"I don't remember what they said, only the fury of their words, how the air turned raw and full of welts. Later it would remind me of birds trapped inside a closed room, flinging themselves against the windows and the walls, against each other."

Trauma, Truth, Anger, Memory, Suffering

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"I don't remember what they said, only the fury of their words, how the air turned raw and full of welts. Later it would remind me of birds trapped inside a closed room, flinging themselves against the windows and the walls, against each other."

Exlpore more Trauma quotes

"This was true, she knew. Being involved with him gave her the privileged position of knowing him intimately. There were nights when he would wake up sweating, the nightmares returning out of the blue after a peaceful period sometimes weeks long. Growing up in the middle of a fierce civil war could indelibly mark a child. To Mykl, birthdays were always just another year under the belt, where the only reason to celebrate was that you weren't dead yet. She took his hand, squeezed it tight and led him inside."

Christina Engela, South African Author

Trauma, War, Survival, Pain

"I looked in the mirror and realized that I was already dead. I let you kill me one piece at a time, starting when I was, what? Eight years old? Nine? You killed yourself and then you came after us."

Laurie Halse Anderson, American Author

Trauma, Death, Abuse, Pain, Identity

"As Jess watched in numb horror, the man tore a page from the book and stuffed it into his mouth."

Rachel Caine, Canadian Actress

Trauma, Horror, Fear, Emotion, Violence

"I'd still thought that everything I thought about that night-the shame, the fear-would fade in time. But that hadn't happened. Instead, the things that I remembered, these little details, seemed to grow stronger, to the point where I could feel their weight in my chest. Nothing, however stuck with me more than the memory of stepping into that dark room and what I found there, and how the light then took that nightmare and made it real."

Sarah Dessen, American Author

Trauma, Memory, Pain, Shame

"No, I am never setting foot in this house again it scares me and makes me sad and I wish you could be a mom whose eyes worked but I don't think you can."

Laurie Halse Anderson, American Author

Trauma, Fear, Family, Pain

"I knew the eyes. I didn't know the Kraut, but yeah, I sure knew that look. I see it when I look in the mirror, even now. If you stay too long in the way, it's like your eyes try to get away, like they're sinking down, trying to hide, wary little animals crawling into the cave of your eye socket."

Michael Grant, American Author

Trauma, War, Memory, Identity

"The silences after his last gasp were sung together by a blackbird. I lay there, my eyes unable to close. His were unable to open. I listed the places where I hurt, and how much. My loins felt ripped. Something inside had torn. There were seven places on my body where he had sunk his fangs into my skin and bitten. He'd dug his nails into my neck, and twisted my head to one side, and clawed my face. I hadn't made a noise. He had made all the noise for both of us. Had it hurt him?"

David Mitchell, British Novelist

Trauma, Pain, Suffering, Violence, Endurance

"My slurred speech isn't from one or nine drinks too many, it's from my father."

Kris Kidd, American Writer

Trauma, Family, Speech, Pain, Identity

"The first several years of my life were used to upload incredible amounts of fear, and I just became afraid of everything. I was afraid of my parents, afraid of my classmates, afraid of the streets of Washington, D.C. I would flinch at every gesture."

Henry Rollins, American Musician

Trauma, Fear, Anxiety, Childhood, Memory

"Meredith's father, the composer, who shot himself in this house. Came all the way from Vienna to shoot himself in LA. Escaped the Nazis but not himself."

Janet Fitch, American Author

Trauma, History, Sorrow, Loss

Explore more quotes by Sue Monk Kidd

"You don't have to place your hand on Mary's heart to get strength and consolation and rescue, and all the other things we need to get through life. You can place it right here on your own heart. Your own heart."

Self

"In the photograph by my bed my other is perpetually smiling on me. I guess I have forgiven us both, although sometimes in the night my dreams will take me back to the sadness, and I have to wake up and forgive us again."

Forgiveness

"You come from your mauma, you sleep in the bed with her till you're near twenty years grown, and you still don't know what haunches in the dark corners of her."

Family

"There are things without explanation, moments when life will become arranged in such odd ways that you imagine a whole vocabulary of meaning inside them. The breakfast smell struck me like that."

Philosophy

"Until we look from the bottom up we have nothing."

Perspective

"I can't explain exactly why it lives within me for so long and passionately. But race matters to me; racial equality matters to me, as does gender. There is something about these kinds of social injustices that go to the deep of me."

Society

"I wonder if that's the perennial story of writers: you find the true light, you lose the true light, you find it again. And maybe again."

Reflection

"Sarah shifted on the bench. I worried she was winding up to say something, that Sky would start humming now, that the fright spring-coiled inside me would break loose. Then I remembered the widow dress I was wearing. I made a sound with my lips like I was trying to give him an answer, but choking on the words, seized by my grief, and I didn't have to pretend that much. I felt sorrow for my life, for what I'd lived and seen and known, for what was lost to me, and the weeping turned real."

Emotion

"We are so limited, you have to use the same word for loving Rosaleen as you do for loving Coke with peanuts. Isn't that a shame we don't have many more ways to say it?"

Love

"Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here."

Literature