Sebastian Junger Quotes

You must hurt, or be hurt.

No matter what I do, I'm hurting someone." - Katniss Everdeen

I have spent much of my adult life flinching with pain as I tried to pull out the threads that bound the shadows of my past to me.

I'm a fountain of blood. In the shape of a girl.

Make no mistake, adolescence is a war. No one gets out unscathed.

Sometimes history reads like a catalogue of post-traumatic stress.

A soldier's longing to talk about his experiences of battle is a wound that never heals.

No soldier ever really survives a war.

When I heard your organization was recording testimonies, I knew I had to come. She died in my arms, saying 'I don't want to die.' That is what death is like. It doesn't matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn't matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we would never have war anymore.

They hurt you. You hurt 'em back. Or maybe it is the other way around. Whatever. Someday you might find a way to forgive each other. But it won't be like it used to 'cause that pain never really goes away.

Are you in pain, Frodo?' said Gandalf quietly as he rode by Frodo's side. 'Well, yes I am,' said Frodo. 'It is my shoulder. The wound aches, and the memory of darkness is heavy on me. It was a year ago today.' 'Alas! there are some wounds that cannot be wholly cured,' said Gandalf. 'I fear it may be so with mine,' said Frodo. 'There is no real going back. Though I may come to the Shire, it will not seem the same; for I shall not be the same. I am wounded with knife, sting, and tooth, and a long burden. Where shall I find rest?' Gandalf did not answer.

If all the people who have been hurt by the war were to exclude joy from their lives, it would almost be as if they had died.

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

You do not know what wars are going on down there where the spirit meets the bone.

We're all damaged somehow."-A Great and Terrible Beauty

That's one of the horrors of war, that you can train a person, train them to hate, train them to kill. It's a terrible thought.

Each step is more difficult than the last; the heaviness fills me and turns my limbs to stone. You must hurt or be hurt.

The ways I could hurt her and hurt myself. Those two things were intertwined somehow. It's hard to explain, but when you were as closed off as I was the past few months, opening felt as wrong as stripping naked in church.

The world is full enough of hurts and mischances without wars to multiply them.

DEMON MATH What is JUST in a world you've ripped in two as if there could be a half for me a half for you what is FAIR when there is nothing left to share what is YOURS when your pain is mine to bear this sad math is mine this mad path is mine subtract they say don't cry back to the desk try forget addition multiply and i reply this is why remainders hate division.

Grief doesn't fade. Grief scabs over like my scars and pulls into new, painful configurations as it knits. It hurts in new ways. We are never free from grief.

Scars speak more loudly than the sword that caused them.

The dead won’t hurt you, Shahara. Only the living can do that. (Syn)

This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love.

We are all broken by something. We have all hurt someone and have been hurt. We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent.