Tim O'Brien Quotes

Misery pulls away the brackets of life leaving you to free fall.

Mental wounds not healing, who and what's to blame. I'm going off the rails on a crazy train.

Broken people say awful things and do incredibly absurd things.

You encountered a misery near the end of the day and it took a while to gauge its full extent. Some miseries had sharp curvature and could be negotiated readily. Others had almost no curvature and you knew you'd be spending hours turning the corner. Great whopping-big planet-sized miseries.

no one had experiences any more, only traumas.

You always wrestle with depression, you always wrestle with those things, because the events and the experiences are still there, and the things that take place are still happening.

Remembering how my mother looked before she gave birth to my sister is frightening. But even more frightening is the feeling that I wanted them to catch me and beat me. Why did I want to be punished? Shadows out of the past clutch at my legs and drag me down. I open my mouth to scream, but I am voiceless. My hands are trembling, I feel cold, and there is a distant humming in my ears.

That was when Leonard realized something crucial about depression. The smarter you were, the worse it was. The sharper your brain, the more it cut you up.

Its so hard to talk when you want to kill yourself. That's above and beyond everything else, and it's not a mental complaint-it's a physical thing, like it's physically hard to open your mouth and make the words come out. They don't come out smooth and in conjunction with your brain the way normal people's words do; they come out in chunks as if from a crushed-ice dispenser; you stumble on them as they gather behind your lower lip. So you just keep quiet.

A frightening menagerie, my emotions are Too many and varied to number Like creatures they crawl and they fly above Tearing my body asunder.

...too much sadness hath congealed your blood,And melancholy is the nurse of frenzy.

My soul is a broken field, plowed by pain.

I think we start suffering as soon as we come out of the womb. I think that people tend to stereotype. When they think of suffering, they think of abuse - physical abuse, emotional abuse, poverty, that kind of thing. There's different levels of suffering. I don't think that it has to do with how much money you have - if you were raised in the ghetto or the Hamptons. For me it's more about perception: self-perception and how you perceive the world.

There are a hundred things she has tried to chase away the things she won't remember and that she can't even let herself think about because that's when the birds scream and the worms crawl and somewhere in her mind it's always raining a slow endless drizzle.

You can be living in a big house, driving a nice car, going on exotic vacations and still be empty inside, crippled with fear and dread.

We have a dysfunctional dream of the planet, and humans are mentally sick with a disease called fear. The symptoms of the disease are all the emotions that make humans suffer: anger, hate, sadness, envy, and betrayal. When the fear is too great, the reasoning mind begins to fail, and we call this mental illness.

I know that we often tremble at an empty terror; yet the false fancy brings a real misery.

She lost much of her appetite. At night, an invisible hand kept shaking her awake every few hours. Grief was physiological, a disturbance of the blood. Sometimes a whole minute would pass in nameless dread - the bedside clock ticking, the blue moonlight coating the window like glue - before she'd remember the brutal fact that had caused it.

I simply cannot understand how any parent could kill themselves.

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

The whole world can become the enemy when you lose what you love.

Fear / a motor, / pumps me around and around / until I fade slowly.

But it was not the room’s disorder which was frightening; it was the fact that when one began searching for the key to this disorder, one realized that it was not to be found in any of the usual places. For this was not a matter of habit or circumstance or temperament; it was a matter of punishment and grief.