J. D. Salinger Quotes

...and trauma had a way of burning memories deeper into the mind.

Unlike the vast majority of people, I've been locked in a box like an animal and I've also been on the receiving end of bloody thrashings, so I feel uniquely qualified to judge which is worse.

I have scars on my hands from touching certain people...Certain heads, certain colours and textures of human hair leave permanent marks on me. Other things, too. Charlotte once ran away from me, outside the studio, and I grabbed her dress to stop her, to keep her near me. A yellow cotton dress I loved because it was too long for her. I still have a lemon-yellow mark on the palm of my right hand. Oh God, if I'm anything by a clinical name, I'm a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.

Every fear, every night terror, every hour I cried for Liev, every fight with Sebastian is registered as a neat white scar.

My head was spinning, I had never seen blood. Four years old, this don't feel like love.

So many things have happened to me in my life that I could be phobic about.

I have scars on my hands from touching certain people.

You grow up with your father holding you down and covering your mouth so another man can make a horrible searing pain between your legs.

I was badly bullied when I was in the seventh grade - relentlessly, mercilessly - by a group of 12-year-old girls. And it left me with a determination that no matter what, I had to throw my shoulders back, stick out my chin, and project a sense that no one and nothing could hurt me. That turned out to be a life-changing mistake.

Most of us have unhealthy thoughts and emotions that have either developed as a result of trauma or hardships in their childhood, or the way they were raised.

You get these fear memories that are hard to undo.

The world is come upon me, I used to keep it a long way off, But now I have been run over and I am in the hands of the hospital staff.

The honest truth is that it was just traumatizing with the piano, with the authority of the piano teacher, getting rapped across the knuckles, and so whenever you put a piece of music in front of me, there's a Pavlovian reaction where it starts off.

Whatever had happened to him [Newt] out there — maybe even related to his lingering ankle injury — had been truly awful.

What people believe is a measure of what they suffer.

We were king’s men, knights, and heroes . . . but some knights are dark and full of terror, my lady. War makes monsters of us all.” “Are you saying you are monsters?” “I am saying we are human. You are not the only one with wounds, Lady Brienne

If all the people who have been hurt by the war were to exclude joy from their lives, it would almost be as if they had died.

The human race tends to remember the abuses to which it has been subjected rather than the endearments. What's left of kisses? Wounds, however, leave scars.

We're all damaged somehow."-A Great and Terrible Beauty

I think people who come from abuse and/or people who have mental illnesses, have terrible self-esteem problems.

The scars left from the child's defeat in the fight against irrational authority are to be found at the bottom of every neurosis.

I don't think people fully appreciate the trauma associated with losing. It takes a lot out of you, year after year.

I don't think grief of grief in a medical way at all. I think that I and many of my colleagues, are very concerned when grief becomes pathological, that there is no question that grief can trigger depression in vulnerable people and there is no question that depression can make grief worse.

When you're dealing with killing people and things that are upsetting, that can be a delicate place to occupy yourself for a day.

In a way, everybody is wounded from the wound of the real. This phenomenon is similar to madness. The mad person is wounded by his or her distorted relationship to the real.