Tillie Olsen Quotes

So to really be able to dive into what does it mean to be broken by an experience, and I developed it just through research and talking and understanding the truth of what it means to lose everything.

When you come from so many damaged places you don't ever want to spiral back there, so you gotta continue to check yourself.

What distresses me at times is that I meet a lot of people in their 40's, 50's, 60's, who still say they're a victim of child abuse.

As awful as crime can be, it's what happens afterward - the struggling to get out of bed, to put one foot in front of the other - that alters people.

I was bullied at school, and I let that get hold of me and withdrew into myself - I regret letting that happen.

Trauma and pain and suffering can be the very thing that dislodges a person from themselves both in awful ways and larger ways that force one to reckon with one's own life.

It's been my experience with damaged people: they don't wake up every day and wallow in the bad things that have happened to them.

I was a mess my freshman year of college. I still had so much pain in my heart.

I think for guys who get severely injured and can't move forward, it's because the 'what-ifs' absolutely destroy their recovery.

What people believe is a measure of what they suffer.

One person's trauma is another's loss of innocence.

Bones mend. Regret stays with you forever.

The one thing all that battle taught me, is that no one walks away without scars. No one. (Bad Moon Rising)

How could anyone stay sane with entire lifetimes stored in one human mind?

The pain is there; when you close one door on it, it knocks to come in somewhere else.

Memories are dangerous things. You turn them over and over, until you know every touch and corner, but still you'll find an edge to cut you.

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.

You can run away from home But you can't run away from your pain I sit here alone There's always someone else to blame.

I was battling depression, went through a really hard time in my marriage, and I used to cry myself to sleep. I went through years and years of pain and suffering, and finally got help. I feel so much better now, feel like a new person, so now I can be happy about it.

Sometimes you almost have to laugh to keep from crying to deal with the pain associated with the 'hood.

My mom died of cancer when I was really young. I'm not someone who tries to work out their own stuff with a role, but I think that happened despite my best efforts to keep myself separate from it.

While books provided me with some escape from the mental and physical horrors of my early life, they were unreliable. Many times the protagonists suffered terribly and then died at the end.

Children can only take so much, and they deal with it however they can.

Sometimes I think we're exposed to things we shouldn't be exposed to too early. I think that sets the tone to a person's whole life. Trauma.

Listen, it's not nice to have your mum kill herself, that is difficult. But at the end of the day, it happened a long time ago. My mother was, I hope, not the reason that I have been successful. It's not as simplistic as 'My mum killed herself; I've got to prove myself.' I was very lucky that my parents took an interest in me.