare, you think, 'What caused this?' And then you can sometimes get the same scenario two or three nights, back to back. Or something really bad happens, and you feel absolutely sad and do not want it to be real. You don't want to fall asleep and get sucked back into that same dream.

I still get nightmares. In fact, I get them so often I should be used to them by now. I'm not. No one ever really gets used to nightmares.

I don't have nightmares; I give them all to you.

Some people's lives seem to flow in a narrative; mine had many stops and starts. That's what trauma does. It interrupts the plot. You can't process it because it doesn't fit with what came before or what comes afterward. A friend of mine, a soldier, put it this way. In most of our lives, most of the time, you have a sense of what is to come. There is a steady narrative, a feeling of "lights, camera, action" when big events are imminent. But trauma isn't like that. It just happens, and then life goes on. No one prepares you for it.

Of course I have nightmares-Who doesn't?

No one ever really gets used to nightmares.

That's not such a bad thing,' he said to me. 'In nightmares we can think the worst. That's what they're for, I guess.

I'm suddenly finding it hard to know the difference between nightmares and consciousness.

Killing makes me feel good.

Because I can't handle the nightmares. Not without you.

Emma dropped the paper. Her first impression was of a weak feeling in her stomach and in her knees; then of blind guilt, of unreality, of coldness, of fear; then she wished that it were already the next day. Immediately afterwards she realized that that wish was futile because the death of her father was the only thing that had happened in the world, and it would go on happening endlessly.

Feel the feelings and drop the story.

Pretty much everyone hates high school. It's a measure of your humanity, I suspect. If you enjoyed high school, you were probably a psychopath or a cheerleader. Or possibly both. Those things aren't mutually exclusive, you know. I've tried to block out the memory of my high school years, but no matter how hard you try, it's always with you, like an unwanted hitchhiker. Or herpes. I assume.

I think most of us can remember from our own childhood, just in the Disney cartoons, things that frightened us profoundly. For me it was Bambi, the scene when the forest was on fire. That was something I had nightmares about. I can't imagine being a little kid of eight and seeing Night Of The Living Dead with living corpses eating the flesh of living people.

What you don't deal with rules your life.

Some are exploring the world through the subconscious. I've done that on occasions for various reasons, whether it be illness or self abuse, or whatever. Once things start to look grotesque I don't write them or sing them. I couldn't write them - making nightmares into living daylight...The minute it gets dark I shoot back, retreat.

Five years later I still wake up screaming for him to run

I wake up 5 a.m. some mornings and hear the planes coming in at National Airport and I think they are bombing me.

Usually right when I'm feeling it, right when it's happening, I always find I need to be in some sort of survival mode or mature mom mode, so it always seems to come later that I have the breakdown.

During the day, memories could be held at bay, but at night, dreams became the devil's own accomplices.

Nightmares end. That's how you know they're nightmares.

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

An obligation to feel can freeze feelings.

The things we ignore often come back to us in our sleep.