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Quotes tagged “Trauma”

“Although psychology and pedagogy have always maintained the belief that a child is a happy being without any conflicts, and have assumed that the sufferings of adults are the results of the burdens and hardships of reality, it must be asserted that just the opposite is true. What we learn about the child and the adult through psychoanalysis shows that all the sufferings of later life are for the most part repetitions of these earlier ones, and that every child in the first years of life goes through and immeasurable degree of suffering.”
— Melanie Klein, Narrative of a Child Analysis (The Writings of Melanie Klein)
Tagged: Suffering, Trauma, Children, Child Psychology, Psychologists, Hardship
“Memories demand attention, because memories have teeth.”
— Viola Davis, Viola Revealed a Devastating Truth About Childhood Sexual Assault That Everyone Should Hear
Tagged: Memory, Sexual Assault, Trauma, Rape
“becoming dragonfish to survive
the horrors we are living
with tortured lungs
adapting to breathe blood.”
— Audre Lorde, The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde
Tagged: perseverance, Trauma, Poetry
“Why do we assume that pain yields wisdom or moral clarity?”
— Edna Friedberg, Elie Wiesel and the Agony of Bearing Witness
Tagged: Pain, Perspective, Trauma, Morality, Wisdom
“It is impossible for you to go on as you were before, so you must go on as you never have.”
— Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
Tagged: Moving On, strength, Starting Over, Trauma, Grief
“To love me
is to love a haunted house–
it’s fun to visit once a year,
but no one wants to live there,
and when you say,
'Tell me about the bad days,'
it sounds like all the neighborhood kids daring each other to ring the doorbell”
— Brenna Twohy, Anxiety: A Ghost Story
Tagged: Trauma, Poetry, Love, Scars
“How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart, you begin to understand, there is no going back? There are some things that time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep… that have taken hold.”
— Frodo, Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King
Tagged: Pain, Loss, Trauma, Grief, Moving On
“Some old wounds never truly heal, and bleed again at the slightest word.”
— R. R. Martin, A Game Of Thrones
Tagged: Pain, Suffering, Grief, Trauma
“Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.”
— Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within
Tagged: Writing, Pain, Trauma, Healing, Honesty, expression, Self-Expression, vulnerability
“On February 8, 2009, at 12:30am, Chris Brown 
 beat Rihanna’s face into a landscape of craters 
 and bruises. This is the architecture of violence. 
 Later, Chris Brown described their relationship 
 as being similar to Romeo and Juliet’s. 

In 2013, David O. Russell groped 
his niece’s breasts and claimed 
she had flirted with him first. 

In 1965, Sean Connery told Playboy 
there was nothing wrong with beating a woman. 
That “bloody-minded,” “hysterical,” “bitch” 
women should be hit, should be slapped. 

In 2014, Julia Sonenshein wrote an article 
titled “10 Violent Men Who Are Always Forgiven 
Because Everyone Loves Their Art.” 


They say it’s a myth that mother rabbits
abandon their young in their nests 
after their young have been handled 
by humans. That the scent of humans 
will drive the mother away. 
They say it’s a myth. 
And that the young, no matter how battered 
or bruised, will still be accepted 
by their caregivers. 


But in the human world, the rules change. 
After the rape, most of my rapist’s friends 
abandoned me. One claimed I only wanted 
to profit off my art. 


No one considered that blood 
does not make good paint. 
That trauma is an electric chair 
that singes anyone it can reach. 
It wasn’t my art, remember? 
It was his. 
And he was always forgiven 
because they loved his art.”
— Meggie Royer, It’s Time to Stop Forgiving Our Male Heroes
Tagged: Poetry, Writing, Sexual Assault, Trigger Warning, Rape Culture, Trauma
“Since then, he has tried to tell Willem more things. But there are so many topics that he has never discussed with anyone since Ana, now twenty-five years ago, that he finds he literally doesn't have the language to do so. His past, his fears, what was done to him, what he has done to himself — they are subjects that can only be discussed in tongues he doesn't speak: Farsi, Urdu, Mandarin, Portuguese. Once, he tried to write some things down, thinking that it might be easier, but it wasn't— he is unclear how to explain himself to himself.”
— Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life: A Novel
Tagged: Inner Distances, The Difficulty Of Communication, Trauma

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About The Authors

This page was created by our editorial team. Each page is manually curated, researched, collected, and issued by our staff writers. Quotes contained on this page have been double checked for their citations, their accuracy and the impact it will have on our readers.

Kelly Peacock is an accomplished poet and social media expert based in Brooklyn, New York. Kelly has a Bachelor's degree in creative writing from Farieligh Dickinson University and has contributed to many literary and cultural publications. Kelly assists on a wide variety of quote inputting and social media functions for Quote Catalog. Visit her personal website here.

Kendra Syrdal is a writer, editor, partner, and senior publisher for The Thought & Expression Company. Over the last few years she has been personally responsible for writing, editing, and producing over 30+ million pageviews on Thought Catalog.