The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.

Recovery can only take place within the context of relationships; it cannot occur in isolation.

After a traumatic experience, the human system of self-preservation seems to go onto permanent alert, as if the danger might return at any moment.

The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.

Over time as most people fail the survivor's exacting test of trustworthiness, she tends to withdraw from relationships. The isolation of the survivor thus persists even after she is free.

... in practice the standard for what constitutes rape is set not at the level of women's experience of violation but just above the level of coercion acceptable to men.

The study of psychological trauma has repeatedly led into realms of the unthinkable and foundered on fundamental questions of belief.

In situations of captivity the perpetrator becomes the most powerful person in the life of the victim, and the psychology of the victim is shaped by the actions and beliefs of the perpetrator.

Dissociation appears to be... the internal mechanism by which terrorized people are silenced.

People who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory and fragmented manner.

The relentless persistence of Light eventually exhausts darkness.

I want to be different from anyone ever.

I only know that it was, and ceased to be; and that I have written, and there I leave it.

Imagine for a minute yourself in the same shoes, the same sense of survival and the same nothing to lose.

A cat who turns her nose up at bread does not deserve meat.

We are at once the problem and the only possible solution to the problem.

But now I know that it is very important that all buildings should be consistent, that this is the quality of the Gothic cathedral, for instance, that we like.

ObamaCare (modeled almost precisely on RomneyCare) is wrong; it was bad medicine; it's bad for the economy, and I will repeal it.

I've definitely read stuff that I've been offered, where I've been like, "I can't do this. I think somebody would be better in this than me."

Often, before returning home, I would take a long and roundabout way and pass by the peaceful ramparts from where I had glimpses of other provinces, and a sight of the distant country.