Dylan O'Brien Quotes

If you get an infection, you get a fever; the fever is your body dealing with the infection. If you get traumatized, your mind and your brain have a reaction to that trauma. If you're not dreaming about it, something's probably wrong.

When you're traumatized, you pick out one thing you remember more than anything else.

I love those sorts of stories where you actually see the consequences of what violence does physically to people as well as psychologically.

I wanted to write something from a child's viewpoint... Five of the characters I have played in movies have either been abused or became abusers, themselves, and I just kind of felt like there was a need.

I think what's always been interesting to me than the science and the criminality with this job is what happens to your persona, your disposition, after day in and day out dealing with life and death.

Let's suppose somebody abused you sexually. You still had a choice, though not a good one, about what to tell yourself about the abuse.

It's... a hard thing for a director, to think you came up with a shot, something from your mind, and someone died while doing it. It's the worst thing you'll ever have to live with. It was very hard for me to get back on the horse again.

Characters who experience great trauma will sometimes create an escape.

However, if you listen to me I think you can hear years of abuse in my voice - both bad abuse and good abuse.

Everybody is not completely traumatised by their life.

I'm not affected by violence the way some people are. I don't know why, but I enjoy that intensity.

The negative effects of combat were nightmares, and I'd get jumpy around certain noises and stuff, but you'd have that after a car accident or a bad divorce. Life's filled with trauma. You don't need to go to war to find it; it's going to find you. We all deal with it, and the effects go away after awhile. At least they did for me.

Yes, I've been very preoccupied with the survivor all through my work.

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.

I have this helicopter crash, and I fall in love with this man who was in the crash with me. I must have been suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome.

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.

What distresses me at times is that I meet a lot of people in their 40's, 50's, 60's, who still say they're a victim of child abuse.

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.

I believe I encountered death, which was a bit too much for a seven-year-old.

When you go through a traumatic event, there's a lot of shame that comes with that. A lot of loss of self-esteem. That can become debilitating.

I guess I'm curious about how people process grief and how they process loss. And I'm also interested in the ways in which an event can have long-reaching consequences and a life over the course of years.

My daughters have grown up knowing all about my kidnapping and the case and what happened.

I did have imprinted on me the idea of trauma that changes things dramatically and suddenly. As a writer, I return to that again and again because it fascinates me, and it's where I come from, in a sense.

I was interned in Auschwitz for one year. I didn't bring back anything, except for a few jokes, and that filled me with shame. Then again, I didn't know what to do with this fresh experience. For this experience was no literary awakening, no occasion for professional or artistic introspection.

I have survivor's curiosity, I guess.