Gideon Raff Quotes

The psychology of brutality was worse than the beatings.

People who have been made to suffer by certain things cannot be reminded of them without a horror which paralyses every other pleasure

My theory is that Kurt had a lot of residual pain from his childhood. And when you pile that on top of his experience in World War II - he was in Dresden when it was bombed and saw a city annihilated. When you combine those two things, my impression of Kurt Vonnegut at 84 was that he was a very pained and haunted man.

… the most uncouth … mental torture

I spent five years in a North Vietnamese POW camp, kept in the dark, fed with scraps. Do you think I want to do that all over again?

On the haggard faces of every man among these prisoners, the same expression sat … It had something of that strained attention which we see upon the faces of the blind ad deaf mingled with a kind of horror as thought they had all been secretly terrified. I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body …

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

Many writers who have had to deal with the subject of atrocity can't face it head-on.

Terror made me cruel; and finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bedclothes.

He could not understand why he had needed so many words to explain what he felt in war because one was enough: fear. ~Jose Aracadio Segundo Buendia After the second banana slaughter

I lived in the first century of world wars. Most mornings I would be more or less insane.

I hated the bangs in the war: I always felt a silent war would be more tolerable.

My father was one of the first six guys ashore on Iwo Jima. He's 86 years old now, and every single night of his life, he has nightmares, and he wakes yelling.

The idea that somebody who has done something horrible in a war is not willing to talk about it for 32 years is hardly a shocking idea. Quite the contrary.

Trauma is not the sole province of victims. If that were true, soldiers returning from Afghanistan wouldn't suffer from PTSD.

Bill Phillips was this nervous, chain-smoking student. He had signed up to be an engineer, he had gone away to fight in the Second World War, he had come back. He had switched to sociology because he wanted to understand how people could do these terrible things to each other. And he did a little bit of economics on the side.

There is no birth of consciousness without pain.

I've been water-boarded, and I speak from experience, and it's torture.

My father, unusually for a PoW, talked about his experiences, but he talked about them in a very limited way.

Posttraumatic stress is something that's always existed. I think that the earliest recording was during the Trojan War, but it's only recently that we're beginning to be aware of it.

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 began to speak well at a very advanced age - 15, 16, 17 years old. It was psychological: the trauma of war, my family and growing up on my own. I was more or less a street kid.

Every war has its demons.

We talk about war in America, we talk about it on an intellectual level. We don’t talk about the sound or smells of war…the pain

The unnecessary result of wartime hysteria.