Trauma Reflection Quotes

I don't think I could have tackled 'The Pura Principle' until now. It takes me about twenty years to come to term with any difficult period in my life, to get enough of a grasp on it to fictionalize it.

Two children of same cruel parent look at one another and see in each other the image of the cruel parent or the image of their past oppressor. This is very much the case between Jew and Arab: It's a conflict between two victims.

When I first came back from Iraq, I of course found myself thinking a lot about it. Not just my experiences, but those of people I talked to, friends, and colleagues.

As much as I transferred my mother to Elizabeth Shore of The Black Dahlia, as much as her dad mutated into an obsession with crime in general, well, I have thought about other things throughout the years.

I think '12 Years a Slave' really helped me, as a person and as a student, to grow.

People should be able to tell stories that are important to them to try and understand what they mean. I don't think you figure anything out on your own. Certainly not war stories.

Trauma reflected upon in tranquility can produce morally stunning insights - literary light! It can also produce maudlin rubbish.

It is tragic to have to realize that the best I had to give as a soldier, obedience, and loyalty, was exploited for purposes which could not be recognized at the time, and that I did not see that there is a limit set even for a soldier's performance to his duty. That is my fate.

Thanos came to me while I was taking a psychology class in college after coming out of the service; the ol' Thanos/Eros concept.

I don't think anybody thinks about their past much, unless they're in a mental institution.

My experience in Iraq made me realize, and during the recovery, that I could have died. And I just had to do more with my life.

That's what they do to whatever I was - 19 or something. You're the baby hooker. You can ask any woman my age and we've all played baby hookers.

The past does not haunt us. We haunt the past. We allow our minds to focus in that direction. We open memories and examine them. We reexperience emotions we felt during the painful events we experienced because we are recalling them in as much detail as we can.

The Iraq I returned from was, in my mind, a fairly simple place. By which I mean it had little relationship to reality. It's only with time and the help of smart, empathetic friends willing to pull through many serious conversations that I've been able to learn more about what I witnessed.

Looking back on the God my friend believed in, he seems a little erratic, not entirely unlike her father - God as borderline personality.

Some people ask why people would go into a dark room to be scared. I say they are already scared, and they need to have that fear manipulated and massaged. I think of horror movies as the disturbed dreams of a society.

I want hard stories, I demand them from myself. Hard stories are worth the difficulty. It seems to me the only way I have forgiven anything, understood anything, is through that process of opening up to my own terror and pain and reexamining it, re-creating it in the story, and making it something different, making it meaningful - even if the meaning is only in the act of the telling.

Cancer is too real, and too awful, and I can't make it good or magical. I couldn't even read a book where a character had cancer, for a while... But now I've reached a point where I don't think about cancer nonstop anymore, and sometimes I worry about that - I'm going to forget what I went through; I'm going to forget how horrible it was.

On those occasions when he had killed in the dark, he later needed to see his victims' faces because, in some unlit corner of his heart, he half expected to find his own face looking up at him, ice-white and dead-eyed. "Deep down," the dream-victim had said, "You know that you're already dead yourself, burnt out inside. You realize that you have far more in common with your victims after you've killed them than before.

Perhaps I created the monster Ramsay, who ended up as a TV personality screaming at celebrities on 'Hell's Kitchen,' doing to them what I had done to him.

Nearly losing my life made me want to live my life.

We cannot get by Auschwitz. We should not even try, as great as the temptation is, because Auschwitz belongs to us, is branded into our history, and - to our benefit! - has made possible an insight that could be summarized as, 'Now we finally know ourselves.'

Europe is so much the home of Horror, with its myths of vampires, werewolves, witchcraft and the undead, yet it's like those myths were exported to Hollywood, leaving Europe the room to develop a new tradition as a way of processing its traumas, particularly the two world wars.

Annexation is an ugly word, and ugly deeds have been done under it—but the word need not frighten us and the deeds by no means be repeated.

The odd thing is, that I wrote The Great Spring while I had cancer and it's not about cancer. It was after I was done with cancer that I wrote a book about it.