Paul Virilio Quotes

I just want to sleep. A coma would be nice. Or amnesia. Anything, just to get rid of this, these thoughts, whispers in my mind. Did he rape my head, too?

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

They don't find peace. It's pure bullshit. When something unspeakable happens, or when you do something unspeakable, it changes you. It takes you apart and reassembles you. You are a Frankenstein of circumstance, and the parts never fit back quite right and the life you live is a stolen one. You don't deserve to walk among the living, and you know it.

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

I think that there are cancers of the body, but I think they are what I would call cancer of the emotional system, too. These are the kind of diseases or illnesses or sicknesses of the emotional system that are as incurable as cancer.

I've never had a person come to me and say, 'I want to take down this person.' They come and say, 'I need help. This thing is killing me. It's weighing me down. It's sitting in the pit of my stomach.'

Bullying made me feel insecure, alone, ugly, powerless, and hopeless at times.

But those with shattered souls find it very difficult to speak.

Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering—this is an all-weather beatitude for gloom in general and fairly salutary day-time advice for everyone. But at three o’clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn’t work—and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.

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

According to Madam Pomfrey, thoughts could leave deeper scars than almost anything else.

From this haunting feeling of being not wanted, which remained a recurrent haunt through life, I found two ways of escape, both of which in changing form also persisted. One was the invention of gods, the other was personal efficiency in work.

It's terrifying to see someone inside of whom a vital spring seems to have been broken. It's particularly terrifying to see him in your mirror.

A child of broken mind, the fear that I hide behind.

An unacknowledged trauma is like a wound that never heals over and may start to bleed again at any time.

Once shame touches your being at any point, even the most distant nerve is implicated, whether you know it or not; any fleeting encounter or random thought will rake up the anguish and add to it.

Mental wounds not healing, who and what's to blame. I'm going off the rails on a crazy train.

No one will ever know what 'In Cold Blood' took out of me. It scraped me right down to the marrow of my bones. It nearly killed me. I think, in a way, it did kill me.

I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.

Elaine is just in pain. I think Elaine has become very, very sad woman. She is someone who is in deep need of many hours of analysis and I like to think that I'm not that type of person.

All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams.

Such persons are windows through which one looks into terrible worlds.

Those 18 months in solitary confinement... bruised my soul. If I had had a weapon, I would have fought my way out.

It's not easy to talk about things that are still hurting.

Like Jesus, every human being has enough memories in his past to occupy his time and thoughts continually. It is not the remembrance of these incidents but the reliving of them that creates havoc in our souls.