Anna Katharine Green Quotes

Appalling things can happen to children. And even a happy childhood is filled with sadnesses.

Love and pain become one in the same in the eyes of a wounded child.

Children would die of terror if they knew the folly and ignorance of their caretakers.

Childhood should be carefree, playing in the sun; not living a nightmare in the darkness of the soul.

Inwardly, I gouged my eyes out.

It was not fair, it was not fair, it was not fair. So cried his child's heart, and then his child's heart died a little. For that is also the way of the world.

At great periods you have always felt, deep within you, the temptation to commit suicide. You gave yourself to it, breached your own defenses. You were a child. The idea of suicide was a protest against life; by dying, you would escape this longing for death.

it is the worst humiliation and grievance of the suffering, that they cause suffering.

Many times I see you as a portrait of torture.

There are some of us who in after years say to Fate, 'Now deal us your hardest blow, give us what you will; but let us never again suffer as we suffered when we were children.' The barb in the arrow of childhood's suffering is this: its intense loneliness, its intense ignorance.

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.

Every life and every childhood is filled with frustrations; we cannot imagine it otherwise, for even the best mother cannot satisfy all her child's wishes and needs. It is not the suffering caused by frustration, however, that leads to emotional illness, but rather the fact that the child is forbidden by the parents to experience and articulate this suffering, the pain felt at being wounded.

I've seen the slip a few times. I don't have to watch something like that to go through the pain again and again and again.

I could tell you it's the heart, but what is really killing him is loneliness. Memories are worse than bullets.

That is scary, when you consider what we're doing to children all over the planet. They're the ones who are truly being terrorized by all the madness adults are perpetrating.

What hurts people a lot is taking humiliation.

For a second I was just a kid – a kid who had lived all of his life in the same tiny town. Just a child. Because I knew I would have to live a lot more, suffer a lot more, to ever understand the searing agony in Edward’s eyes.

You're only as sick as your secrets.

Not, not mine: it's somebody else's wound; I could never have borne it. So take the thing that happened, hide it, stick it in the ground; whisk the lamps away.

No, it was the brutal loss of his family that haunted him and for that Nykyrian couldn’t fault him at all. Syn had been put through a meat grinder by life. The fact that man could still get up and make it through a day without blowing his brains out amazed him.’ (Nykyrian)

Adults had the notion that juveniles needed to suffer. Only when they had suffered enough to wipe out most of their naturally joyous spirits and innocence were they staid enough to be considered mature. An adult was essentially a broken-down child.

A child of broken mind, the fear that I hide behind.

Grief is not just a series of events, stages, or timelines. Our society places enormous pressure on us to get over loss, to get through grief. But how long do you grieve for a husband of fifty years, a teenager killed in a car accident, a four-year-old child: a year? Five years? Forever? The loss happens in time, in fact in a moment, but its aftermath lasts a lifetime.