Trauma doesn’t make us stronger. It makes us feel broken. If we keep trying to overcome it and are able to heal from it, then we become stronger. We become stronger from our actions, not because of what happened to us.

-Samantha Camargo

– Virginia Woolf, from a Letter to Violet Dickinson written c. January 1909

[TEXT ID: "I appreciate your concern. None of this is your fault. It's me. It's me and my head. / In winter, I collapse." END ID]

“You can never really go back to the same waters. Not only are you no longer the same, but neither are the waters you left. The current has changed. The elements of nature have affected the stream. When you return, although it appears the same, it really is a different river and you are a different person. Therefore, you cannot cross the same river twice.”

— Alice Walker

“The more you reach after the fatal flower of happiness, which trembles so blue and lovely in a crevice just beyond your grasp, the more fearfully you become aware of the ghastly and awful gulf of the precipice below you, into which you will inevitably plunge, as into the bottomless pit, if you reach any farther.”

— The Fox, D.H. Lawrence

I wanted
the past to go away, I wanted
to leave it, like another country; I wanted
my life to close, and open
like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song
    where it falls
down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;
    I wanted
to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,
whoever I was, I was

alive
for a little while.

—Mary Oliver, from “Dogfish,” in Dream Work (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986)

“In the hallway, you wonder will the world always be as narrow as this, two walls threatening to squeeze and crush you into nothingness. So you imagine other worlds, sometimes not even better, but at least different from this.”

— Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

Close up view of the Poe quilt. (Pattern)

No matter how hard you try to be what you once were, you can only be what you are here and now. Time hypnotizes. When you're nine, you think you've always been nine years old and will always be. When you're thirty, it seems you've always been balanced there on that bright rim of middle life. And then when you turn seventy, you are always and forever seventy. You're in the present, you're trapped in a young now or an old now, but there is no other now to be seen.

– Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

Some people turn sad awfully young ... No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer, and ... get sadder younger than anyone else in the world.

– Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

“I found myself remembering the day in kindergarten when the teachers showed us Dumbo, and I realized for the first time that all the kids in the class, even the bullies, rooted for Dumbo, against Dumbo’s tormentors. Invariably they laughed and cheered, both when Dumbo succeeded and when bad things happened to his enemies. But they’re you, I thought to myself. How did they not know? They didn’t know. It was astounding, an astounding truth. Everyone thought they were Dumbo.”

— Elif Batuman, The Idiot

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“The sea was calm. I was too. But on the lookout, suspicious. As if this calm couldn’t last. Something is always about to happen.”

— Clarice Lispector, excerpt from “As Fast As I Can Type” (April 17, 1971), Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas  (trans. Margaret Jull Costa & Robert Patterson)

“If you want to be respected by others the great thing is to respect yourself. Only by that, only by self-respect will you compel others to respect you.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Humiliated and Insulted