Trauma Quotes

“Forgive before they do, and nothing can get to you.”
― Matthew Edward Hall

“Childhood trauma does not come in one single package.”
― Asa Don Brown

“Resiliency is the essence of a global positive framework...”
― Asa Don Brown, The Effects of Childhood Trauma on Adult Perception and Worldview

“Resiliency is not gender-, age-, or intellectually specific...”
― Asa Don Brown

“Your brain is recognizing a pattern that it has flagged with life-or-death importance, and it reflexively shoots out what it believes to be the appropriate response… None of this of course is reasonable or rational. But your brain is not trying to be reasonable. It’s trying to save your life.”
― Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know

“Self-hatred is a terrible waste of potential.”
― Omar Delawar

“True strength is not the absence of pain, but the refusal to transmit it, born only in those who have carried the fullest measure of betrayal and chosen, against all reason, not to pass the cup.”
― Njau Kihia

“I was born dead.”
― Sarah Jollien-Fardel, Sa préférée

“She was living proof that no one could see the marks my father had left.”
― Sarah Jollien-Fardel, Sa préférée

“On some primal, simplistic level, I concluded that men brought nothing but pain. It was not a physical, intellectual, or ideological choice so much as a firm, voluntary intention set on the cusp of adolescence.”
― Sarah Jollien-Fardel, Sa préférée

“Was it possible that my homosexuality had been a choice resulting from pain?”
― Sarah Jollien-Fardel, Sa préférée

“I know nothing will ever move me enough to turn things around. Nothing can break down this anger. I know the foundations of my childhood aren’t strong enough to support me.”
― Sarah Jollien-Fardel, Sa préférée

“It doesn’t matter how much fertilizer you add, nothing will ever grow.’ The earth’s no good. I’m no good. Nothing will ever grow. Bad soil, bad seed.”
― Sarah Jollien-Fardel, Sa préférée

“In small towns, where there is a dearth of good coffee shops, there is also a dearth of good lovers. You get what you get. On Tinder. On Bumble. A game of beer pong at a frat party. In the mixers section at Ashebrooke Liquor Outlet. At a cricket screening potluck party. And then, you make the most of it. You pass the snow days. And the fall days. And the two days of summer.”
― Kanza Javed

“Some wounds don’t bleed — they erase you slowly from the inside.”
― Tarek El fedaey, THE GIRL THEY TRIED TO ERASE: A Psychological Fiction Novel

“For fourteen years I believed I was the lone survivor of the genocide that destroyed my village.”
― —Kyneos Ashstone

“Any conversation on the left these days, it's always so competitive, it's always each person trying to outperform the person before them in terms of their oppression or their lack of privilege or their personal trauma or, like, the fact that actually they’re Jewish or actually they’re bisexual, or guess what, they’re a quarter this or that ethnicity, which gives them the right to speak or the right to take offence or whatever. It’s a marketplace! Yet again! You can dress it up in the language of sensitivity and social justice and blah blah blah, but the point of intersectionality isn’t to learn how to transcend our differences, or eliminate them, the point isn’t solidarity, it’s about shoring up your brand, cornering the market, everyone out for themselves, maximising profit and minimising risk—'

‘I can’t believe I’m hearing this,’ Amber said.

‘It locks us into our differences,’ Tony said, ‘it’s segregationist. And it’s also just advertising. It’s brand management. That’s my point. We’re still inside the fucking paradigm!”
― Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood

“The Hamas fighters who stormed into Israel on 7 October were largely young people who learned the language of violence from the bombs that Israel dropped on them. This is not a justification of what they did. But we should not be so certain that, had we been subject to the same trauma, with no resolution in sight, we would respond much better.”
― Ilan Pappé, A Very Short History of the Israel–Palestine Conflict

“The damage wasn’t in what was done. It was in what followed.”
― Anonymous

“He was beautiful in the way things born to power often are… He rode a silver-grey stallion that looked like it had been bred from starlight and arrogance.

True love dies most beautifully in the mouths of poets and liars.

She was beautiful in the way teeth are beautiful right before they bite.

I am the scream behind the silence.

I am the ending that learned how to dance.”
― Teresa Ribeiro, The Serpent's Dance : A Fable for the Girls Who Burned and Didn’t Apologise

“Living in the wake of slavery is haunting, and to experience this haunting is to be nothing less than traumatized. Still, it is possible to heal from trauma, or come to terms with it.

At first, we try to block out the horrors of the past - to ignore them, to pretend they are not there.

The next step is to acknowledge the past and its harm, even as it triggers us. We try to avoid looking at it too closely. But the ghosts are everywhere; they have been waiting for us all along.”
― Rebecca Hall

“We reach the final stage of healing from trauma when we integrate the past into who we are. It becomes a part of us that we acknowledge and provides understanding of our world.

The past is not a ghost we want to banish or exorcise; it is something we want to internalize.

Like at a wake, a wake as in a funeral, we speak of the dead for the dead. At this wake, we must defend the dead. Our memories must be longer than our lifetimes.”
― Rebecca Hall

“Most of your healing journey
will be about unlearning
the patterns of self-protection
that once kept you safe.”
― Vironika Wilde, Love and Gaslight

“Some knowledge comes not from curiosity, but from fear.”
― Angelika Regossi, Love in Communism: A Young Woman's Adult Story

“Overcoming your trauma isn't easy, but not overcoming it is slow death.”
― Omar Delawar

“i knew you were going to try and kill yourself before you did it. i knew because before all this happened you were the only person my seven-year-old nephew with asperger's ever let hug him. you were eighteen and you were just shining, your even brown skin competing with the bright blue sky for my attention. god, you were perfect. i was in love with the idea that finally we had given birth to a generation that didn't have to spend their adult lives recovering from their childhoods. you weren't going to drown yourself in anything, you were just going to smile and fight in some mythological honourable way we'd all only imagined. then i found out your mama was about to die and every time you looked me in the eye i wanted to cry, because i knew there was a diagnosed train wreck coming your way and i didn't know how someone so perfect could survive.”
― Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Islands of Decolonial Love: Stories & Songs

“With love, you can be who you're meant to be; without love, you'll be lost.”
― Omar Delawar

“She wanted it all to have never happened. She wanted her mind back. And she wanted to be more than a body, more than mere flesh, a thing to inscribe and observe and maybe fondle when you were bored. She wanted the version she was promised...but this was all a fairy tale.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

“Grace is what you choose when revenge would be easier.”-Author-Felicia Brookins”
― Felicia Brookins, Josie's WAYS of Grace: Echoes Of Betrayal

“By a pretty, untranslatable pun, Traum (the German for a dream) and trauma were almost indistinguishable in the Vienna which was at home to both.”
― Frederic Raphael, Dream Story