Quotes About Healing

The only person who suffers, when you squirrel alway all that hate, is you.

It was a catch-22: If you didn't put the trauma behind you, you couldn't move on. But if you did put the trauma behind you, you willingly gave up your claim to the person you were before it happened.

There are five things we need to say to people we love before they die…: I forgive you. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you. Goodbye.

And he made love to her, offering his body in both tenderness and anger, unsure which was the best way to pass her bits of his soul so that she could patch her own with it

How can you be a survivor, when you can't even remember the war?

What could you give me, I ask, my voice shaking, to make me forget ... that you forgot about me?

Doctors put a wall up between themselves and their patients; nurses broke it down.

I] don't think I was trying to kill myself. I just wanted to hurt, and understand exactly whay I was hurting. This made sense: you cut, you felt pain, period.

If it is possible to die of grief then why on earth can't someone be healed by happiness?

When you lose someone you love, there is a tear in the fabric of the universe. It's the scar you feel for, the flaw you can't stop seeing. It's the tender place that won't bear weight. It's a void.

I don't know the first thing about holding together a family, especially one that resembles an heirloom vase, shattered but glued back together for its beauty, and no one mentions that you can see the cracks as plain as day.

It was almost as if there was a tear in the fabric I was made of, and he was the only color thread that would match to stitch it back up.

This is what it means to be human. We are all just canvases for our scars.

You get through it, you just never get over it

Why are you doing this to yourself? When something bad happens, why do you have to pick at it until it bleeds all over again?

It turns out that sharing the past with someone is different from reliving it when you're alone. It feels less like a wound, more like a poultice.

When you're hurting deeply, you go inward.

She thought of death like the seam of a hem: each time you lose someone close, it unraveled a little. You could still go along with your life, but you'd be forever tripping over something you previously took for granted.

There are an endless number of people who have left a love-shaped hole in the heart of someone else. Eventually someone brave and stupid will come along and try to fill that hole. But it never works, and so instead, that selfless soul winds up with a gap in his heart, too. And so on. It's a miracle that anyone survives, when so much of us is missing.

There was no easy switch that she could flip to stem the flow of feelings, no way to drain the memories that pooled like acid in her stomach because her heart no longer knew what to do with them.

I think...she said finally, that all of us have got our ghosts.

In half hour my mother has managed to give me what my father couldn't: my past.

Even though the injury has faded, I still see it the way it was right after the accident: raw and red, a jagged lightning bold splitting the symmetry of my face. In this, I suppose I'm like a girl with an eating disorder, who weighs ninety-eight pounds but sees a fat person staring back at her from the mirror. It isn't even a scar to me, really. It's a map of where my life went wrong.

you don't ever recover from losing someone you love—even the ones you leave behind because you're better off without them.