"The old Amy, the girl of the big laugh and the easy ways, literally shed herself, a pile of skin and soul on the floor, and stepped this new, brittle, bitter Amy ... a razor-wire knot daring me to unloop her, and I was not up to the job with my thick, numb, nervous fingers. Country fingers. Flyover fingers untrained in the intricate, dangerous work of 'solving Amy'. When I'd hold up the bloody stumps, she'd sigh and turn to her secret mental notebooks on which she tallied all my deficiencies, forever noting disappointments, frailties, shortcomings."

Trauma, Pain, Change, Identity, Healing

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"The old Amy, the girl of the big laugh and the easy ways, literally shed herself, a pile of skin and soul on the floor, and stepped this new, brittle, bitter Amy ... a razor-wire knot daring me to unloop her, and I was not up to the job with my thick, numb, nervous fingers. Country fingers. Flyover fingers untrained in the intricate, dangerous work of 'solving Amy'. When I'd hold up the bloody stumps, she'd sigh and turn to her secret mental notebooks on which she tallied all my deficiencies, forever noting disappointments, frailties, shortcomings."

Exlpore more Trauma quotes

"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

"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

"My traumatic experience was life changing."

Asa Don Brown, Canadian Author

Trauma, Change, Experience, Life

"Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I'll wake up with sweat drenching my chest and think it's the blood and muck I was covered in that night."

Shannon A. Thompson, American Author

Trauma, Memory, Emotion, Stress

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

H. P. Lovecraft, American Novelist

Trauma, Horror, Memory, Fear

"He wants me to tell him about the front; he is curious in a way that I find stupid and distressing; I no longer have any real contact with him. There is nothing he likes more than just hearing about it. I realize he does not know that a man cannot talk of such things; I would do it willingly, but it is too dangerous for me to put these things into words. I am afraid they might then become gigantic and I be no longer able to master them. What would become of us if everything that happens out there were quite clear to us?"

Erich Maria Remarque, German Writer

Trauma, War, Fear, Reality

"There are things that can be forgotten. And things that cannot - that sit on dusty shelves like stuffed birds with baleful, sideways staring eyes."

Arundhati Roy, Indian Novelist

Trauma, Memory, Past, Sorrow

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

Stanley Victor Paskavich, American Politician

Trauma, Pain, War, Memory, Struggle

"The aftermath of bearing shackles is an exquisite devastation, fraught with the ravages of survival. Even though one is no longer held captive-be that from a person, a government, or one's inner self-the scars are deeply engraved into one's psyche, and there's no remedy for the soul. Many have the misconception that freedom equals happiness forever and ever.That's a wicked delusion."

Laura Kreitzer, American Author

Trauma, Freedom, Survival, Healing

"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

Explore more quotes by Gillian Flynn

"I am, after all, an adult, a grown man, a useful human being, even though I lost the career that made me all these things. I won't make that mistake again."

Growth

"Like walking through a door. Our relationship immediately attained a sepia tone: the past."

Memory

"I don't feel like a person at all: I am something to be loaded and unloaded, like a sofa or a cuckoo clock. I am something to be tossed into a junkyard, thrown into the river, if necessary. I don't feel real anymore. I feel like I could disappear."

Identity

"Don't fret, we'll sort this out: the true and the not true and the might as well be true."

Truth

"My father, [was] a mid-level phonecompany manager who treated my mother at best like an incompetent employee. At worst? He never beat her, but his pure, inarticulate fury would fill the house for days, weeks, at a time, making the air humid, hard to breathe, my father stalking around with his lower jaw jutting out, giving him the look of a wounded, vengeful boxer, grinding his teeth so loud you could hear it across the room I'm sure he told himself: 'I never hit her'. I'm sure because of this technicality he never saw himself as an abuser. But he turned our family life into an endless road trip with bad directions and a rage-clenched driver, a vacation that never got a chance to be fun."

Family

"I know a little bit about trying to do the right thing and fucking up completely.' I added.'You talking about mom?' Ben said'I was talking about me.''You could have been talking about all of us. Ben pressed his hand against the glass and my brother and I matched palms."

Forgiveness

"I was raised feral, and I mostly stayed that way."

Independence

"There will be days you wish you'd never done it. And thosewill be the good times, when it's only days of regret and notmonths."

Regret

"If I say I don't want to read the book, I don't want to read the book."

Choice

"A theme that has always interested me is how women express anger, how women express violence. That is very much part of who women are, and it's so unaddressed. A vast amount of literature deals with cycles of violence about men, antiheroes. Women lack that vocabulary."

Women