Iyanla Vanzant Quotes

You can accept or reject the way you are treated by other people, but until you heal the wounds of your past, you will continue to bleed. You can bandage the bleeding with food, with alcohol, with drugs, with work, with cigarettes, with sex, but eventually, it will all ooze through and stain your life. You must find the strength to open the wounds, stick your hands inside, pull out the core of the pain that is holding you in your past, the memories, and make peace with them.

I know what it feels like to be bruised; I know what it feels like to carry things around with you that never totally heal. There's closure and then there's stuff that's kind of like, Well, I guess it's going to be in the minivan forever. And you carry it with you and you continue on your journey with your minivan full of stuff, which I think most of us do.

When the wound/ No longer hurts/ The scar does.

You must find the strength to open the wounds, stick your hands inside, pull out the core of the pain that is holding you in your past, the memories, and make peace with them.

When something's painful, you just avoid it. Why bother dredging up the past if it's nothing but bad stuff?

I have spent much of my adult life flinching with pain as I tried to pull out the threads that bound the shadows of my past to me.

If you've got to my age, you've probably had your heart broken many times. So it's not that difficult to unpack a bit of grief from some little corner of your heart and cry over it.

I'm trying to put the past to rest, but things just keep popping up to just pull me back in.

Unless you come to terms with your past... it haunts you, and you never leave it.

People who have been through trauma, their souls are hurting.

Scars are memory. Like sutures. They stitch the past to me.

With me being in so many pain from when you have a betrayal from your best friend - who was my husband - and the girl got pregnant, I couldn't even get out of bed. The only thing that saved me was my stand-up. I would get on stage and just talk about stuff, and I made people laugh. A lot of women e-mail me and say, 'How do you smile? How do you laugh at something like this?' That's how I do it. I laugh because that's how I get through pain.

I have some scars... lots of internal ones. But they're all scabbed over.

The word landed with a stony thud Onto my still-beating breast. Nevermind, I was prepared, I will manage with the rest. I have a lot of work to do today; I need to slaughter memory, Turn my living soul to stone Then teach myself to live again. . . But how. The hot summer rustles Like a carnival outside my window; I have long had this premonition Of a bright day and a deserted house.

When you have committed an action that you cannot bear to think about, that causes you to writhe in retrospect, do not seek to evade the memory: make yourself relive it, confront it repeatedly over and over, till finally, you will discover, through sheer repetition it loses its power to pain you. It works, I guarantee you, this sure-fire guilt-eradicator, like a homeopathic medicine - like in small doses applied to like. It works, but I am not sure that it is a good thing.

Our most merciless enemy is our past.

You become the victim of the past, and your tormentor today is your self left over from yesterday.

I’m packed with broken glass and memories and it all hurts.

The Detective was different. Not that he wasn't a good man; Willie had heard enough about him to understand that he was the kind who didn't like to turn away from another's pain, the kind who couldn't put a pillow over his ears to drown out the cries of strangers. Those scars he had were badges of courage, and Willie knew that there were others hidden beneath his clothes, and still more deep inside, right beneath the skin and down to the soul. No, it was just that whatever goodness was there coexisted with rage and grief and loss.

We won't let ourselves feel our anger, rage, and pain. We push it down or anesthetize it through drugs, alcohol, shopping, or whatever we do in order not to feel it. When that memory and the associated feelings get lodged down there in our soul, the feelings are still there. They don't just magically go away. We have to give ourselves the opportunity to feel them.

The damage was permanent; there would always be scars. But even the angriest scars faded over time until it was difficult to see them written on the skin at all, and the only thing that remained was the memory of how painful it had been.

Even when the wound is healed the scar remains.

Every present anger derives from past weakness.

In visions of the night, like dropping rain, Descend the many memories of pain.

Love is brief: forgetting lasts so long.