Shared Trauma Quotes

One smell of brimstone makes the whole world kin.

People talked to me in a way I think they would not have talked to somebody who hadn't shared the experience; they gave me their papers, they gave me their diaries. I found people constantly opening up to me. And I think they did because I had shared that experience with them.

It’s a hard thing to explain to somebody who hasn’t felt it, but the presence of death and danger has a way of bringing you fully awake. It makes things vivid. When you’re afraid, really afraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to the world. You make close friends. You become part of a tribe and you share the same blood- you give it together, you take it together.

Feminism is experiential; it's comparing notes. And when those stories get told, and you realize it's not just you - it's bigger - there's just a huge sigh of relief. Otherwise, you think you're crazy.

I once fell in love with a man only because we both belonged to that large and secret club of children who had "crazy mothers." We traded stories of the shameless houses to which we could never invite our friends.

I believe that when people experience an event as a community, it can transcend and change people's lives.

I myself have seen the same racism happen to me and my Dad... I think about all the stories I have growing up with my Dad how obvious it is.

Bob Monkhouse, Galton and Simpson, Spike Milligan and I all started around the same time with an enormous advantage: working to an audience all of whom had shared an awful, common experience - the war.

Damaged people gravitate towards damaged people.

But then, the flames of a fire are not made less painful by the knowledge that others are burning with you.

I have a collective sense of suffering.

In terms of experience with the police, everybody got those. It's such a reality.

People could empathize with other people who had gone through the same experience as they had.

That strange feeling we had in the war. Have you found anything in your lives since to equal it in strength? A sort of splendid carelessness it was, holding us together.

Most male victims of violence are the victims of other men's violence. So that's something that both women and men have in common. We are both victims of men's violence.

There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.

When soldiers have been baptized in the fire of a battle-field, they have all one rank in my eyes.

It was definitely a part of our life. I mean, my mom had both her brothers and her fiancee in Vietnam at the same time, so it wasn't just my dad's story, it was my mom's story too. And we definitely grew up listening to the stories.

Stories distribute the suffering so that it can be borne.

Sometimes family doesn't always consist of your relatives or by blood. Sometimes your best friends can feel more like family than your cousins. I think everybody kind of has that same feeling. When you go through an accident together, when you go through a traumatic event, sometimes that brings you closer together.

No matter where we come from or where we're going, we've all got memories to contend with, and it's always best not to do this alone!

The woman hanging from the 13th floor window on the east side of Chicago is not alone...She is all the women of the apartment building who stand watching her, watching themselves.

I think everybody should go to high school. It's horrible, and it unites you with other people.

We've come from the same history - 2000 years of persecution - we've just expressed our sufferings differently. Blacks developed the blues. Jews complained, we just never thought of putting it to music.

It felt as if we'd been to war together. Deep in a jungle, alone, I had relied on them, these strangers. They'd held me up in ways only people could. When it was over, an ending never felt like an ending, only an exhausted draw, we went our separate ways. Be we were bonded forever by the history of it, the simple fact they'd seen the raw side of me and me of them, a side no one, not even closest friends or family had ever seen before, or probably ever would.