top of page
Exlpore more Trauma quotes

"Innocence eroded into nightmare.All because of very bad touch.Love, corrupted."

"When I have flash backs from PTSD I wish my mind came with a delete key."

"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?"

"Wait-a-minute!Reality kicked in after marking its spot `position vacant' for the short and pleasant while. He groaned mournfully as he found himself staring at the inside of his own eyelids. The first thing that occurred to him was the terrible bone-wracking pain running up and down his spine. Pain? No, curiously enough. It was the memory of it that seemed to hurt so much. Maybe that's what scared him. Or maybe it was the creaking of the ship around him."

"Many call it the 1000 yard stare and can't realize the pain when PTSD takes us there."

"It happened in New York, April 10th, nineteen years ago. Even my hand balks at the date. I had to push to write it down, just to keep the pen moving on the paper. It used to be a perfectly ordinary day, but now it sticks up on the calendar like a rusty nail."

"The entire time, he'd only ever looked at my body, never at my face, his empty eyes hungry, never seeing me at all. I wasn't the presence of a person, but a body. I could have said anything, he wouldn't have heard me. He'd never responded, not by stopping, not with his words."

"She'd taken care of me in all the ways my body needed, but the devastation of my rape had made me feel the weight of the essential way she had neglected me: she hadn't nurtured the potential of my strong and healthy independence."
Explore more quotes by Aspen Matis

"If I could mark clearly, convincingly and consistently what was good for me and also what was bad-if I could say yes and also no, as if it were the law-it would become my law."

"From that unremarkable gap in dense northern forest, I could finally see clearly that if I hadn't walked away from school, through devastating beauty alone on the Pacific Crest Trail, met rattlesnakes and bears, fording frigid and remote rivers as deep as I am tall-feeling terror and the gratitude that followed the realization that I'd survived rape-I'd have remained lost, maybe for my whole life. The trail had shown me how to change.This is the story of how my recklessness became my salvation.I wrote it."

"I wrote through darkness, vividly seeing: my passivity was not a crime; my desire to trust was not a flaw."

"Rest fixed most things. Sleep was my sweet reward. I treated bedtime as both incentive and sacrament."

"And the idea of light unexplainably produced out of nothing was haunting, it shook me. A flat drab mountain could produce its own light, no one in this whole world knows why, and if that was possible then of course there must be other things that seemed impossible that weren't, and so anything-great and terrible-felt possible to me now."

"The bravest thing I ever did was leave there. The next bravest thing I did was come back, to make myself heard."

"I felt like I belonged to an ancient tradition of all young people given this same task of finding their own ways through to the futures they wanted for themselves."

"The trees were friendly, they gave me rest and shadowed refuge. Slipping through them, I felt safe and competent. My whole body was occupied. I had little energy to think or worry."
bottom of page