Henri Nouwen Quotes

With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.

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.

A wound that goes unacknowledged and unwept is a wound that cannot heal.

One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual.

our dreams draw blood from old sores.

If you were in a bad relationship and you meet someone new, you're going to leave with your luggage. The next person is going to have to endure things that someone else causes.

At some point people either had to throw off the wounds of their childhood or go through life permanently crippled

they say that time heals all things, they say you can always forget; but the smiles and the tears across the years they twist my heart strings yet!

There is some comfort in killing that which has hurt you, but it is cold comfort. It'll destroy things inside of you that the original pain wouldn't have harmed. Sometimes it's not a question of whether a piece of your soul is going to go missing, only which piece it's going to be.

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

You can't patch a wounded soul with a Band-Aid.

The damage can fester under layers of time and change, and an ignorant, thoughtless remark can easily reopen the wound.

There are those hearts, reader, that never mend again once they are broken. Or if they do mend, they heal themselves in a crooked and lopsided way, as if sewn together by a careless craftsman. Such was the fate of Chiaroscuro. His heart was broken. Picking up the spoon and placing it on his head, speaking of revenge, these things helped him to put his heart together again. But it was, alas, put together wrong.

If you want to understand a difficult or trying person, begin by asking the question: 'What is the wound they are trying to heal?'

Grief doesn't fade. Grief scabs over like my scars and pulls into new, painful configurations as it knits. It hurts in new ways. We are never free from grief.

I had lots of hurt and lots of pain, lots of woundedness, bruises, broken heartedness in my life. I was abused sexually by my father, abused mentally, emotionally. My mom didn't know what to do about it, and she was being hurt in the process. So she just didn't deal with it. And I can guarantee you, just because you don't deal with something, that doesn't make it go away.

What deep wounds ever closed without a scar?

What deep wounds ever closed without a scar? The hearts bleed longest, and heals but to wear That which disfigures it.

Love will break your heart,[...] but love can also mend it. Not many things in life are both the cause and the cure.

I can heal the scars on your body, but I can’t heal the scars of the soul. Not yours, not mine. You have to learn to live with them. You have to choose to live beyond them

The abused child goes on living within those who have survived such torture, a torture that ended with total repression. They live with the darkness of fear, oppression, and threats. When all its attempts to move the adult to heed its story have failed, it resorts to the language of symptoms to make itself heard. Enter addiction, psychosis, criminality.

You know, the mind is a remarkable thing. Just because you can't see the wound doesn't mean it isn't hurting. It scars all the time, but it heals.

But a wound unfelt is a wound unhealed.

Adults are just children sometimes. But evil, hurt children.

Closure is a greasy little word which, moreover, describes a nonexistent condition. The truth, Venus, is that nobody gets over anything.