Arundhati Roy Quotes

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.

It was a catch-22: If you didn’t put the trauma behind you, you couldn’t move on. But if you did put the trauma behind you, you willingly gave up your claim to the person you were before it happened.

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.

I'm attracted to subjects who overcome tremendous suffering and learn to cope emotionally with it.

This show has shown me how to throw a punch. But watching my future sister-in-law go through breast cancer has also shown me how to take one.

I think everybody has their pain. For me, the time that I really had to grow up was when I was 15 and I had my best friend die of leukemia. Watching somebody so strong go through that is definitely something that will give you a little bit of depth. There have been a lot of things that have happened in my life that has forced me to grow up.

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.

When I think about my teenage years, when my parents broke up, and feeling alone and being out of control and having to survive... And then other times when you've had to find your own way... that's always been a dominant theme in what I've done.

The only thing I know how to do is survive.

I'm asked daily about how and why I don't have PTSD. I'm probably the last person on Earth you should ask about this stuff.

Oftentimes, experiencing tragedy very young can strangely give you a kind of equilibrium.

In a cruel land, you either learned to laugh at cruelty or spent your life weeping.

People learned to live with the most unimaginable things.

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

How can you be a survivor, when you can't even remember the war?

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.

I look back and think of all the times I've had to let things go in the past, and how traumatic it seemed while it was happening, but how my understanding of it changed as time passed - and oftentimes things that seem really difficult and traumatic in the short term seem a lot less difficult and traumatic in the long term. So I remind myself of that.

You get through it, you just never get over it

There had been times when he knew, somewhere in him, that he would get used to it, whatever it was, because he had learnt that some hard things became softer after a very little while.

I know I can do it," Todd Downey said, helping himself to another ear of corn from the steaming bowl. "I'm sure that in time her death will be a mystery, even to me.

If people can live through genocide and retain compassion, if they can take strength in pain, if they are able, still, to laugh, then certainly we can learn something from them.

After my husband, Dave, died, I called my friend Adam, a psychologist who studies how people find meaning in our lives, and I asked him what, if anything, I could do to help myself and my kids get through this. We started talking about resilience, then reading about it, then talking to other people who had gotten through grief and other huge challenges. In time, those conversations and that research helped me heal.

If it is true that one gets used to suffering, how is it that as the years go one always suffers more? No, they are not mad, those people who amuse themselves, enjoy life, travel, make love, fight they are not mad. We should like to do the same ourselves.

Loss either teaches you to persist in the face of suffering, or hardens you into a bitter cynic. Sometimes, it does a little of both.

Oftentimes things that seem really difficult and traumatic in the short term seem a lot less difficult and traumatic in the long term.