Art Spiegelman Quotes

Grateful people may recover faster from trauma.

Sometimes broken things heal crooked. The pieces didn’t fit anymore.

They would grow up grappling with ways of living with what happened. They would try to tell themselves that in terms of geological time it was an insignificant event. Just a blink of the Earth Woman's eye. That Worse Things had happened. That Worse Things kept happening. But they would find no comfort in the thought.

I have some scars... lots of internal ones. But they're all scabbed over.

And if you're lucky enough to survive going crazy and get back to the point where you can pass for normal, it builds a question into the rest of your life. You have to forgive people for wondering, 'How all right can he be?'

I think we're all wounded, but some of us, when we experience the healing of those wounds, that they scar and scab over.

It had taken years to put themselves back together, and so what if some things didn’t get put back in the right place? At least they could hold themselves up.

There's a lot of wounded people out there who don't believe that there's any way they'll ever be healed from those wounds.

Growing up is all about getting hurt. And then getting over it. You hurt. You recover. You move on. Odds are pretty good you're just going to get hurt again. But each time, you learn something.

It's harder to heal than it is to kill.

When you can tell the story and it doesn't bring up any pain, you know it is healed.

It was a catch-22: If you didn’t put the trauma behind you, you couldn’t move on. But if you did put the trauma behind you, you willingly gave up your claim to the person you were before it happened.

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

An injury is not just a process of recovery it's a process of discovery.

Recovery isn’t easy, at first. It takes time. It takes more work, sometimes, than you think you’re willing to do. But it is worth every hard day, every tear, every terrified moment. It’s worth it, because the trade-off is this: you let go of your eating disorder, and you get back your life.

I though about what death is, what a loss is. A sharp pain that lessens with time, but can never quite heal over. A scar. The idea occurred to me there on the site. Take a knife and cut open the earth, and with time the grass would heal it. As if you cut open the rock and polished it.

Forgetting lets you live without the pain for a moment but remembering hits hard.

Time doesn't. All that Time does is make it more distant, put more space between you and what happened. It doesn't heal anything. I don't know how or what does the healing, but it isn't Time.

I'm a recovering optimist.

Other people are going to find healing in your wounds. Your greatest life messages and your most effective ministry will come out of your deepest hurts.

Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can't cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It's just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.

Pain is a relatively objective, physical phenomenon; suffering is our psychological resistance to what happens. Events may create physical pain, but they do not in themselves create suffering. Resistance creates suffering. Stress happens when your mind resists what is... The only problem in your life is your mind's resistance to life as it unfolds.

Forgiveness is something that we are often asked to grant and very few of us ever have the roadmap of how to get from the pain that we have experienced to being able to forgive someone.

There is no recovery for anyone without lifting the lid on the pain of the past and letting in the light.

As the smoke clears, I awaken, And untangle you from me. Would it make you feel better To watch me, while I bleed? All my windows still are broken, But I'm standing on my feet.