Traumatic Events Quotes

To be a police officer in New York requires so much more than just we, as a citizen, need to walk around. Your job is to put yourself in this place where a horrible event has happened and try to figure it out. That's what you do, day in and day out. You have to have a certain distance to it. You can't let yourself go too far into it.

People need to trust what gardai say on the stand, and I can understand that perhaps in a scenario whereby lots of things are happening quickly and people are caught up in the heat of the moment, they may have a recollection that isn't exactly as things happened.

It's been an obsession with me from childhood, the horrors of the twentieth century.

My dad had a series of heart attacks when I was a little girl, and our world was shaped by these huge, traumatic events.

Childhood - that was not my favorite time in my life.

I was 15 when Chernobyl happened, I've been vaguely thinking about it for most of my life. But somewhere around 2015, it occurred to me that I didn't know how it happened, which seemed like a pretty bizarre lapse in my understanding of the world and how it functions.

I chose to go down a very dark place, and I can't change that, but those moments have served as an education for me.

Being bullied is something I experienced in school, and it is not fun.

...humanity learns true lessons only in cataclysm.

People tell me, 'Bill, let it go. The Kennedy assassination was years ago. It was just the assassination of a President and the hijacking of our government by a totalitarian regime - who cares? Just let it go.' I say, 'All right then. That whole Jesus thing? Let it go! It was 2,000 years ago! Who cares?'

Broadcasting through 9/11 together, like Katie Couric and I did, creates a bond.

I remember 9/11; we had 'Comics Come Home' about a month after those events. That night, even the comedians were concerned. Would the audience be ready to laugh? It was a release for everyone.

I guess I'm curious about how people process grief and how they process loss. And I'm also interested in the ways in which an event can have long-reaching consequences and a life over the course of years.

When I was ten years old, I saw a big, fat beetle get squished. I don't recall the circumstances, but that's not important. It's the result that stuck with me. The beetle's thick, viscous insides so closely resembled a crushed blueberry that, to this day, I can't eat raw blueberries without feeling nauseous.

And I, unfortunately, have been to too many disasters as president.

Bad things happen. And the human brain is especially adept at making sure that we keep track of these events. This is an adaptive mechanism important for survival.

I beg the reader not to go in search of messages. It is a term that I detest because it distresses me greatly, for it forces on me clothes that are not mine, which in fact belong to a human type that I distrust; the prophet, the soothsayer, the seer. I am none of these; I'm a normal man with a good memory who fell into a maelstrom and got out of it more by luck than by virtue, and who from that time on has preserved a certain curiosity about maelstroms large and small, metaphorical and actual.

When I heard your organization was recording testimonies, I knew I had to come. She died in my arms, saying 'I don't want to die.' That is what death is like. It doesn't matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn't matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we would never have war anymore.

The real test of an anchor is when there's a very big event. Sept. 11 is the quintessential example of that, and that day it took everything that I knew as an anchor, as a citizen, as a father, as a husband, to get through it.

Disasters like Oklahoma City and 9/11 were time-limited. The children who were affected psychologically could go to a place of normalcy.

The only way you can handle big kinds of questions is to simply state briefly what the truth was. What am I going to tell you about the Holocaust? Would you like three pages about it? I don't think you would... I don't think anything different than you think - it was horrible.

Of all my childhood memories, I don't have any good ones.

A lot of my past is gone from my mind.

It's not funny when you actually get shot, but afterwards, yeah, it's funny.

When somebody says that six million people died in the Holocaust, there is nobody in the world who can understand that. It's only through story, reading books by Elie Wiesel or Primo Levi, that you really begin to understand the trauma and how horrible it actually was.