Telling Your Story Quotes

“The fear of abandonment forced me to comply as a child, but I’m not forced to comply anymore. The key people in my life did reject me for telling the truth about my abuse, but I’m not alone. Even if the consequence for telling the truth is rejection from everyone I know, that’s not the same death threat that it was when I was a child. I’m a self-sufficient adult and abandonment no longer means the end of my life.”
― Christina Enevoldsen, The Rescued Soul: The Writing Journey for the Healing of Incest and Family Betrayal

“We all serve as a vessel to be messengers for one another. Are you sharing the messages you are inspired to speak? Someone is waiting to hear your words.”
― Nanette Mathews

“To keep telling my story seems like the last bit of living I can still do. I feel like a dragonfly clinging to a grass blade in a windstorm, but I can't just let go. I can't. I stare at the candle, how the flame shivers and bends when the wick is too long. The light is small and unsteady, but unless it's snuffed out, it'll keep burning for as long as the wick runs.”
― Shannon Hale, Book of a Thousand Days

“I thought about all the moments we had experienced in this place that no one knew about. But I didn't want the world to just know about all the bad things that had happened to us. I wanted them to see who we were and how we had survived through friendship and brotherhood.”
― Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo

“In the telling, I found humor in my adventures. By the time I was done describing my day, we were both roaring with laughter there by the side of the pool.
You had to laugh, if you wanted to survive.”
― Deborah Spungen, And I Don't Want to Live This Life: A Mother's Story of Her Daughter's Murder

“Norma Bowe often said she believed there was a wonder in unleashing your story, horrible as it might be, out into the world. She told her students that speaking it aloud releases a different kind of power from writing it down on paper or typing it on a computer screen. Give it voice, and you never know what kind of gift might find its way back in return.”
― Erika Hayasaki, The Death Class: A True Story About Life

“Working on these books helped me make sense of this place and what had happened to us. It was my way of processing and even reclaiming the power to tell the world who I was in my own words, not the interrogators'. They could control my life, but I wouldn't allow them to define it.”
― Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo