Adolf Galland Quotes

What you experience in the army, aged 18 to 21, is what you take through all your life. You cross invisible lines: you shoot someone, get shot, break into people's houses. It's naive to think you won't carry anything into your life.

To imagine that trauma casts out fantasy is a dangerous mistake.

You get these fear memories that are hard to undo.

It's often said that a traumatic experience early in life marks a person forever, pulls her out of line, saying, "Stay there. Don't move.

It took me a very long time to heal. It was a shock to my system.

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

All damaged people are dangerous. Survival makes them so.' 'Why?' 'Because they have no pity. They know what others can survive, as they did.

I had a lot of expectations placed on me because I was already having some success with my short stories. That was not a good situation to be in. That by itself took a long time to overcome.

After all, how many of us had tried to forget something traumatic...only to find it printed on the back of our eyelids, tattooed on our tongues?

When it comes to my interpersonal relationships with men, of course, a lifetime of abuse vastly affected everything I did. I always came from a place of abuse, actually wanting, welcoming, and accepting it because that was my language. It never seemed strange to me.

Some directors don't tell you that it's not your fault, so you get increasingly depressed that you're not delivering what's required, and then you discover it's not you at all, it's something in the background that's out of focus.

INTROVERTS are especially vulnerable to challenges like marital tension, a parent’s death, or abuse. They’re more likely than their peers to react to these events with depression, anxiety, and shyness. Indeed, about a quarter of Kagan’s high-reactive kids suffer from some degree of the condition known as “social anxiety disorder,” a chronic and disabling form of shyness.

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

That first shrink I saw when I got back to Clayton Falls told me no one is a lost cause, but I think that’s bullshit. I think people can be so crushed, so broken, that they’ll never be anything more than a fragment of a whole person.

How long does it take for a broken spirit to kill a body that has food, water and shelter?

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

Killing makes me feel good.

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.

In a healthy individual, a broken bone that has healed properly is strongest where it was once broken. You have not lost any life, Henry told himself. You will still get your fair share of years. Yet the quality of his life changed. Once you've been struck by violence, you acquire companions that never leave you entirely: Suspicion, Fear, Anxiety, Despair, Joylessness. The natural smile is taken from you and the natural pleasures you once enjoyed lose their appeal.

I was shaking all over, and it wasn't from the vampire. Memories have teeth, too.

When you're in a depressed state, having something really bad happen gives you kind of a life again.

When you stare into an abyss for a long time, the abyss also stares into you.

I had had to learn the difference between the bearable fatigue and the unbearable, the fatigue of fear. The first can be cured by a night's sleep; the second kills.

Both success and struggle are different kinds of trauma.

There are things that can harm a lot more than physically.