Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes

The shock of any trauma, I think changes your life. It's more acute in the beginning and after a little time you settle back to what you were. However it leaves an indelible mark on your psyche.

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

I was scarred in 1977 by watching Jaws, and I've never got over it.

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.

Characters who experience great trauma will sometimes create an escape.

As a young man you don't notice at all that you were, after all, badly affected. For years afterwards, at least ten years, I kept getting these dreams, in which I had to crawl through ruined houses, along passages I could hardly get through.

My uncle's house burned down when I was 6 years old. We got out safely. But ever since, I've had a nightmare of dying in a fire.

No person can escape Einsteinian relativity, and no soldier or veteran can escape the trauma of war's dislocation.

It's kind of a mystery to me, as far as my own life experiences and what I've witnessed - why some people can just move on through traumatic experiences, in childhood particularly, and why other people are just paralyzed by it. I just don't know how and why that is.

Trauma creates one of four types of people: victims, rescuers, or perps - and if you're really lucky and really strong and very willing and brave, survivors.

My childhood was so traumatic.

Children certainly can't learn if they're dealing with trauma or mental illness.

I don't want to get into splitting hairs. Trauma is trauma. I'm not in a position to quantify or qualify people's trauma.

When you grow up with a significant amount of trauma, you are realizing it as you get older, and you're realizing the ways you can recover from that trauma. The things that I have witnessed and that I have been through, it's going to take a lifetime to undo.

Childhood trauma is really what puts the rocket fuel behind addiction.

Shame--what happened when my mother, the dragon, huffed and puffed and blew my self down.

You get these fear memories that are hard to undo.

But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes. The heart of a hurt child can shrink so that forever afterward it is hard and pitted as the seed of a peach. Or again, the heart of such a child may fester and swell until it is a misery to carry within the body, easily chafed and hurt by the most ordinary things.

The portrayal of post-traumatic stress disorder and things like that felt really big and important.

It is true to say that the first kill can influence the whole future career of a fighter pilot. Many to whom the first victory over the opponent has been long denied either by unfortunate circumstances or by bad luck can suffer from frustration or develop complexes they may never rid themselves of again.

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?

My head was spinning, I had never seen blood. Four years old, this don't feel like love.

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

I think so much of my early life, even though I grew up White and middle class, I was completely shattered by the horrifically violent atmosphere I grew up in. I am a consequence of violence. That opened a door to many realities that I would not have experienced had I not survived what I did.

Those whom fate has dealt hard knocks remain vulnerable for ever afterwards.