Anne Grant Quotes

Lorna was quite young when her mother died, and I think she's blocked out some of the memories. I talked to her a little bit about that, but I wasn't prepared to go around and poke and hurt her.

Don't tell me that [broken heartstrings] hurt less than a broken bone, that an ingrown life is something surgeons can cut away, that there's no way for it to metastasize - it does.

...grief can derange even the strongest and most disciplined of minds.

In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.

under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet, every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. we have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief. we have never seen a totally sane human being.

Shame produces trauma. Trauma produces paralysis.

I think I ran so hard and so fast, in a lot of ways, from my life and I kind of took a fall. It was like - what do they call it? - post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Grief is the agony of an instant; the indulgence of grief the blunder of a life.

What is the value of sticking a microphone in a man's face right after he has learned of his wife's death?

The Marine Corps taught me how to kill, but it didn't teach me how to deal with killing.

The flip side of suicide is that it leaves a lingering question in the minds of the people who survived. It's like a cancer that's metastasized. The suicide is the cancer and the metastasis is all these people saying, Why? Why? Why?

The thing about post-traumatic stress disorder, we know about one in five, about 20 percent of individuals that are exposed to a direct traumatic stress will develop this disorder.

The main cause of my difficulties stemmed from the tragedy of my daughter's unsound birth and my inability to face my feelings.

As crime writers, we put these characters, year after year, book after book, through the most horrendous trauma, dealing with grief and death and loss and violence. We can't pretend that these things don't affect these characters; they have to. If they don't, then you're essentially writing cartoons.

Grief causes suffering and disease.

I had to steel myself against this psychic devastation - to see your father on the street. It's hard enough to pick up somebody you don't know from the streets, and then to actually have other people pick your father up - it was psychically devastating.

I've always been more interested in what happens after the bad thing has happened - the fallout of the bad thing, when people are already damaged. I'm less interested in seeing people when they're fine and following their journey to becoming damaged.

I was darkly convinced that at age 52 I would kill myself because my mother committed suicide at that age. I was fantasizing that she was waiting for me on the other side of the grave.

There was no way to laugh anymore, to love, to care, and there was a sense of guilt in having survived when others had been killed. I turned into a worse workaholic than I had already been by trying to work myself into the ground.

My family made it through Hurricane Sandy. We have water, power, and a roof, but the survivor's guilt makes me want to hide. Sneak away from the brilliance of life. It shouts at me: 'Don't enjoy anything too much; people are suffering.' I feel childlike somehow.

It is devastating, losing a parent. I don't really know what the effect is, but I suppose people might call me an ambitious man, and I'd say that an ambitious man is a damaged man.

I can safely say that losing my mum at the age of 12 and therefore shutting down all of my emotions for the last 20 years has had a quite serious effect on not only my personal life but also my work as well.

Going back to 2012, it was a bad year for me. I lost my dad as well, so burying him a week before I went to jail, just having all of that emotion, it just hit me hard.

As a doctor, I was aware that when children go through severe trauma, they shouldn't see their parents completely disintegrate because subconsciously, that tells them they have no one to take care of them.

Abortion, more than not, leaves women with an aftermath of grief, guilt, and emotional overload. In a lot of cases, this can last a lifetime.