Nell Zink Quotes

If you woke up, every day, and someone punched you in the face, for the first week, you'd go, 'Why is someone punching me in the face?' But, by the time you got through week two, you'd take it and just go on with the day.

A long-term crisis, after a certain point, no longer seems like a crisis. It seems like the way things are.

As awful as crime can be, it's what happens afterward - the struggling to get out of bed, to put one foot in front of the other - that alters people.

If people got hit on the head by a baseball bat every week, pretty soon they would invent reasons why getting hit on the head with a baseball bat was a good thing.

That is, Jack thought, the way of life. The horror changes us, because we can never forget. Cursed with memory. It starts when we're old enough to know what death is and realize that sooner or later we'll lose everyone we love. We're never the same. But somehow we're all right. We go on.

Most of us do not take these situations as teachings. We automatically hate them. We run like crazy. We use all kinds of ways to escape - all addictions stem from this moment when we meet our edge and we just can't stand it. We feel we have to soften it, pad it with something, and we become addicted to whatever it is that seems to ease the pain.

After awhile you could get used to anything.

There is secrecy and betrayal but that's more part and parcel of the kind of anguish that the people go through. And maybe that's modes of survival, rather than modes of consciousness.

You can get used to anything - haven't I already said that? Isn't that what all survivors say?

A shocking occurrence ceases to be shocking when it occurs daily.

Life's fairly excruciating. Painful things happen. Every now and then, you drag yourself out of the stream and stand on the bank gasping for air. I think that's how I work.

Suffering, it turns out, demands profound imagination. A new future has to be conjured up because the old future isn't there anymore.

It's amazing what you can learn to get used to.

You have come to a stage where you almost have to work on yourself. You know, on finding some tranquility with which to respond to these things, because I realize that the biggest risk that many of us run is beginning to get inured to the horrors.

Learn to get used to it. Eels get used to skinning.

You see one eviction, and you're overcome, but then there's another one and another one and another one.

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

People play with pain all the time.

We're all shocked by new ideas, and we're less shocked when we hear them again. And less shocked when we hear them a third time.

I've been hit in the head a lot, but I don't think I have any problems, but I can't, for the life of me, remember a lot of my road stories and good times. When times are bad enough, that's all you can ever think about.

Perhaps the worst thing about suffering is that it finally hardens the hearts of those around it.

People learned to live with the most unimaginable things.

There was a point that I stopped crying. It's not just because I didn't feel pain anymore, not because I didn't feel sorrow. It was just to keep going. I mean, it just was to survive, to live.

I cry and pray and try to find the positive or the lesson for my pain.

Dancers dance through their pain I shrink from mine.