“You are significantly more likely to die in a car accident, especially if you fail to wear a seat belt, than to be attacked by ISIS. Wear your seat belt”
— Jessica Stern
“Some people’s lives seem to flow in a narrative; mine had many stops and starts. That’s what trauma does. It interrupts the plot. You can’t process it because it doesn’t fit with what came before or what comes afterward. A friend of mine, a soldier, put it this way. In most of our lives, most of the time, you have a sense of what is to come. There is a steady narrative, a feeling of “lights, camera, action” when big events are imminent. But trauma isn’t like that. It just happens, and then life goes on. No one prepares you for it.”
— Jessica Stern
“Other flowers came at the end of the summer, but by then the winter sadness had already dissipated, and the effect of the blooms was not the same.”
— Jessica Stern
“My breathe would catch at the sight of violets-so common in the woods at home, so surprising in the mountains. The violet’s message was “Keep up your courage, stay true to what you believe in.” p264”
— Jessica Stern
“This book is a memoir – not of specific life events, but of the processes of dissociation, and of re-enlivening emotions that are shameful to admit or even to feel. It is an account of the altered states that trauma induces, which make it possible to survive a life-threatening event but impair the capacity to feel fear, and worse still, impair the ability to love. (292)”
— Jessica Stern
“I can still bring into my body the joy I felt at seeing the first trillium of spring, which seemed to be telling me, “Never give up hope, spring will come.”
— Jessica Stern