Childhood Traumas Quotes

The old rule about how a thing of beauty is a joy forever, in my experience, even the most beauteous thing is only a joy for about three hours, tops. After that, she'll want to tell you all about her childhood traumas. Part of meeting these jail girls is it's so sweet to look at your watch and know she'll be behind bars in half an hour. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

I learned that female professors and departmental secretaries are the natural enemies of the academic world, as I was privileged to overhear discussions of my sexual orientation and probable childhood traumas from ten to ten-thirty each morning through the paper-thin walls of the break room located adjacent to my office. By these means I learned that although I was in desperate need of a girdle, I was better off than one of the other female professors, who would never lose all that baby weight by working all of the time. As ~ Hope Jahren

Eventually, however, the denial turned into emptiness and my childhood ended. ~ Floyd C. Forsberg

Some of your childhood traumas may be remembered with incredible clarity, while others are so frightening or incomprehensible that your conscious mind buries the memory in your unconscious. ~ Renee Fredrickson

Over centuries, organised perpetrator groups have observed and studied the way in which extreme childhood traumas, such as accidents, bereavement, war, natural disasters, repeated hospitalisations and surgeries, and (most commonly) child abuse (sexual, physical, and emotional) cause a child's mind to be split into compartments. Occult groups originally utilised this phenomenon to create alternative identities and what they believed to be "possession" by various spirits. In the twentieth century, probably beginning with the Nazis, other organised groups developed ways to harm children and deliberately structure their victims' minds in such a way that they would not remember what happened, or that if they began to remember they would disbelieve their own memories. Consequently, the memories of what has happened to a survivor are hidden within his or her inside parts. ~ Alison Miller

I am quite scandalous, you see. I come packaged with unpredictable moments, brutal honesty, calamitous outbursts, the ghastly need for love, a fiendish lack of filter, the horrific need to question everything, nauseating affection, offensive kindness, indecent spirituality, obscene beauty, monstrous creativity, barbaric embellishments, contemptuous passion, sinful childhood traumas, unscrupulous hobbies, vexatious caring, abominable sensitivity, reprehensible humor, hideous sarcasm, displeasing feelings, unpalatable confidence, offensive compassion, villainous inspiration and a devilish wit. I am quite grotesque in my imperfectness and I am not ashamed to admit it. ~ Shannon L. Alder

The rush I got from crime was better than that of glue, drink or hash. I loved playing cat and mouse with the local coppers. He Who Dares Wins, the SAS motto, was very applicable to my life then. ~ Stephen Richards

I want to poke holes in the erroneous beliefs about what fame provides. It won't raise your self-esteem, it won't create profound connection, it's not going to heal your childhood traumas, it's only going to amplify them. You're going to be subject to a lot of criticism and praise, both of which are violent in their own ways. ~ Alanis Morissette

You were the first to do her harm. You were the first person to make the world dangerous for her. ~ Ava Dellaira

We're taught to find the antecedents to our adult failures in childhood traumas, and so we spend our lives looking bacwards and pointing fingers, rather than bucking up and forging ahead. But what if your childhood was all a big misunderstanding? An elaborate ruse? What does that say about failure? Better yet, what does that say about potential? ~ Heidi Julavits

If the point of the inner-child movement is to cure adult problems, it doesn't work. Reliving childhood traumas gives you a nice afterglow, but it lasts only for hours or days. There is no evidence it changes adult problems. ~ Martin Seligman

If you could get anything at all off Santa, what would it be?'
I asked for a fire engine and sweets. Bunty exclaimed in delight, 'Santa will get you that, but you and Scott will need to leave out a bowl of milk and some carrots for Rudolph.'
'Who's Rudolph?' I asked.
Bunty told me in confidence that Rudolph was Santa's reindeer and that he helped pull all the children's toys in the world over the snow. I couldn't wait.
In readiness for Rudolph, Scott, Martha, Bunty and I picked out four of the biggest carrots from a bag in the kitchen, which we then washed. We found a big bowl that we used to lick the cream out of, which we filled with milk. We put the bowl along with the carrots under the Christmas tree, with all the other children's offerings. Then Bunty and Martha came in and washed us, put us to bed and read us a story, before kissing us good night. On their way out they said, 'When you wake up, Santa will have been'. ~ Stephen Richards

Childhood trauma does not come in one single package. ~ Asa Don Brown

Emotional abuse is designed to undermine another's sense of self.
It is deliberate humiliation, with the intent to seize control of how others feel about themselves. ~ Lorraine Nilon

The magic of childhood is the strangeness of childhood - the uniqueness that makes us see things that other people don't see. ~ Maurice Sendak

I had built such a wall between my experiences and how I felt about those experiences that I was incapable of reliving both simultaneously. I could talk about my traumas, even walk through them, but I couldn't feel them. When I tried to bring it all together, when I tried to remember how I had felt, I disappeared in my own head. My to-do list took on grave importance. The book I read the night before filled my thoughts. Yesterday's article suddenly called out to be rewritten. I couldn't get inside myself. ~ Sarah Hackley

Having a white parent undoubtedly makes for a different childhood experience than having two black parents. ~ Melissa Harris-Perry

The hypermnesia of dreams and their command of childhood material have become the two pillars on which our theory rests; our theory of dreams has ascribed to wishes deriving from childhood the part of indispensable moving-force in the formation of dreams. ~ Sigmund Freud

One may enter the literary parlor via just about any door, be it the prison door, the madhouse door, or the brothel door. There is but one door one may not enter it through, which is the child room door. The critics will never forgive you such. The great Rudyard Kipling is one of a number of people to have suffered from this. I keep wondering to myself what this peculiar contempt towards anything related to childhood is all about. ~ Michael Ende

I lived, particularly in childhood but with lessening intensity right on to middle age, in a world that was peculiarly and intimately my own, scarcely to be shared with others or even made plausible to them. I habitually read special meanings into things, scenes and places qualities of wonder, beauty, promise, or horror for which there was no external evidence visible or plausible to others. My world was peopled with mysteries, seductive hints, vague menaces, intimations of immortality. ~ George F. Kennan

I am much more powerful today than the old programs and mind viruses that I absorbed in my childhood. ~ Wayne Dyer

This life is but the childhood of our immortality. ~ Denis Johnson

I sold my elegant blackness to all those childhood ghosts and now they pay me for it. ~ Toni Morrison

I felt if I went chronologically, I'd get bogged down in childhood and that's part of our culture of complaint in America. This endless wailing about your childhood. ~ Edmund White

All people cross the line from childhood to adulthood with a secondhand opinion of who they are. Without any questioning, we take as truth whatever our parents and other influentials have said about us during our childhood, whether these messages are communicated verbally, physically, or silently. ~ Heyward Bruce Ewart III

On the occasion of a visit to Jane Austen's childhood home in Steventon, Hampshire:

"I put my hand down on Jane's desk and bring it up covered with dust. Oh that some of her genius might rub off on me! One would have imagined the devoted female custodian going round with her duster at least every other day. ~ Barbara Pym

I believe in miracles. At the age of 13, I was on holiday in Moscow with my mother. It was the only trip I took in my whole childhood. We stepped off a metro train and were approached by a talent scout who told me that she wanted to sign me to her modeling agency. ~ Olga Kurylenko

Smelling the hint of his cologne. Hearing his voice speak her name. It was like reopening a cut you thought already healed and pouring salt directly into it. ~ Nicole Douglas

I keep seeing this ad on TV. It talks about teachers. Thank you for teaching me. Thank you for changing my life. They all look happy. Have they always been this happy? Did they have a perfect childhood? A perfect school life? I was happy once. But I was young. The older you get, the more you remember. The younger you are, the more you forget. ~ Haresh Sharma

I once had a mind of quicksand,
That dragged ideas into its depths,
Inhaling specks of sunlight,
Every time I drew a breath,
But the world thought me a hazard,
When every word I spoke, I meant,
So around me they put caution tape,
And filled me with cement. ~ Erin Hanson

Since religion was so much a part of my life as a child, and since my childhood was so happy and so full of laughter and joy, I associate the two. Even my concept of Jesus goes along with this association of happiness and religion. ~ Minnie Pearl

I was fortunate to have had a lively, happy childhood, but somewhere along the way I convinced myself I wasn't wanted anywhere or by anyone if I wasn't thin. ~ Lucy Davis

The Wise County Bookmobile is one of the most beautiful sights in the world to me. When I see it lumbering down the mountain road like a tank ... I flag it down like an old friend. I've waited on this corner every Friday since I can remember. The Bookmobile is just a government truck, but to me it's a glittering royal coach delivering stories and knowledge and life itself. I even love the smell of books. People have often told me that one of their strongest childhood memories is the scent of their grandmother's house. I never knew my grandmothers, but I could always count on the Bookmobile. ~ Adriana Trigiani

It is self-evident that St. Louis affected me more deeply than any other environment has ever done. I feel that there is something in having passed one's childhood beside the big river, which is incommunicable to those people who have not. I consider myself fortunate to have been born here, rather than in Boston, or New York, or London. ~ T. S. Eliot

Sometimes I fantasize about getting my hands on my library records. . . my recurring bookworm dream is to peruse my personal library history like it's a historical document.

My bookshelves show me the books I've bought or been given. . . But my library books come into my house and go out again, leaving behind only memories and a jotted line in a journal (if I'm lucky). I long for a list that captures these ephemeral reads - all the books I've borrowed in a lifetime of reading, from last week's armful spanning back to when I was a seven-year-old kid with my first library card. I don't need many details - just the titles and dates would be fine - but oh, how I'd love to see them.

Those records preserve what my memory has not. I remember the highlights of my grade-school checkouts, but much is lost to time. How I'd love to see the complete list of what I chose to read in second grade, or sixth, or tenth. ~ Anne Bogel

This was a factory, a sorting house. We were no different from dogs and pigs and cows: all of us were allowed to play when we were small, but then, just before reaching maturity, we were sorted and classified. Being a high school student was the first step toward becoming a domestic animal. ~ Ryu Murakami

The patterns learned as a child, repeat as an adult. Those with an abusive childhood are very often oh-so blind to this inescapable truth. - André Chevalier ~ Nikki Sex

Carelessness was once something to be owned. They wore it around their necks as they joined the springtime breeze while ducking in and out of the forest believing their fairy tale. ~ A. Lynn

No, I'm no patriot, nor was I ever allowed to be. And yet, the
country of my childhood lives within me with a primacy that is
a form of love. It lives within me despite my knowledge of our
marginality, and its primitive, unpretty emotions. Is it blind
and self-deceptive of me to hold on to its memory? I think it
would be blind and self-deceptive not to. All it has given me is
the world, but that is enough. It has fed me language, percep-
tions, sounds, the human kind ... no geometry of landscape,
no haze in the air, will live in us as intensely as the landscapes
that we saw as the fi rst, and to which we gave ourselves wholly,
without reservation. ~ Eva Hoffman

How do our experiences in childhood make us the adults we become? It is one of the great human questions, the theme of countless novels, biographies, and memoirs; ~ Paul Tough

Childhood lasts all through life. It returns to animate broad sections of adult life ... Poets will help us to find this living childhood within us, this permanent, durable immobile world. ~ Gaston Bachelard

This is what I love to do: I love to run through a field of wet grass that has not been mowed recently, I love to run, keeping my snout low to the ground so the grass and the sparkles of water cover my face. I imagine myself as a vacuum cleaner, sucking in all the smells. all the life, a spear of summer grass. It reminds me of my childhood, back on the farm in Spangle, where there was no rain but there was grass, there were fields, and I ran. ~ p208 ~ Garth Stein

You know what gets to me, though? You know what's truly ironic?

What?

She needed us. She was exactly the kind of person that my father and I have sworn our lives to protect. She wasn't tough. She made bad choices. She drank too much, she dated the wrong men, she believed anyone's pack of lies. God, she desperately needed someone to save her from herself. And we didn't do it. I spent so much of my childhood resenting her. Crying, complaining Mandy who was always upset about something. Now, I just wonder why we didn't take better care of her. She was in our own family. How could we fail her so completely? ~ Lisa Gardner

I'm just having fun. And giving a sort of second shot at childhood and life - and I need to be present to do it. ~ Sandra Bullock

If childhood is still a state, it is now chiefly a state of confusion. ~ Phyllis McGinley

He had given Cosette a dress of Binche lace that had come down to him from his own grandmother. "These fashions have come round again," he said, "old things are all the rage, and the young women of my old age dress like the old women of my childhood, ~ Victor Hugo

What's in a name? That is what we ask ourselves in childhood when we write the name that we are told is ours. ~ James Joyce

Dreaming is risky. While only some dreams can put you at physical risk, all dreams require that you take an emotional risk. By their nature, dreams create a gap between your present reality and the reality you want to have, causing you to question whether you can bridge that gap. This risk alone can be so daunting for people that they prefer to leave their dreams in their childhood or buried away beneath layers of fear, doubt, and resignation. That's why dreaming bigger dreams takes courage; it means risking the possibility that your dreams will not come true. ~ Margie Warrell

It's a universal truth that no parent wishes to acknowledge that the fear and phobias we are in thrall to in adulthood almost invariably connect back to childhood experiences. ~ Mariella Frostrup

Childhood bullying was a big part of my life. ~ Michael Steger

Childhood is a long, long road, from which that dark whispering forest of death seems an impossible destination. ~ Lauren DeStefano

Let there be a child, who should,
not be taught.
Let there be a child, who should,
be refrained from books.
Let him not hear,
don't preach him, dear.
Don't let him read the quotations,
on internet and make them his passion.
Don't tell him stories of successful,
and make them his anthem.
Allow him to grow unto what,
he is to know. ~ Jasleen Kaur Gumber

He started touching me. 'How old are you?' He ran his hands over my nose, my mouth, my eyes. I was paralysed. 'Nine. What about you?' 'Nine.' 'When's your birthday?' 'The twelfth of September. And yours?' 'The Twentieth of November.' 'What's your name?' 'Michele. Michele Amitrano. What year are you in at school?' 'The fourth. What about you?' 'The fourth.' 'Same.' 'Same' 'I'm thirsty.' I gave him the bottle ~ Niccolo Ammaniti

You step over the threshold of your parents' home, and you're instantly transported back to your childhood. It's like time travel. You revert at once to a place of arrested development. ~ Tamsin Greig

My childhood years were a balance of dark and light. ~ Martha Graham

The hero is the man of self-achieved submission. But submission to what? That precisely is the riddle that today we have to ask ourselves and that it is everywhere the primary virtue and historic deed of the hero to have solved. Only birth can conquer death - the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new. Within the soul, within the body social, there must be a continuous "recurrence of birth" a rebirth, to nullify the unremitting recurrences of death. For it is by means of our own victories, if we are not regenerated, that the work of Nemesis is wrought: doom breaks from the shell of our very virtue. Peace then is a snare; war is a snare; change is a snare; permanence a snare. When our day is come for the victory of death, death closes in; there is nothing we can do, except be crucified - and resurrected; dismembered totally, and then reborn.

The first step, detachment or withdrawal, consists in a radical transfer of emphasis from the external to the internal world, macro- to microcosm, a retreat from the desperation's of the waste land to the peace of the everlasting realm that is within. But this realm, as we know from psychoanalysis, is precisely the infantile unconscious. It is the realm that we enter in sleep. We carry it within ourselves forever. All the ogres and secret helpers of our nursery are there, all the magic of childhood. And more important, all the life-potentialities that we never managed to bring to adult realization, those other p ~ Joseph Campbell

Man, by his very nature, tends to give himself an explanation of the world into which he is born. And this is what distinguishes him from the other species. Every individual, even the least intelligent, the lowest of outcasts, from childhood on gives himself some explanation of the world. And with it he manages to live. And without it, he would sink into madness. ~ Elsa Morante

It was all beginning to run together in the back of Eleanor's mind, and the things that had probably really happened were confused with the things that probably hadn't. And every day everything in her whole past life - the real things and the imaginary things - was being pushed farther and farther back, because going to high school was so enormous, so vast! so different from all of Eleanor's life before. The milling crowds in the hall between classes, all those jostling elbows and swollen shoulders and bosoms, all those enormous hands and feet, they pushed and thumped and shoved at Eleanor's childhood, until there was no room anymore for anything but now, right now, a hurrying rushing now that was just incredibly thrilling, or absolutely rotten and just disgusting, this heaving present moment, right now. ~ Jane Langton

I had dinner with my father last night, and made a classic Freudian slip. I meant to say, "Please pass the salt," but it came out, "You prick, you ruined my childhood. ~ Jonathan Ned Katz