Trauma Art Quotes

You have a strange relationship with calamity when you're a writer: you write about it; as an artist, you objectify and fetishize it. You render life into material, and that's a creepy thing to do.

Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

The only thing that gets me through any type of pain, emotional or physical, is to make it worthwhile by putting it into my work.

Poe had this curious kind of alchemical courage, where he took all the terrible things and terrors that happened in his life, all this shame and fear and pain, and turned them into great works of art. He was a complex, brilliant person who was just wired too tight.

Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.

Suffering has as much right to be expressed as a martyr has to cry out. So it may have been false to say that writing poetry after Auschwitz is impossible.

An art that heals and protects its subject is a geography of scars.

The most beautiful pieces of art come from the ugliest situations.