Unacknowledged Pain Quotes

In the late 1990s, I wrote a book from the point of view of a young black woman who has barricaded herself in her college dorm room, pursued by a man, either real or imagined, who finally materializes as the father she has never known.

My dad was quiet, angry, shut down. So my thing is: I express everything that's there. I want to get it all out.

The sadness of the incomplete, the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art.

I had a lot of chaos in my very early years before I was old enough to know what was going on, and then I just skated through the rest of my childhood without dealing with it.

People tell me there are a lot of guys like me, which doesn't explain why I'm lonely.

It's impossible to exorcise the darkness out of you. We can pretend it's not there until something bursts.

Mum had pumped me so full of anger, I couldn't throw it off.

I felt like that growing up - that I didn't have a voice.

Thematically, I like playing with the ideas of stuff that you try to bury, and you think will go away, but instead you carry it with you until it becomes crippling. And sometimes you have to look back and deal with some stuff in order to truly move forward.

Most people don't go around talking about their miscarriages. It's not really something you shout about. What's more, people often feel embarrassed or even guilty about them.

I think the thumb print on the throat of many people is childhood trauma that goes unprocessed and unrecognized.

I think it's not inaccurate to say that I had a perfectly happy childhood during which I was very unhappy.

Let the poets cry themselves to sleep, and all their tearful words will turn back into steam.

When your outlet is taken away from you, when your catharsis is stripped from you and you don't understand why, and you're so disappointed, and you're so blindsided by it, it hurts.

I like the idea of contained emotion because I grew up most of my life feeling that way. As an adolescent, people would always say I was not expressive, and they always made the mistake of thinking that I didn't feel anything because I didn't react to things.

You can hide the caskets but you can’t hide the casualties.

An unacknowledged trauma is like a wound that never heals over and may start to bleed again at any time.

If you suppress grief too much, it can well redouble.

Everyone thought I had everything. I had nothing.

The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society.

I'm motivated by a bottomless well of anger. It's a joke, but I don't think I don't mean it.

I said 'It can't go on' and he said 'No, it can't.' Honestly, I don't think I could have mattered less to him by then. But by then, nothing mattered to him.

I was told not to cry as a kid.

I've played an awful lot of repressed people.

I've been hiding crucial events in my life since I was 13.