James Wolfensohn Quotes

I built Kosovo for 10 years.

I think the American people want to see what we want to see, and that is for the Iraqi people to have a free, open, fair election, for their forces to be built up, for our reconstruction money to be used well, and for Iraqi security forces to take over so we can start bringing our troops home.

He'll be delivered from madness. What then? He'll feel himself acceptable! What then? Do you think feelings like his can be simply re-attached, like plasters? Stuck on to other objects we select? Look at him! ... My desire might be to make this boy an ardent husband - a caring citizen - a worshipper of abstract and unifying God. My achievement, however, is more likely to make a ghost!

I think also people in states like Pennsylvania know that a lot of money and effort and time needs to be spent on knitting America back together, on the bridges and the roads and the infrastructure and the education.

When the emotional soul receives a wounding shock, the soul seems to recover as the body recovers. But this is only in appearance. Slowly, slowly the wound to the soul begins to make itself felt, like a bruise, which only slowly deepens its terrible ache, till it fills all the psyche. And when we think we have recovered and forgotten, it is then that the terrible after-effects have to be encountered at their worst.

I think emotional and mental pain is probably worse than physical pain. I think we don't realize that I have no arms or legs but we all have disabilities of some sort, some fear, some lost, some wishes that didn't come true, things we wish would be better.

My philosophy is, "murder the rapist in your mind so you stop killing yourself." I've seen, in my lifetime, that sexual abuse has turned into self-abuse. When I kill the rapist inside of me, I will stop killing myself.

I have also Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and I wouldn't have survived that if not for music. So I think for me, music was a soothing thing and it was also a place where you could say all the stuff that you couldn't say anywhere else.

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

She thought she brought a gift of compassion for those exhausted souls who had not received a chest portion from the people who raised them. If compassion and therapy did not work, she could always send her patients to the local pharmacy for drugs.

Because you think an explosion has taken place and you're looking at the shards and you say, 'Well, can we put this back together?' And by God, maybe you can put it back together. And maybe it won't be the same, but maybe it will be different, and maybe it can even be better in a different way.

Suicidal thinking, if serious, can be a kind of death scare, comparable to suffering a heart attack or undergoing a cancer operation. One survives such a phase both warier and chastened. When-ten years ago-I emerged from a bad dip into suicidal speculation, I felt utterly exhausted and yet quite fearless of ordinary dangers, vastly afraid of myself but much less scared of extraneous eventualities.

I'm lucky to be alive. It took three years of therapy to recover but I did it.

She thinks that happiness is a mat that sits on her doorway.

The brain heals the past like an injury.

I wandered around not knowing what I was doing in The Great Waldo Pepper and feeling pretty lost, and they rightly cut my part down. I don't think I was in very good emotional shape. I think I was a bit of a mess. I'd done about six movies back-to-back, and was in a state of complete exhaustion.

[The] majority of the girls working there had major emotional problems. And not cries-too-much emotional problems; more like stabs-her-boyfriend-with-a-steak-knife-then-falls-into-a-corner-and-starts-whispering-to-herself emotional problems.

I think a brain can be made "more thinking" or made "more emotional." At what point does this become abnormal? Autism in its milder variants, I think, is part of normal human variation.

I am not aware, however, that patients suffering from traumatic neurosis are much occupied in their waking lives with memories of their accident. Perhaps they are more concerned with not thinking of it.

A decade of cutting away dead flesh, cauterizing old scars ripped open over and over and still it is not enough.

You’re not leaving me here alone,” I say. Because if he dies, I’ll never go home, not really. I’ll spend the rest of my life in this arena, trying to think my way out.

New York, home of the vivisectors of the mind, and of the mentally vivisected still to be reassembled, of those who live intact, habitually wondering about their states of sanity, and home of those whose minds have been dead, bearing the scars of resurrection.

I didn't think there was any way to convince Jack that he wanted more than I had to give, that to people who'd been damaged the way I had been, fear and the will to survive would always be more powerful than attachment. I could only love in a limited way

The struggle hasn't ended. It's only just begun in our view. In the sense that if all goes well during the elections and we emerge as the government there will still be another form of struggle. But there's going to be lots of work in reconstruction, resettling people. In the initial period we will expect all the support groups we have here in Britain and elsewhere to concentrate their efforts in enabling us to resettle our people.

How I Learned to Drive I think it's one of the great American plays. Its one of those plays that will be done forever, and it's timeless. I think it, for me, has so much heart and so much love.