Traumatized Book Quotes & Sayings

Chloe Honum's brilliant first book The Tulip-Flame traces an identity forming within radically divergent but interlocking systems: a family traumatized by the mother's suicide, a failed relationship, the practice of ballet, a garden-each strict, exacting. And with 'a crow's sky-knowing mind,' Honum in every case transfigures emotion by way of elegant language and formal restraint. Chloe Honum is 'one astounding flame' of a poet, and I predict a long-lasting one. — Claudia Emerson

For the kids at Chaff, the annual Career Day, held about two weeks before the summer break, was enough to make most of them at contemplate career suicide before they'd even taken an aptitude test or a written resume. Held outdoors on the schoolyard blacktop, the assemblage of coal miners, driving-range golf-ball retrievers, basket weavers, ditch diggers, book-binders, traumatized fire-fighters, and the world's last astronaut never does much to inspire. — Paul Beatty

Alas, I think I am becoming a god. — Titus

The dead sleep in their moonless night; my business is with the living. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I don't love the word luxury because it feels Bougy to me. — Beth Ditto

Try another way of looking. Try you looking and the whole universe seeing. — Rumi

He / thought of women. / What is it like to be a woman / listening in the dark? Black mantle of silence / stretches between them like geothermal pressure. / Ascent of the rapist up the stairs seems as slow as / lava. She listens / to the blank space where / his consciousness is, moving towards her. Lava can / move as slow as / nine hours per inch. [ ... ] She wonders if / he is listening too. The cruel thing is, she falls asleep / listening. — Anne Carson

But my body was telling its story. I have read a lot of stuff about cancer. I needed this book. I wish I'd had this book when I had cancer. I wanted someone to be talking to me about "fart floors." I wanted somebody telling me what it was like to have a [colostomy] bag. I felt so alone. And if you're a person who's been traumatized [by past abuse], it's so potentially re-traumatizing. You slip right into "oh my god, this is the only person this has happened to before" mentality: "I'm especially bad and I have especially bad cancer ... " — Eve Ensler

Mind where you're going, people muttered at me. I hated them, but really the person I hated was myself. I fled. — Rachel Joyce

My impulse now, as then, is to disagree. The majority of people in this country who haunt bookstores, go to readings and book festivals or simply read in the privacy of their homes are not traumatized exiles. — Azar Nafisi

People love to do that, to point to some single phenomenon, assign it all the blame, and wipe the slate clean, like when overeaters sue McDonald's for making them fat pigs. — Jonathan Tropper

He couldn't remember where he had come from, and ultimately he didn't know where he would go. But he could look back without regret on the time in between, his life, with a full-throated laugh and utter amazement. — Robert Seethaler

Raillery is a mode of speaking in favor of one's wit at the expense of one's better nature. — Charles De Secondat