Quotes About Healing

The words and sentences you take into your body from books are no less sacred and healing than communion. Surely at least one such person lives in your zip code.

Any time you try to collapse the distance between your delusions about the past and what really happened, there is suffering involved. p. xx

When you've been hurt enough as a kid (maybe at any age), it's like you have a trick knee. Most of your life, you can function like an adult, but add in the right portions of sleeplessness and stress and grief, and the hurt, defeated self can bloom into place.

For the more haunted among us, only looking back at the past can permit it finally to become past.

But because of you, I couldn't die and couldn't monster myself, either. So you were the agent of my rescue—not a good job for somebody barely three feet tall. Blameless

The lady in Chicago survived, she told me, through stories. Which is at the core of traditional therapy: retelling the family saga. Talk about it, the old wisdom says, and you get better. From narratives about childhood, this woman manufactured a self, neither cut off from her past nor mired in it.

In terms of cathartic affect, memoir is like therapy, the difference being that in therapy, you pay them. The therapist is the mommy, and you're the baby. In memoir, you're the mommy, and the reader's the baby. And—hopefully—they pay you. ("No man but a blockhead ever wrote for any cause but money," Samuel Johnson said.)

whether you're a memoirist or not, there's a psychic cost for lopping yourself off from the past:

I only breathe with one lung since you've gone , you say. And I love you with one hemisphere of my brain, the dumb one, the one that forgets.

the only parts I remember of my childhood are lies I told myself to feel better

I know sometimes you feel less than human more like an unknown planet no one cares about more like hot guilt more like a catalog of trauma mary, stop trying to die. there is nothing better than looking into the mirror to discover infinite doors. to witness your own bloom. you are the best version of this story. we're all waiting for you

É por isso que, quando prego e funerais, digo que a morte é a derradeira cura, porque é na morte que nos tornamos finalmente quem somos.

When you have committed an action that you cannot bear to think about, that causes you to writhe in retrospect, do not seek to evade the memory: make yourself relive it, confront it repeatedly over and over, till finally, you will discover, through sheer repetition it loses its power to pain you. It works, I guarantee you, this sure-fire guilt-eradicator, like a homeopathic medicine — like in small doses applied to like. It works, but I am not sure that it is a good thing.

It is better for the heart to break, than not to break.

Therefore, dark past, I'm about to do it. I'm about to forgive you for everything.

After a cruel childhood, one must reinvent oneself. Then reimagine the world.

Everything that was broken has forgotten its brokenness. I live now in a sky-house, through every window the sun. Also your presence. Our touching, our stories. Earthy and holy both. How can this be, but it is. Every day has something in it whose name is Forever.

Sometimes I really believe it, that I am going to save my life a little.

Where has this cold come from? "It comes from the death of your friend." Will I always, from now on, be this cold? "No, it will diminish. But always it will be with you." What is the reason for it? "Wasn't your friendship always as beautiful as a flame?

The water, that circle of shattered glass, healed itself with a slow whisper and lay back

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on.

I began to pick through the red rivers of confusion; I began to take apart the deep stitches of nightmares.

Oh, mother earth, your comfort is great, your arms never withhold. It has saved my life to know this. Your rivers flowing, your roses opening in the morning.

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.