Trujillo Quotes

I understood these things intellectually, the way I understand that the world is round or that gravity is a universal force. But it took me a long time to truly grasp what Dr. Summer had told me many times before: "To survive a violent childhood, you created aspects of your consciousness that held information about the violence away from you. That's why you remember it as if it happened to someone else. You have many ways of being you. ~ Olga Trujillo

A perfect ride. I fell a bit behind on the slow pace, but everything's good. It's real good. Yes, he ran the race we wanted him to run. ~ Elvis Trujillo

You're afraid of everything. And I know it. And that's why you don't like me. ~ E.E. Charlton-Trujillo

I felt like I had been numb most of my life, and now I craved being able to have real feelings: the joy, the sadness, and everything in between. ~ Olga Trujillo

She looked genuinely confused. "I…I don't know. He just seems so sweet and out of place. I guess I feel sorry for him. Kinda like a lost puppy."

"Great, well, can you just take him home with you then? I'm allergic. ~ Christy Wulff

You're not alone. You're never alone. Use creativity to change what world you're in at this moment. ~ E.E. Charlton-Trujillo

I was so moved that she remembered my birthday that I cried harder than I had in years. When I returned her call, she told me her computer was broken and she couldn't afford to replace it. My heart fell. As I had done so many times before, I went to her rescue. Still on the phone, I went online and bought her a new laptop, top-of-the-line. That was what she had really called for, She thanked me and hung up. I went to Casey, sobbing. Soon afterward, I closed the bank account and asked my mom to not ask me for any more gifts or money. Now my relationship with my mom is very limited, and it's still very painful for me. She continues to occasionally send me bills she can't pay. I respond by telling her that I love her but I cannot pay her bills. ~ Olga Trujillo

Ask any of your elders and they will tell you: Trujillo might have been a dictator, but, he was a Dominican dictator, which is another way of saying he was the number-one bellaco in the country. ~ Junot Diaz

Among the conclusions that emerge from this combination of qualities is the fact that in no sense was Trujillo a man of revolutionary aspiration or tendency. He did not wish to overthrow the system of government developed by Heureaux; he merely wanted to inherit it. He did not want to pull down or overturn; he preferred to extend and build. But above all, and without limit, he wanted to dominate. He embodied in every one of his attitudes the view that Macaulay attributed to Henry VIII in respect to the Roman Catholic faith: 'an orthodox Catholic except that he chose to be his own Pope. ~ Robert D. Crassweller

I opened my eyes and felt better, exhausted but relieved of a burden. The pressure to tell and the weight of the emotions had been with me for weeks. Now that I'd told what had happened, the burden lifted a bit. ~ Olga Trujillo

My mind instinctively developed new parts to specialize in skills I needed to make it through law school. They learned to focus on the important information: the outlines, the nutshells, and what each case meant. ~ Olga Trujillo

Controlling my environment was still a compelling need for me. I did everything I could to not be surprised by anything...

Looking back, I think that my need to predict how my day was going to unfold was a direct response to the amount of chaos in my childhood. ~ Olga Trujillo

When David and I went to visit my mom, she treated me well and seemed interested in our lives, focusing less on what she needed from me or how I should be taking care of her.

Mom saved those conversations for our daily phone calls because she thought David wouldn't find out about this other side other. But he could see the changes in me when I talked to my mom. ~ Olga Trujillo

He who does not know how to deceive does not know how to rule. ~ Rafael Trujillo

In this country, in one way or another, everyone had bean, was, or would be part of the regime. "The worst thing that can happen to a Dominican is to be intelligent or competent," he had once heard Agustín Cabral say ...and the words had been etched in his mind: "Because sooner or later Trujillo will call upon him to serve the regime, or his person, and when he calls, one is not permitted to say no." [Agustín Cabral] was proof of this truth....As Estrella Sadhalá always said, the Goat had taken from people the sacred attribute given to them by God: their free will. ~ Mario Vargas Llosa

Just because your electronics are better than ours, you aren't necessarily superior in any way. Look, imagine that you humans are a man in LA with a brand-new Trujillo and we are a nuhp in New York with a beat-up old Ford. The two fellows start driving toward St. Louis. Now, the guy in the Trujillo is doing 120 on the interstates, and the guy in the Ford is putting along at 55; but the human in the Trujillo stops in Vegas and puts all of his gas money down the hole of a blackjack table, and the determined little nuhp cruises along for days until at last he reaches his goal. It's all a matter of superior intellect and the will to succeed.
Your people talk a lot about going to the stars, but you just keep putting your money into other projects, like war and popular music and international athletic events and resurrecting the fashions of previous decades. If you wanted to go into space, you would have. ~ George Alec Effinger

I was shocked and terrified to hear Dr. Summer say I had what was formerly known as multiple personality disorder. Is that like Sybil? Am I like the woman in The Three Faces of Eve? My head began to spin. What do I have inside of me? Is there a crazy person in there? What am I? I felt like a freak. I was afraid to have anyone know. I have a mental illness. People make fun of people like me. Upon hearing my diagnosis, I stopped thinking of myself as smart, creative, or clever. Even though Dr. Summer had worked hard to help me understand that I had developed an amazingly adaptive survival technique, I no longer thought of it that way at all.

I was overwhelmed by fear and shame. The words multiple personality disorder echoed in my mind. I thought of all the ways people with multiple personalities were ridiculed and marginalized: They're locked away in mental institutions. They are really sick. I'm not going to be the subject of people's jokes. I am a lawyer. I work at the U.S. Department of Justice. The more I thought about it, the deeper my despair grew. ~ Olga Trujillo

As I was growing up, no one in my family got their needs met through respectful negotiation and compromise. ~ Olga Trujillo

You need to find a way to propel this creativity to the masses. People get brainwashed and they start to forget what's good. ~ Robert Trujillo

I would like to travel and wander and see the soul of the world and myself. ~ Alex Trujillo

The diagnosis shouldn't have surprised me, as we had been talking about my symptoms for so long. But it's easier to think you just have a bunch of parts inside. Everyone says things like "A part of me wants to go to the movies, but another part of me wants to just stay home." Using the term "part" made me feel normal. I knew I was a little different in that my parts were quite separate aspects of me. I knew my consciousness wasn't whole and knew that it was unusual to have some thoughts come to me in Spanish. I knew most people didn't experience terror and struggle to catch their breath when they were in benign situations. But we hadn't been calling this DID, so I'd been able to avoid fully accepting the implications of having these special parts. ~ Olga Trujillo

I wanted to go to a few therapy sessions and be back to normal. As I saw it, the panic attacks were the problem. What I really wanted was to stop having them. I genuinely thought I could do that. I didn't want to think about the past. ~ Olga Trujillo

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

I came to understand intellectually that my mind used dissociation as a way to protect me from knowing things. Dr. Summer repeatedly explained, "If you had woken up every morning and knew that later that day or evening you would be abused, you would have killed yourself". I would always nod, as if in agreement. It all made sense in a theoretical way, but I could not and did not want to truly understand or accept what had happened to me. ~ Olga Trujillo

I closed my hand into a fist and captured the details of the feeling for later, when I might need them. Storing thoughts in my fist was a way of creating parts of myself, brighter rooms in the house that was my mind, parts that could hold on to feelings of being loved. ~ Olga Trujillo

One morning in early June, I woke up with my usual anxious thoughts. I worried that Mike wouldn't like me anymore, that I wasn't good enough to play with him and his friends. What I didn't know then was that anxious, obsessive worrying helped my mind keep parts of me that had been raped and abused shut away, removed from my consciousness. Although the worrying was unpleasant, it served as a superficial distraction. It helped me get out of bed, focus on something else, and go on with my day. ~ Olga Trujillo

So there's this guy named Murphy and he has this law. I hate him. ~ Christy Wulff

I started crying. "When will it stop hurting?"
"I don't know. I wish I could tell you. I wish I could take the pain away. But it will get better and easier for you over time. ~ Olga Trujillo

Her other paramour was a student at the UASD
one of those City College types who's been in school eleven years and is always five credits shy of a degree. Students today don't mean na; but in Latin America whipped into a frenzy by the fall of Arbenz, by the stoning of Nixon, by the Guerillas of the Sierra Madre, by the endless cynical maneuverings of the Yankee Pig Dogs
in a Latin America already a year and a half into the Decade of Guerilla
a student was something else altogether, an agent for change, a quantum string in the staid Newtonian universe. Such a student was Arquimedes. He also listened to the shortwave, but not for Dodgers scores; what he risked his life for was the news leaking out of Havana, news of the future. Arquemides was, therefore, a student, the son of a Zapatero and a midwife, a tirapiedra and a quemagoma for life. Being a student wasn't a joke, not with Trujillo and Johnny Abbes scooping up everybody following the foiled Cuban Invasion of 1959. ~ Junot Diaz

From that mild dissociation, I quickly went into a deeper dissociative state if there was conflict around me, if someone expressed strong emotions, or if something unpredictable happened. Although these difficult situations triggered me, they brought out behavior that helped me do well when the going got tough. I loved solving problems and getting into the thick of things and also had well-developed skills in reading people and anticipating their needs. ~ Olga Trujillo

And Toronto's own Sergio Trujillo has redone his choreography totally, showing all the comical invention that we know he's capable of. ~ Richard Ouzounian