James Hillman Quotes

The thing that always interests me from a storytelling point of view is how that moment of trauma, whatever the trauma is, even divorce, your dog dies, whatever it is, the consequence, in terms of people's emotional lives and the way it resonates behaviorally for a long time, is really the stuff that interests me.

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.

I probably only cried five or six times in my life and I think four of those times was from my daddy kicking my butt.

My childhood was so traumatic.

You get these fear memories that are hard to undo.

Given my heritage and the ordeal of my childhood, I sometimes wonder why I myself am not insane. Maybe I am.

By then Esthappen and Rahel had learned that the world had other ways of breaking men. They were already familiar with the smell. Sicksweet. Like old roses on a breeze.

I was badly bullied when I was in the seventh grade - relentlessly, mercilessly - by a group of 12-year-old girls. And it left me with a determination that no matter what, I had to throw my shoulders back, stick out my chin, and project a sense that no one and nothing could hurt me. That turned out to be a life-changing mistake.

I never really got nightmares from movies. In fact, I recall my father saying when I was three years old that I would be scared, but I never was.

Disasters like Oklahoma City and 9/11 were time-limited. The children who were affected psychologically could go to a place of normalcy.

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

Even as a kid I remember seeing 'Minority Report' and just crying my eyes out. It was horrible what was happening to her. That was my mum!

Oftentimes, experiencing tragedy very young can strangely give you a kind of equilibrium.

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

I remember that I felt I had to avoid all these sensational photos, the hanged woman, the man who shot himself, and so forth. I collected a great deal of material, including a number of banal, irrelevant photos, and then in the course of my work I came back to the very pictures I had actually wanted to avoid, which summed up the various stories.

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.

There are things that can harm a lot more than physically.

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.

Never had it occurred to me that the things that had happened to me...might be a kind of trauma.

But I didn't understand then. That I could hurt somebody so badly she would never recover. That a person can, just by living, damage another human being beyond repair.

I'm scared of myself. I think I'd be a bad driver. I'm scared of cars, period. I've had too many friends killed now, and I've seen too many people killed in my life when I drove across the country when I was 12. I'm sure that has a lot to do with it. If you see a few real dead bodies with brains on the pavement, it does a lot to change your attitude. It means you can get it too. I've had a lot of relatives killed. I've had a lot of dear friends killed. It's stupid. The whole activity is stupid.

There’s no way you can kill someone and get to the other side of the experience unchanged.

My oldest brother was stabbed thirty to forty times and strangled to death with his own belt when I was eight years old. Much of my life has been pockmarked with violence. So I had a natural interest in the topic, along with a strong home-field advantage.

Even a 30-year-old man whose wife dies is eleven times more likely to commit suicide than a 30-year-old man whose wife is living. At age 30, when men can bury themselves in their jobs and are physically and financially attractive to women, the loss of the one woman a man loves is so devastating it is often not softened even by the opportunities for many women... in brief, it is the loss of love that devastates men.

Painful memories didn't just ease back in-they shoved the door open hard, all of them and all at once