V. S. Naipaul Quotes

Every fear, every night terror, every hour I cried for Liev, every fight with Sebastian is registered as a neat white scar.

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.

...This fear was unbearable. It unwrapped who she was, as neatly as he'd unwound her bandage, leaving too much pain and ugliness exposed. Nerve endings; he'd said they were the problem [causing phantom pain in the amputated limb]." Things that cut off, that ended abruptly or died--like parents and marriages--kept hurting forever.

There's some things I can't write about, just terrible personal tragedies.

Some things I don't want to remember.

Going back to 2012, it was a bad year for me. I lost my dad as well, so burying him a week before I went to jail, just having all of that emotion, it just hit me hard.

I would tell high school Shane to just start writing down everything that was happening. It was so hard to think back to all those terrible moments. They all started clustering together into one big terrible moment.

I was extremely timid and to be made to feel that I was not wanted, although in a place where I had every right to be, even months afterwards caused me sometimes weeks of pain. Every time any one of these disagreeable incidents came into my mind, my heart sank, and I was anew tortured by the thought of what I had endured, almost as much as the incident itself.

I hit my head against the wall because I don't want to know all the terrible things that I know about. I don't want to feel all these wretched things, but they're in me already. If I don't get rid of them, I'm not ever going to feel anything else.

But those with shattered souls find it very difficult to speak.

We're tortured, a lot of us, believe me.

I was in such a state of mental shock and quickly spiraled into a depression at the multitude of loss. My husband, I thought, was going to leave me. I was cut off from this mentor and someone I cared for very much, David Petraeus, who also did nothing to stand up for me and in fact, empowered his surrogates to throw me under the bus, and that was devastating.

To realize that I was the victim of what was apparently someone's sick joke and constant lies was, and is, painful and humiliating.

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

...you are battered and bruised in the collisions between reminiscence and reality.

There have been three times. Once I got in a car accident and shattered my finger. A few years ago I didn't feel like being alive. That's all I can say.

Imagine trying to relive your worst break-up, your worst fight, the most painful death of a loved one, and just really relive it step by step, and bring it up and apply it to the scene you're in.

It was stressful [to live as a child in a Sylvian Hills]. It's always been complicated, honestly... I do not really want to tell you, actually. It bothers me that you want me to tell this.

Pain is an event ... Suffering, on the other hand, is the nightmare reliving of unscrutinized and unmetabolized pain.

An unacknowledged trauma is like a wound that never heals over and may start to bleed again at any time.

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

Shame produces trauma. Trauma produces paralysis.

Once shame touches your being at any point, even the most distant nerve is implicated, whether you know it or not; any fleeting encounter or random thought will rake up the anguish and add to it.

...and trauma had a way of burning memories deeper into the mind.

And then theres always the crying and the weeping that we hear-children, women, even men. And these images and these sounds are always with me.