c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
In one moment I was feeling everything and I was feeling nothing.
— Kami Garcia, Beautiful Creatures
If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.
— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
You're late.""Sorry. I was busy talking about my feelings and killing people.
— Jennifer Estep, Spider's Bite
Strange how complicated we can make things just to avoid showing what we feel!
— Erich Maria Remarque, The Night in Lisbon
She had a strange feeling in the pit of her stomach, like when you're swimming and you want to put your feet down on something solid, but the water's deeper than you think and there's nothing there
— Julia Gregson, East of the Sun
You could feel things or you could find a way to shut down. But once you were feeling things, you couldn’t decide exactly what to feel. That was the trouble with letting them in at all. They made a mess of the place.
— Ann Brashares
Knowing and feeling are two different things, and feeling is what counts.
— François Lelord, Hector and the Search for Happiness
Warmth, perfume, rugs, soft lights, books. They do not appease me. I am aware of time passing, of all the world contains that I have not seen, of all the interesting people I have not met.
— Anaïs Nin, A Cafe in Space: The Anais Nin Literary Journal, Volume 3
For our part, when we feel, we evaporate; ah, we breatheourselves out and away; with each new heartfirewe give off a fainter scent. True,  someone may tell us:you're in my blood, this room, Spring itselfis filled with you . . . To what end? He can't hold us,we vanish within him and around him.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies
When you're in bad mood, you find jerk on anywhere.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
no matter how u run away, no matter how can u pretend, no matter how scared u are there is gona be the sense u have missed something, fallen heart feeling u mixed with in the moments u should live, u will get used to that feeling, believe me when i tell u, this is crazy, some day ur life will be sou r just warming up
— مسعد العرباني
If you lovesomeone, tell them.
— Alison G. Bailey, Present Perfect
Who wants to feel everything everyone else feels all the time?
— Eileen Wilks, On the Prowl
I'm so tired I never want to wake up again. But I've figured out now that it was never them that made me feel that way. It was just me, all along.
— Maggie Stiefvater, Forever
Feeling bored is a childish attitude.You wouldn't feel so if you don't relyon somebody to change your feeling.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
He sighed profoundly, and flung himself - there was a passion in his movements which deserves the word - on the earth at the foot of the oak tree. He loved, beneath all this summer transiency, to feel the earth's spine beneath him; for such he took the hard root of the oak tree to be; or, for image followed image, it was the back of a great horse that he was riding; or the deck of a tumbling ship - it was anything indeed, so long as it was hard, for he felt the need of something which he could attach his floating heart to; the heart that tugged at his side; the heart that seemed filled with spiced and amorous gales every evening about this time when he walked out. To the oak tree he tied it and as he lay there, gradually the flutter in and about him stilled itself; the little leaves hung, the deer stopped; the pale summer clouds stayed; his limbs grew heavy on the ground; and he lay so still that by degrees the deer stopped nearer and the rooks wheeled round him and the swallows dipped and circled and the dragonflies shot past, as if all the fertility and amorous activity of a summer's evening were woven web-like about his body.
— Virginia Woolf, Orlando
I like the feeling that anything, anything, could happen.
— Marsha Qualey, Just Like That
At times he felt that he had almost rather not be in love with her, for it brought him no peace. What was the use of it, if it was only going to be painful?
— Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove
Enjoy it, kid. Enjoy feeling that you can make a difference.' Floyd flashed him a smile. 'It won't last for ever.
— Alastair Reynolds, Century Rain
I don't know...just a feeling, like in..." Xander thought for a moment. "Star Wars. You know, when Han Solo says, 'I've got a bad feeling about this'?
— Robert Liparulo, House of Dark Shadows
Me, feeling. What a concept.
— Jeff Lindsay, Darkly Dreaming Dexter
The meaning and worth of love, as a feeling, is that it really forces us, with all our being, to acknowledge for ANOTHER the same absolute central significance which, because of the power of our egoism, we are conscious of only in our own selves. Love is important not as one of our feelings, but as the transfer of all our interest in life from ourselves to another, as the shifting of the very centre of our personal life. This is characteristic of every kind of love, but predominantly of sexual love; it is distinguished from other kinds of love by greater intensity, by a more engrossing character, and by the possibility of a more complete overall reciprocity. Only this love can lead to the real and indissoluble union of two lives into one; only of it do the words of Holy Writ say: 'They shall be one flesh,' i.e., shall become one real being.
— Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov, The Meaning of Love
Gradually the feeling wears off, and I feel swamped again by the inexplicable pettiness of being alive.
— Sebastian Faulks, Engleby
Awkward.That's exactly how it was when we walked over to our sister and stood on each side of her, looking at her and feeling things and not knowing what to do.
— Markus Zusak, Underdog
Subjectivity measures nothing consistently.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
Love is something that u feel inside that others can not.
— Sphencer Perales
Running away from love is never any good at all, to our sort. It only deepens the feeling, and it’s better to stay and wear it down.
— Rachel Ferguson
how wonderful if something that only be existed in wishful thinking, comes and expresses themselves without being asked forcefully; but alas, i'm too immersed in the excitement until i don't realize that it's only temporarily, not forever
— cG9sYXJhZGl0aWE=
I don’t know how to talk because I’m feeling.I’m listening to my voice as if it were someone else’s,And my voice is speaking about her as if she were speaking.She has hair as blond as yellow wheat in the sun,And when she speaks her mouth says things that aren’t words.She laughs, and her teeth are as clean as stones in a river.
— Alberto Caeiro, O Pastor Amoroso
I looked for company and i found myself.
— Pushpa Rana, Just the Way I Feel
Not everything that happens in your life has to hit you like a hurricane.
— Joyce Rachelle
The only way to live well is to feel intensely.
— Marty Rubin
Life is nothing, if you feel nothing.
— Marty Rubin
Miss you?" He grated the incredulous question, dropping his mouth to her temple. "You left me without a soul. I can barely remember the days since you left. They passed without me feeling a single thing. Because you are feeling for me. You're the only thing that keeps me from being numb. Twice in my life you've turned me back into a living, breathing man, and missing you... missing you, Peggy, doesn't even begin to cover it. You revive me.
— Tessa Bailey, Too Hard to Forget
That was what it felt like - as if one had always been in that place and never been bored although nothing had ever happened.
— C.S. Lewis, The Magician's Nephew
You are not abandoned until you feel that you are! - On Being Abandoned.
— Lamine Pearlheart, The Sunrise Scrolls: To Life from the Shadows II
My Faith in science is the belief of all that is ....."noticeable" ...
— Hesham Nebr
this feeling is bigger than my resistance bigger than my chest size ,this feeling need to go out and this is pressure on my heart make it beats faster as my heart say to this feeling" i am as strong as you , feel more and i will beats faster and dont worry about the brain i am able to control it and i will make him help you
— Sherif Mansy
Sometimes you just get a feeling about someone and that feeling is worth more than all of the little things put together.
— J. Saman, Start Over
She felt detached from all aspects of her life. She had no time anymore to feel. All that time she used to waste feeling, and analyzing her feelings, as if they were a matter of national significance.
— Liane Moriarty, Truly Madly Guilty
And the weird weird thing about this story of Angela's Ring was that it didn't even have a point to it, no happy ending, no lesson to be learnt.It was like one person's cry of pain, echoing out on and on and on trough the generations, even after that person was long long dead.
— Chris Beckett, Dark Eden
If you’re not going to feel how are you going to know what to think? Isn’t it in the nature of feeling to evolve thought?
— Glenn Haybittle, The Memory Tree
Like Alice in wonderland I feel as though I was slipped the Drink Me Potion and unlike her the mushrooms are no where to be found.
— Chuck Bridges
Crushes are called crushes because they crush The soul.
— Vergi Crush
I love to have more books since it keeps me busy reading.
— Willy BUN
I have strange feeling, but I should continue with the fight I never should give up!
— Deyth Banger
Share, share, share your experience, feelings, anxiety.
— Deyth Banger
What's the feeling, nobody can hear you???What's the feeling you to scream and nobody hears?What's the feeling, to can't do anything?
— Deyth Banger
The feeling that something good will happen must always be kept alive!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
But you know, there's a difference between thinking something and feeling something. I don't know whether I ever thought an answer like that was true before. I might have. But I never felt it. And I guess what that means is that if you haven't felt something, you don't know it.''That reminds me of something a poet called Kabir said once,' I said.... 'He said, 'Nothing that hasn't been experienced is true.
— Ptolemy Tompkins, Proof of Angels: The Definitive Book on the Reality of Angels and the Surprising Role They Play in Each of Our Lives
obsession either boosts up feeling orjust blow it off . . .
— shivangi lavaniya
An innate, typically fixed pattern of behaviour is our instinct. A sense of intuitive thought/feeling. An urge, an inner prompting, a drive, a compulsion. That quirky urge, that little voice inside you, those gut feelings is what emerges naturally within you in a particular situation to react with outer world. Every instinct is an impulse. Feel it, trust it, follow it, because when you've whittled down your options and are stuck at a crossroads, that is what gets you through it! That good old instinct feeling
— Angie karan
A heart that can break is better than no heart at all.
— Marty Rubin
There seem to be no way he could stop anything that was happening, although it all felt wrong.
— Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove
I spot a fly floating on the surface of the water, its little legs pumping madly as it fights to keep itself afloat. I know that feeling.
— Courtney Summers, Some Girls Are
I explored because I was feeling really crappy, and I wanted to know why
— Steven Magee
Human life is a sad show, undoubtedly; ugly, heavy and complex. Art has no other end, for people of feeling than to conjure away the burden and bitterness.
— Gustave Flaubert
I could lose my mind, your love drives me crazy, and I ignore the reason why I'm crying at everytime I remember it's not reciprocal and you're saying that you're sorry because you don't show everything.
— Sara Keddar
Sometimes it is easier to feel the veins wilted and empty than to sense the coldness of blood in fear
— Munia Khan
The popular element "feels" but does not always know or understand; the intellectual element "knows" but does not always understand and in particular does not always feel.
— Antonio Gramsci
The worst feeling in life is not being lonely
—  it's being forgotten by the one person you could never forget.
TO BE IS NOT AS IMPORTANT AS TO FEEL!
— Abhishek Kumar, Stardust Family - We Are One!
Don't you enjoy being alive? Don't you like feeling: This is me, this is my hand, this is my leg, I'm real, I'm solid, I'm alive! Don't you like this?
— George Orwell
I am that, I AM!" We always intend to BE something or someone, where we already ARE everything we could ever desire to be. We just need to unlock the part of us we wanna be. And the key to THAT is the FEELING about THAT. TO BE IS NOT AS IMPORTANT AS TO FEEL! ~ UNIVERSE LOVES YOU & SO DO I ‪#‎StardustAK‬
— Abhishek Kumar
I wished I could paint this ineffable beauty but I had never been artistic. I hadn’t even packed a camera, and my phone was out of charge. It didn’t matter. I just breathed in the feeling, savouring it. Suddenly I knew that I’d enjoy many more moving moments and visions of beauty, and that they’d sustain me for the rest of my life.
— Jane Wilson-Howarth, Snowfed Waters
Many things might have caused pain this year. The good thing is that we would not have felt them if we weren't alive. Thankful that I'm alive!
— Assegid Habtewold, The 9 Cardinal Building Blocks: For Continued Success in Leadership
1My father says a hunch is your brain’s way of taking a short cut to the truth,’ replied Max.‘He’s a wise man, your father. What else does he say?’‘That the more you try to hide from the truth, the quicker it finds you.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Prince of Mist
Music, oh, how faint, how weak,Language fades before thy spell!Why should Feeling ever speak,When thou canst breathe her soul so well?
— Thomas   Moore
Possibility of enjoying life makes death feel terrible.
— Santosh Kalwar, One-liners
i also dislike people who try to talk down to my understanding. they are like people who when walking with you try to shorten their steps to suit yours, hypocrisy in both cases is equally exasperating.
— Helen Keller, The Story of My Life
Try to feel God in any little thing you do or feel. In a laugh, a smile, a tear, a revelation-a kiss.
— Solange nicole
the most random things get her way too full of love
— Maria Semple, Where'd You Go, Bernadette
Do you know how does it feel failing every day? No,You get used to it.
— M.F. Moonzajer, LOVE, HATRED AND MADNESS
When we feel powerless in a hostile world we can at least practice quelling the enmity in our minds.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
...In this place you could not feel anything, except pain and foreknowledge of pain.
— George Orwell, 1984
The earthquake of discomfort you feel moving inside of you when someone insults you is your own insecurity.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
When you realize that the feeling you have — is — the response you choose, you are free in that moment.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
Sure. You want to be touched, inspired and made to feel alive. But a relationship is like a bridge where you meet other people half-way. That means if you want to be touched, inspired and made to feel alive, you have to be touching, inspiring and bring the fire of your aliveness to the union of your companionship.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
Love is selfish yet a selfless feeling.
— Heenashree Khandelwal
But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.
— George Eliot, Middlemarch
I'm not difficult," Violet said. "I'm simple. I like good books and clever conversation and being left alone much of the time. How does that make me difficult? I make sense? I don't talk about my feelings, of course, but then, I don't want to." She shrugged. "So that's reasonable."Sebastian smiled despite himself, a smile that felt bitter even to him. "God, no. Not feelings. Heaven forbid that you have anything so messy.""I have feelings." She spoke stiffly. "I just don't talk about them. What's the point? Talking never changes them.
— Courtney Milan, The Countess Conspiracy
She felt nervy as all her excitements turned into weaknesses
— Munia Khan
The feeling that the world is full of people who think different is synonymous with wrong.
— David Levithan, Two Boys Kissing
Leading a grateful life should be more than a feeling and a habit. It should be our core value, which we should respect no matter what.
— Assegid Habtewold, The 9 Cardinal Building Blocks: For Continued Success in Leadership
Have you ever been in love? It's a question you're asked a lot as a kid from your friends, adults, anyone. They're curious. How do you know you're in love? Do we even really know what love means? It's just a word to define a feeling.
— Shey Stahl, Waiting for You
My friend, love is a verb. Love—the feeling—is a fruit of love, the verb. So love her. Serve her. Sacrifice. Listen to her. Empathize. Appreciate. Affirm her. Are you willing to do that?
— Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change
Are you okay?”She looked up, her eyes glistening. “I just . . . I . . .”“Hey.” He stood up and rounded the picnic table, sitting next to her on the bench. He wrapped hisarm around her, the feeling of her, so warm and female and way too tempting, sending a shock ofpleasure through him. “Hey, don’t . . . don’t do that.”“I’m pregnant. It’s a pregnant thing,” she said.“I’ve never seen you do it.”“I don’t often.”“I can tell.
— Maisey Yates, Unexpected
I was living for one thing only, and that was to confirm my own lack of feeling.
— Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Upon hearing the news I felt completely emptied. Emptied of life, feeling, and hope. I felt as if my very soul had left my body.
— J.W. Lord
It really seems magical when someone loves you back equally you love
— Pawan Mehra
Is it how it feels to do the right things? Because it sucks!
— Susan Vaught, Big Fat Manifesto
How do you feel?”He rubbed his stomach. “Like I’ve been eating Styrofoam.
— Dan Brown, Angels & Demons
Have you ever been writing something when you just forgot where you were, and what time it was, and you kept diving down deeper into your 
— Peter Gould, Write Naked
For the longest time I was just trying to find someone to love as much as I loved you, but now I realize that’s never going to happen....
— Manthan Jariwala
I think music is the greatest art form that exists, and I think people listen to music for different reasons, and it serves different purposes. The best songs are the ones that make you feel something
— Eddie Vedder
If I could have just one wish,I would wish to wake up everydayto the sound of your breath on my neck,the warmth of your lips on my cheek,the touch of your fingers on my skin,and the feel of your heart beating with mine...Knowing that I could never find that feelingwith anyone other than you.
— Courtney Kuchta
What is the mass of a feeling? What is its wavelength, its position on the electromagnetic spectrum?
— Paul McAuley, Evening's Empires
As yet, if a man has no feeling for art he is considered narrow-minded, but if he has no feeling for science this is considered quite normal. This is a fundamental weakness.
— Isidor Isaac Rabi
I’m starting to get used to this feeling of not caring about anything.
— J.A. Redmerski, The Edge of Never
We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.
— Roland Barthes, Mythologies
that feeling that I could touch the sky? That’s exactly how you make me feel.” (Ray)
— Charles Sheehan-Miles, The Last Hour
Rules for Disappearing by Witness Protection Prisoner #18A7R04M: Don’t fall into a routine. Shake things up. Doing the same thing over and over makes you feel comfortable. And feeling comfortable is bad.
— Ashley Elston, The Rules for Disappearing
Everything that happens where we live happens in us. Everything that ceases in what we see ceases in us. Everything that has been, if we saw it when it was, was taken from us when it went away.
— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
Slowly like a movie fade out, the real world evaporates. I'm alone, inside the world of the story. My favorite feeling in the world.
— Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
It is very difficult to bear the pain of ignorance of the person whom you love and who loves you, more than anything in the world..
— Vennela
Do what others do not do, Believe in what others do not believe, Feel what others cant feel, Become what others cannot be
— Yan Antropov
We need music the most when we’re feeling things really intensely. I think the most intense times in your life are when you’re either falling in love or losing it
— Taylor Swift
An Overall Feeling of Doom that One Cannot Ever Escape no Matter What One Does
— Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid
I wish I could take it all back, but I can’t. And I definitely can’t un-feel a feeling.
— Jolene Stockman, The Jelly Bean Crisis
I don’t want to talk.” Dan’s neck muscles tensed resisting Vadim’s hand.He didn’t know the words and he didn’t want to search for them. “I just want to feel.” But no, that wasn’t it. “I want to feel human.
— Aleksandr Voinov, Special Forces
How are you managing? And don't say you're fine."It's true. Whatever the opposite of fine is, that's what I am.
— Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay
When she quieted the jet engine buzz of worries assaulting her brain, when she stopped thinking altogether and just felt, she knew this was right. Feeling the silence of peace and conviction was so foreign to her she wasn't even sure what to do with it.
— Erin McCarthy, Jacked Up
The Invisible is movingSoftly and soothingI feel it insideIt is youIt is my feeling for youI want to give it lifeMy whole life
— Rixa White
I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near the frozen creek. That was a long time ago, but it’s wrong what they say about the past, I’ve learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out. Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years.
— Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
Some people's lives seem to flow in a narrative; mine had many stops and starts. That's what trauma does. It interrupts the plot. You can't process it because it doesn't fit with what came before or what comes afterward. A friend of mine, a soldier, put it this way. In most of our lives, most of the time, you have a sense of what is to come. There is a steady narrative, a feeling of "lights, camera, action" when big events are imminent. But trauma isn't like that. It just happens, and then life goes on. No one prepares you for it.
— Jessica Stern, Denial: A Memoir of Terror
We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.
— Chris Cleave, Little Bee
Some people's lives seem to flow in a narrative
—  mine had many stops and starts. That's what trauma does. It interrupts the plot. You can't process it because it doesn't fit with what came before or what comes afterwards.
Combat and rape, the public and private forms of organized social violence, are primarily experiences of adolescent and early adult life. The United States Army enlists young men at seventeen; the average age of the Vietnam combat soldier was nineteen. In many other countries boys are conscripted for military service while barely in their teens. Similarly, the period of highest risk for rape is in late adolescence. Half of all victims are aged twenty or younger at the time they are raped; three-quarters are between the ages of thirteen and twenty-six. The period of greatest psychological vulnerability is also in reality the period of greatest traumatic exposure, for both young men and young women. Rape and combat might thus be considered complementary social rites of initiation into the coercive violence at the foundation of adult society. They are the paradigmatic forms of trauma for women and men.
— Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror
There is, in every event, whether lived or told, always a hole or a gap, often more than one. If we allow ourselves to get caught in it, we find it opening onto a void that, once we have slipped into it, we can never escape.
— Brian Evenson, Fugue State
Dr. Peter Levine, who has worked with trauma survivors for twenty-five years, says the single most important factor he has learned in uncovering the mystery of human trauma is what happens during and after the freezing response. He describes an impala being chased by a cheetah. The second the cheetah pounces on the young impala, the animal goes limp. The impala isn’t playing dead, she has “instinctively entered an altered state of consciousness, shared by all mammals when death appears imminent.” (Levine and Frederick, Waking the Tiger, p. 16) The impala becomes instantly immobile. However, if the impala escapes, what she does immediately thereafter is vitally important. She shakes and quivers every part of her body, clearing the traumatic energy she has accumulated.
— Marilyn Van Derbur, Miss America by Day: Lessons Learned from Ultimate Betrayals and Unconditional Love
Without realizing it, I fought to keep my two worlds separated. Without ever knowing why, I made sure, whenever possible that nothing passed between the compartmentalization I had created between the day child and the night child.p26
— Marilyn Van Derbur, Miss America by Day: Lessons Learned from Ultimate Betrayals and Unconditional Love
How resilient was the body, to return to its prior form so quickly! Yet the mind was formed of a less pliable substance. The emptiness in her thoughts would not be so easily filled. Instead there was a hollowness among them-a place she had reserved for future joys which now would never arrive.
— Galen Beckett, The Master of Heathcrest Hall
Unlike simple stress, trauma changes your view of your life and yourself. It shatters your most basic assumptions about yourself and your world — “Life is good,” “I’m safe,” “People are kind,” “I can trust others,” “The future is likely to be good” — and replaces them with feelings like “The world is dangerous,” “I can’t win,” “I can’t trust other people,” or “There’s no hope.
— Mark Goulston, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder For Dummies
The counselor says that with more time and more surgeries, I will begin to feel normal again. She says this with a mouth that can still smile. It’s so easy to be reassuring when you have lips.
— Rasmenia Massoud, Human Detritus
Outside, the sun shines. Inside, there’s only darkness. The blackness is hard to describe, as it’s more than symptoms. It’s a nothing that becomes everything there is. And what one sees is only a fraction of the trauma inflicted.
— Justin Ordoñez, Sykosa
Several psychologists (L. Armstrong, 1994; Enns, McNeilly, Corkery, & Gilbert, 1995; Herman, 1992; McFarlane & van der Kolk, 1996; Pope & Brown, 1996) contend that the controversy of delayed recall for traumatic events is likely to be influenced by sexism. Kristiansen, Gareau, Mittleholt, DeCourville, and Hovdestad (1995) found that people who were more authoritarian and who had less favorable attitudes toward women were less likely to believe in the veracity of women’s recovered memories for sexual abuse. Those who challenged the truthfulness of recovered memories were more likely to endorse negative statements about women, including the idea that battered women enjoy being abused. McFarlane and van der Kolk (1996) have noted that delayed recall in male combat veterans reported by Myers (1940) and Kardiner (1941) did not generate controversy, whereas delayed recall in female survivors of intrafamilial child sexual abuse has provoked considerable debate.
— Rachel E. Goldsmith
In 1973, Jan Erik Olsson walked into a small bank in Stockholm, Sweden, brandishing a gun, wounding a police officer, and taking three women and one man hostage. During negotiations, Olsson demanded money, a getaway vehicle, and that his friend Clark Olofsson, a man with a long criminal history, be brought to the bank. The police allowed Olofsson to join his friend and together they held the four hostages captive in a bank vault for six days. During their captivity, the hostages at times were attached to snare traps around their necks, likely to kill them in the event that the police attempted to storm the bank. The hostages grew increasingly afraid and hostile toward the authorities trying to win their release and even actively resisted various rescue attempts. Afterward they refused to testify against their captors, and several continued to stay in contact with the hostage takers, who were sent to prison. Their resistance to outside help and their loyalty toward their captors was puzzling, and psychologists began to study the phenomenon in this and other hostage situations. The expression of positive feelings toward the captor and negative feelings toward those on the outside trying to win their release became known as Stockholm syndrome.
— Rachel Lloyd
In order to believe clients' accounts of trauma, you need to suspend any pre-conceived notions that you have about what is possible and impossible in human experience. As simple as they may sound, it may be difficult to do so.
— Aphrodite Matsakis, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
Denial is our very real, personal response to our own trauma. But denial is the normative response to trauma—by everyone. Society may deny that anything bad ever happened to us. It may deny that DID exists. But that doesn't mean to say it's right. All it says is that like global warming, our histories and our stories are an "inconvenient truth".͏
— Carolyn Spring, Living with the Reality of Dissociative Identity Disorder: Campaigning Voices
Snow girl was glad she had left her own feelings behind.
— Rene Denfeld, The Child Finder
If I’m a monster, mademoiselle, it’s because man’s cruelty has made me so.
— Rachel L. Demeter, Beauty of the Beast
And I knew then that there would be no telling me what he saw. I understand somehow that certain images, certain sounds, could not be shared and could not be lost.
— Kate Morton, The House at Riverton
Complexly traumatized children need to be helped to engage their attention in pursuits that do not remind them of trauma-related triggers and that give them a sense of pleasure and mastery. Safety, predictability, and "fun" are essential for the establishment of the capacity to observe what is going on, put it into a larger context, and initiate physiological and motoric self-regulation.
— Sarah Benamer, Trauma and Attachment
Chemistry is not destiny, certainly. But these scientists have demonstrated that the most reliable way to produce an adult who is brave and curious and kind and prudent is to ensure that when he is an infant, his hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis functions well. And how do you do that? It is not magic. First, as much as possible, you protect him from serious trauma and chronic stress; then, even more important, you provide him with a secure, nurturing relationship with at least one parent and ideally two. That's not the whole secret of success, but it is a big, big part of it.
— Paul Tough, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character
I think I broke Kerri,” she said. “Go fix her,” Al commanded, unfazed. “We’ve got enough broken parts.
— Edgar Cantero, Meddling Kids
TRAUMA STEALS YOUR VOICE People get so tired of asking you what's wrong and you've run out of nothings to tell them. You've tried and they've tried, but the words just turn to ashes every time they try to leave your mouth. They start as fire in the pit of your stomach, but come out in a puff of smoke. You are not you anymore. And you don't know how to fix this. The worst part is...you don't even know how to try.
— nikitta gill
I watch what happens below and Iam grateful that I can smell my smell, smell my smell and live while below me it happens, it happens that night bright as day, but I cannot name it, those things that happened while I watched, and I cannot speak something that was never in words, speak of things I cannot imagine, could never have seen even as I saw it, and I hide and am grateful for my smell crouched like an animal in that dark hot space
— Chris Abani, Song for Night
It registers that I am sitting there topless, but this body I am in doesn't feel like mine anymore so the half-nakedness seems irrelevant, like a rumor, something I'm supposed to care about but don't.
— Lauren   Miller, All Things New
“So how’d you do it? How did you get to where you aren’t scared all the freaking time?”Erin’s smile drooped a little, tired with the effort. “You’re making an assumption,” she said. “Just hang in there. It’ll get easier.” “But not better,” Alexander said. “But not better.
— Daniel Abraham, Unfettered
We don't go back to wallow, we go back to undo the lies that are back there that are holding its captive from living a wondrous and full life.
— Darlene Ouimet
This world isn’t a fair place, because we never know how much time we’ve really got.
— Zoe Cruz, Beastia
Grandiosity is when we are wrapped up in winning life's false contest. This happens only when we live to impress the abusive parents in our heads, not when we are soberly and philosophically working to advance civilization.
— Steven Franssen, Make Self-Knowledge Great Again
Unspeakable feelings need to find expression in words. However... verbalization of very intense feelings may be a difficult task.
— James A. Chu, Rebuilding Shattered Lives: Treating Complex PTSD and Dissociative Disorders
Trauma, if it doesn't destroy us, wakes us up both to our own relational capacities and to the suffering of others. Not only does it makes us hurt, it makes us more human, caring, and wise.
— Mark Epstein, M.D.
When experiences or emotions become too overwhlming, the mind clevely encapsulates the material and stores it for safe-keeping. Many people respond this way in the face of trauma, but the additional step that occurs in this process, in the case of DID, is the formation of distinct ego states that carry the experience.
— Deborah Bray Haddock, The Dissociative Identity Disorder Sourcebook
I found myself in a pattern of being attracted to people who were somehow unavailable, and what I realized was that I was protecting myself because I equate the idea of connection and love with trauma and death.
— Zachary Quinto
I believe that we belittle survivors by assuming that they will fail.
— Toni Bernhard
a trauma that breaks you into brand new pieces.
— Nathan Hill
Karen couldn't understand how these encounters had marked him, and she had always believed that a person without trauma was dangerous in some way, untested. Also bizarre: in all of his stories, Dan ended up succeeding.
— Alexandra Kleeman, Intimations: Stories
One of Coin's men lays a hand on my arm. Its not an aggressive move, really, but after the arena's I react defensively to any unfamiliar touch. I jerk my arm free and take off running down the halls. My mind does a quick inventory of my odd little hiding places and i wind up in the supply closet, curled up against a crate of chalk.
— Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay
Sometimes… we have a war in our hearts. We’re torn in two directions. The way we feel and the way we should feel. They rarely align. The battle goes on.
— Karina Halle, The Debt
We don’t really want to know what soldiers go through in combat. We do not really want to know how many children are being molested and abused in our own society or how many couples—almost a third, as it turns out—engage in violence at some point during their relationship. We want to think of families as safe havens in a heartless world and of our own country as populated by enlightened, civilized people. We prefer to believe that cruelty occurs only in faraway places like Darfur or the Congo. It is hard enough for observers to bear witness to pain. Is it any wonder, then, that the traumatized individuals themselves cannot tolerate remembering it and that they often resort to using drugs, alcohol, or self-mutilation to block out their unbearable knowledge?
— Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
The holes are slowly filling up, and despite itself the brain will work until the job is completed.
— Danny Scheinmann, Random Acts Of Heroic Love
To thoughtful natures, events are like depth charges: the surface is calm, but the shock spreads further.
— Amanda Craig
A lot of people don’t heal, and it manifests in a lot of different ways throughout their lives,” she said once. “Because when trauma doesn’t get to work itself through your system, your system idles at a heightened state, and so getting more really intense input calms your system down.” Which is why, Meredith said, “A lot of folks who’ve survived trauma end up being really calm in crisis and freaking out in everyday life.
— Mac McClelland, Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story
Dissociation is adaptive: it allows relatively normal functioning for the duration of the traumatic event and then leaves a large part of the personality unaffected by the trauma.
— Bessel A. van der Kolk, Psychological Trauma
I could have lived like that. For a long time. People do it. Like a piece of cardboard, walking around tall and flat in the world, without nerve endings, sinews stiff enough to keep any weakness they’re holding safely twined up. It keeps the good things from getting in, too. But you barely register emptiness when you only have two dimensions. People do it, keep their constriction mostly intact; except for the moments when they don't.
— Mac McClelland, Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story
People who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory and fragmented manner.
— Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror
A common feature of many theories of trauma is the idea that the causative—the wounding—event is not remembered but relived, as it is in the flashbacks of combat veterans, experienced anew with a visceral immediacy that affords no critical distance. To remember something, you have to consign it to the past—put it behind you—but trauma remains in the present; it fills that present entirely. You are inside it. Your mouth is always filled with the taste of blood. The killers are always crashing through the brush behind you. Some researchers believe that trauma bypasses the normal mechanisms of memory and engraves itself directly on some portion of the brain, like a brand. Cattle are branded to signify that they are someone’s property, and so, too, were slaves. The brand of trauma signifies that henceforth you yourself are property, the property of that which has injured you. The psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi believed that trauma is characterized by the victim’s helpless identification with the perpetrator, and elsewhere in the literature one often comes across the word “possession.” The moment of trauma marks an event horizon after which memory ceases. Or else memory breaks down, so that the victim can reconstruct the event but not the feeling that accompanied it, or alternatively only the feeling.
— Peter Trachtenberg, The Book of Calamities: Five Questions About Suffering and Its Meaning
My parents also had a tough time recognizing me at first. because my eyes were black and swollen shut and I had two tubes coming out of my head.
— Amy Rankin, Nobody Thought I Could Do It, But I Showed Them, and So Can You!
And so, now, she runs. In her running, her mind leaves her.And she can hear nothing but her heart, the blast making her deaf.There is a great white silent empty in her running.She runs.
— Lidia Yuknavitch, The Small Backs of Children
The culture and heritage should stay intact and be maintained as it provides the individuals with some degree of resiliency. The effects of the trauma is what should be focused on and treated. Improving the quality of life for survivors is the focus of treatment. It is not to erase the past.
— Thomas Hodge, Intergenerational Trauma: The Ghosts of Times Past
Traumatic events challenge an individual's view of the world as a just, safe and predictable place. Traumas that are caused by human behavior. . . commonly have more psychological impact than those caused by nature.
— American Psychological Association, APA Dictionary of Psychology
Psychoanalysis has suffered the accusation of being “unscientific” from its very beginnings (Schwartz, 1999). In recent years, the Berkeley literary critic Frederick Crews has renewed the assault on the talking cure in verbose, unreadable articles in the New York Review of Books (Crews, 1990), inevitably concluding, because nothing else really persuades, that psychoanalysis fails because it is unscientific. The chorus was joined by philosopher of science, Adolf Grunbaum (1985), who played both ends against the middle: to the philosophers he professed specialist knowledge of psychoanalysis; to the psychoanalysts he professed specialist knowledge of science, particularly physics. Neither was true (Schwartz, 1995a,b, 1996a,b, 2000). The problem that mental health clinicians always face is that we deal with human subjectivity in a culture that is deeply invested in denying the importance of human subjectivity. Freud’s great invention of the analytic hour allows us to explore, with our clients, their inner worlds. Can such a subjective instrument be trusted? Not by very many. It is so dangerously close to women’s intuition. Socalled objectivity is the name of the game in our culture. Nevertheless, 100 years of clinical practice have shown psychoanalysis and psychotherapy not only to be effective, but to yield real understandings of the dynamics of human relationships, particularly the reality of transference–countertransference re-enactments now reformulated by our neuroscientists as right brain to right brain communication (Schore, 1999).
— Joseph Schwartz, Ritual Abuse and Mind Control: The Manipulation of Attachment Needs
It is my hope that this book helps those who know and love people with DID: family members, lovers, coworkers, and friends. It is also my hope that those charged with intervening in families in which there is violence will take away a more nuanced approach to their important work, informed by a deeper understanding of trauma.Most of all, I hope that those of you who have DID know that the disorder itself is an incredible survival technique. You should feel proud to have survived. Trauma has had a major impact on my life, as it has on yours, but I’ve learned that my life extends beyond the pain and darkness. Survivors of trauma are full of life, creativity, courage, and love. We are more than the sum of our parts.
— Olga Trujillo, The Sum of My Parts: A Survivor's Story of Dissociative Identity Disorder
Not knowing trauma or experiencing or remembering it in a dissociative way is not a passive shutdown of perception or of memory. Not knowing is rather an active, persistent, violent refusal; an erasure, a destruction of form and of representation. The fundamental essence of the death instinct, the instinct that destroys all psychic structure is apparent in this phenomenon. . . . The death drive is against knowing and against the developing of knowledge and elaborating [it].
— Dori Laub, Listening to Trauma
Triggers are like little psychic explosions that crash through avoidance and bring the dissociated, avoided trauma suddenly, unexpectedly, back into consciousness.
— Carolyn Spring
EMDR is a bizarre and wondrous treatment and anybody who first hears about it, myself included, thinks this is pretty hokey and strange. It's something invented by Francine Shapiro who found that, if you move your eyes from side to side as you think about distressing memories, that the memories lose their power.And because of some experiences, both with myself, but even more with the patients of mine who told me about their experiences, I took a training in it. It turned out to be incredibly helpful. Then I did what's probably the largest NIH-funded study on EMDR. And we found that, of people with adult-onset traumas, a one-time trauma as an adult, that it had the best outcome of any treatment that has been published.What's intriguing about EMDR is both how well it works and the question is how it works and that got me into this dream stuff that I talked about earlier, and how it does not work through figuring things out and understanding things. But it activates some natural processes in the brain that's helped you to integrate these past memories.
— Bessel A. van der Kolk
This morning I was ten years old. Tonight I am older than the stars.
— Kathryn Lasky
But in the dark now and no glow showing and no lights and only the wind and the steady pull of the sail he felt that perhaps he was already dead. He put his two hands together and felt the palms. They were not dead and he could bring the pain of life by simply opening and closing them. He leaned his back against the stern and knew he was not dead. His shoulders told him.
— Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
Naturally the descendants of survivors meet regularly with phenomena in the course of their lives which, for the parents, are in associative connection with the suppressed fearful memories. These phenomena are carriers of grave memories for the survivor parent. The heightened emotional tension, hyperactivity of the parents and grandparents when the child eats or excretes draws the child's attention to the fact that behind these phenomena lies some unknown, painful, shameful secret.
— Terez Virag, Children of Social Trauma: Hungarian Psychoanalytic Case Studies; Illustrated Vy Sari Gerloczy; Translated by Emma Roper-Evans
And as a few strokes on the nose will make a puppy head shy, so a few rebuffs will make a boy shy all over. But whereas a puppy will cringe away or roll on its back, groveling, a little boy may cover his shyness with nonchalance, with bravado, or with secrecy. And once a boy has suffered rejection, he will find rejection even where it does not exist—or, worse, will draw it forth from people simply by expecting it.
— John Steinbeck, East of Eden
We call them survivors, but once the vampires get you, the person you were dies, like any traumatized part of you never leaves that room, that car, that moment, and you walk forward a ghost of your former self. You rebuild yourself over the years, but the person you were isn’t the person you become. The great bad thing happens, and you become a ghost in your own life, and then you become flesh and blood and remake your life, but the ghosts of what happened don’t go away completely. They wait for you in low moments, and then they wail at you, shaking their chains in your face and trying to strangle you with them.
— Laurell K. Hamilton, Affliction
And then it struck him what lay buried far down under the earth on which his feet were so firmly planted: the ominous rumbling of the deepest darkness, secret rivers that transported desire, slimy creatures writhing, the lair of earthquakes ready to transform whole cities into mounds of rubble. These, too, were helping to create the rhythm of the earth. He stopped dancing and, catching his breath, stared at the ground beneath his feet as though peering into a bottomless hole.
— Haruki Murakami, After the Quake
We distance ourselves for protection,Wear scarves when it’s cold. What seems most outlandish in our autobiography Is what really happened.
— Steve Abbott
It's as if I died too,' she whispered to herself, 'as if I was born dead.'Ironically, it was true. Emotionally she knew what her mind did not, beyond logic, beyond reason, as if somehow deep inside she felt what Sarah knew.
— Denny Taylor
The longer we stay in a violating situation, the more traumatized we become. If we don't act on our own behalf, we will lose spirit, resourcefulness, energy, health, perspective, and resilience. We must take ourselves out of violating situations for the sake of our own wholeness.
— Anne  Katherine, Where to Draw the Line: How to Set Healthy Boundaries Every Day
Her voice was flat, in a way Myrna recognized from years of listening to people trying to rein in their emotions. To squash them down, flatten, them, and with them their words and their voices. Desperately trying to make the horrific sound mundane.
— Louise Penny, The Long Way Home
Did you hear me, Zach? I care about you.” “Okay,” I said. “It’s okay with me that you care about me. But can we please not talk about it? Would that be okay with you?” “Yeah, that would be okay,” he said.
— Benjamin Alire Sáenz