Tim O'Brien Quotes

We build a shell around it, like an oyster dealing with a painful particle of grit, coating it with smooth pearl layers in order to cope. This is how we walk and talk and function , day in, day out. Immune to others’ pain and loss.

If I ever saw an amputee getting hanged, I'd probably just start calling out letters.

Anything traumatic in my life I've always dealt with through jokes and comedy.

In 'The Darkest Minds,' Zu's trauma manifests in her choosing to remain silent. It's her one small way she can feel in control of her otherwise uncontrollable situation.

Shock is a merciful condition. It allows you to get through disaster with a necessary distance between you and your feelings.

Memory loss is one way of coping with damage.

The loss of memory isn't always the problem; sometimes--maybe even often--it's the solution.

Indifference is the saddest state of being. It's like PTSD - you're not gonna fight, you're not gonna run, you're just frozen there, feeling nothing. It's very easy to have conversations when you're sitting there feeling nothing, to talk about the weather or what you had for lunch, to Instagram what you had for lunch. We're all suffering from trauma. This world is so crazy. How do we feel safe here? I think that's the question everybody's asking, "What do I need to do to feel safe? Like I'm okay?" I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

The idea of evil is always subject to denial as a coping mechanism.

Sometimes the only way to deal with horrific things in life is through a dark sense of humor.

'Johnny' was a coping mechanism who could take those things which could have ordinarily destroyed me, by tweaking my past and throwing it back out there, getting laughs from things that would have otherwise upset me.

When I'm photographing, I think - like any rescue worker who deals with tragedy - you have to have some protective barrier around your heart so you can do your job. You tend to have a delayed reaction to things. I feel things more deeply after I put the camera down.

What the mind cannot retain, the body will have to endure.

I want pills called September 10. You take one and your mind feels like the 11th never happened.

So the survival of the spirit, the body and the emotions? That's the way to win in 'Lovecraft Country'.

I feel like I've had a lot of painful situations that I intentionally delete from my memory.

I always compartmentalized so many different things.

When something tragic happens, all we want to do is escape it. Acting has always been kind of a twisted way of escaping my own problems and my own reality.

Paranoia: the gift of the survivor and the burden of the overtired, stressed, and terrified.

I'll see something awful on the street and I'll come home and say to my boyfriend, "I just saw the funniest thing on the street." It's a stance. It's the way I was born, or the way I was damaged.

Funny how when your life is mostly bullshit, you turn off feeling. Sometimes it's hard to turn it back on again.

The body shuts down when it has too much to bear; goes its own way quietly inside, waiting for a better time, leaving you numb and half alive.

Memory is all we are. Moments and feelings, captured in amber, strung on filaments of reason. Take a man’s memories and you take all of him. Chip away a memory at a time and you destroy him as surely as if you hammered nail after nail through his skull.

There are some things, I think, you're btter off not remembering.

Denial can be a pathology or a survival mechanism - and sometimes it's both.