Ellen Hopkins Quotes

I was sick. I guess I was about to crack up thinking about all my good buddies. They were better men than me and they're not coming back. Much less back to the White House, like me.

...This fear was unbearable. It unwrapped who she was, as neatly as he'd unwound her bandage, leaving too much pain and ugliness exposed. Nerve endings; he'd said they were the problem [causing phantom pain in the amputated limb]." Things that cut off, that ended abruptly or died--like parents and marriages--kept hurting forever.

I still have nightmares of dead comrades, a long time ago, talking to me. 'Emmanuel, don't forget about us, don't give up, keep telling our story.'

Suicide leaves everyone feeling guilty.

At a certain point memory becomes a beach strewn with landmines, all life’s many losses buried in those sands.

MY REGRETS ARE ABOUT THE PEOPLE I COULDN’T SAVE—Marines, soldiers, my buddies. I still feel their loss. I still ache for my failure to protect them.

But when you kill someone you love, the hard part is never over. It just gets easier to distract yourself from what you've done.

There's nothing glorious about war. There's nothing glorious about holding your friends in your arms and watching them die. There's nothing glorious about having to leave your home for 6 to 8 months while your family's back here and you're away.

Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.

I don't understand why God took him and didn't take me.

The flip side of suicide is that it leaves a lingering question in the minds of the people who survived. It's like a cancer that's metastasized. The suicide is the cancer and the metastasis is all these people saying, Why? Why? Why?

All I know is it destroyed my family, it destroyed my marriage to Sylvester and I will never get over it.

Death became a desired option. I hoped I would hit a mine or run into an ambush and just end it all. I think some part of me wanted to join the legions of the dead, whom I had failed.

I saw a great many men die afterwards, some suffering horribly, but I do not recall any death that affected me quite so much as that of this first victim in my platoon.

There was no way to laugh anymore, to love, to care, and there was a sense of guilt in having survived when others had been killed. I turned into a worse workaholic than I had already been by trying to work myself into the ground.

Losing his wealth, his home, the life he had built, killed my father. He didn't die right away; it took four decades of exile to finish him off.

My '24' death obviously sent Jack Bauer into a huge downward spiral.

My mother died in 1997 and I spiralled into this self-destructive vortex of trying to annihilate my consciousness. I was afraid to face the grief of losing her, because she was somebody I loved more than anybody else in the world.

Suicide carries in its aftermath a level of confusion and devastation that is, for the most part, beyond description.

Looking at suicide—the sheer numbers, the pain leading up to it, and the suffering left behind—is harrowing. For every moment of exuberance in the science, or in the success of governments, there is a matching and terrible reality of the deaths themselves: the young deaths, the violent deaths, the unnecessary deaths

No soldier ever really survives a war.

When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred.

I think that, very often there's a pain that's just too painful to touch. You'll break apart. And I think her mother's death and disappearance and abandonment was something she just never could deal with. Eleanor Roosevelt, when she's really very unwell in 1936, she takes to her bed. She has a mysterious flu.

Bruises fade father, but the pain remains the same. And I still remember how you kept me so afraid.

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