"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."

Trauma, Memory, Time, Pain

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"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."

Exlpore more Trauma quotes

"His abusemakes her an anvilwithout spark."

Munia Khan, Bangladeshi Poet

Trauma, Abuse, Pain, Suffering, Darkness

"Ultimate horror often paralyses memory in a merciful way."

H. P. Lovecraft, American Novelist

Trauma, Horror, Memory, Fear

"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

"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

"Shock is a merciful condition. It allows you to get through disaster with a necessary distance between you and your feelings."

Lisa Kleypas, American Novelist

Trauma, Disaster, Feelings, Distance, Emotion

"Saying those words made a sharp, quick panic rise up in her, an aching pain that had her throat closing. "You left me, she repeated. Maybe it was only out of blind terror at the abyss opening up again around her, but she whispered, "I have no one left. No one."

Sarah J. Maas, American Novelist

Trauma, Neglect, Fear, Loss, Despair

"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

"But I don't know what to him about the aftermath of killing a person. About how they never leave you."

Suzanne Collins, American Novelist

Trauma, Killing, Memory, Guilt, Consequence

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

Stanley Victor Paskavich, American Politician

Trauma, Mind, Pain, Mental Health

"Between 60 and 80 percent of strippers come from a background of sexual abuse."

Caitlin Moran, British Journalist

Trauma, Abuse, Statistics, Exploitation

Explore more quotes by Donna Tartt

"Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel."

Writing,

"Well, I do have some maiden aunts that are not quite like the aunts in the book, but I definitely do have a couple of them, and a couple of old aunties."

Old,

"Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction."

Life, Character, Blood, Fiction

"So I'm not a Southern writer in the commonly held sense of the term, like Faulkner or Eudora Welty, who took the South for their entire literary environment and subject matter."

Environment, Literary, Sense, Writer

"I'm not sure whay I've been drawn to this subject, except that murder is a subject that has always drawn people for as long as people have been telling stories."

People, Murder

"Children - if you think back really what it was like to be a child and what it was like to know other children - children lie all the time."

Time, Lie, Children

"Taking on challenging projects is the way that one grows and extends one's range as a writer, one's technical command, so I consider the time well-spent."

Time, Projects, Writer

"Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about life."

Life, Truth

"I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much."

Work, Writer, Writing

"But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work."

Work, Writer