Bessel van der Kolk Quotes
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. . . . It just happens, and then life goes on. No one prepares you for it.

Quotes to Explore
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You will die but the carbon will not; its career does not end with you. It will return to the soil, and there a plant may take it up again in time, sending it once more on a cycle of plant and animal life.
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I like to sit down every day and not know where the book is going. I have no idea where the book is going to go or how it's going to end as I'm writing it.
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The cultural decoding that many American writers require has become an even harder task in the age of globalisation. The experience they describe has grown more private; its essential background, the busy larger world, has receded.
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When I'm dancing, I don't know where the confidence comes from, but I just pretend I'm someone else, I think, and then I go out and dance.
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I always loved advertising. If I hadn't been in fashion, I'd have been in advertising.
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I'm the most Colombian of the Colombians, even though I've lived 47 years outside of Colombia. I've lived 13 years in New York, and I never did a painting about New York. I've lived in France more than 30 years, and I've never painted Paris.
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For almost a century since 1918, the centralised nation-state has been the world's default political form. Its various experiments in industrialisation, urbanisation, mass literacy and consumerism have brought more people into public life.
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Anyone who sets foot into the 'Watchmen' universe and isn't just a little nervous should be given a few days of electroshock therapy. I've always considered 'Watchmen' to be one of the best graphic novels ever written, and when it came out back in 1986 I was as blown away as everyone else. Just masterful.
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I had a moment where I was like, 'I'm so tired of waiting for other people to accept me.'
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The spiritual virtue of a sacrament is like light; although it passes among the impure, it is not polluted.
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Unless you work for '60 Minutes', your life is: You do stories about things, and nothing happens as a result.
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My husband and I have season tickets to the Giants games, and we go there as fans to enjoy it.
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We don't grow older, we grow riper.
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I was very close to my mother, and her death, which left a gaping hole in my life, has been very difficult for me and my father in a lot of ways.
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Part of my problem as a young writer was that I was too much a New Yorker, always second-guessing the 'market.' I became so discouraged that I decided to write something that would please me alone - that became my sole criterion. And that was when I wrote 'Forgetting Elena,' the first novel I got published.
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I just try to get away with as much as I can. I don't think that's very radical in the art world.
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I now possess the tools as a producer and a songwriter to really just go out and make smashes all day long. I could make an album full of smash records that got pop appeal. But my heart is in hip-hop. My heart is in telling stories. And it's like therapy for me.
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I strive to be brief, and I become obscure.
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People should just express themselves and not worry about trends - try to use fashion like a compass, an indicator, examples of things that you can be. It's not to be taken so seriously. It's just clothes.
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I'm scared of screwing up my kids.
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A great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.
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What I learned at a very early age was that I was responsible for my life. And as I became more spiritually conscious, I learned that we all are responsible for ourselves, that you create your own reality by the way you think and therefore act. You cannot blame your parents, your circumstances, because you are NOT your circumstances. You are your possibilities. If you know that, you can do anything.
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If it were possible to have a life absolutely free from every feeling of sin, what a terrifying vacuum it would be.
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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. . . . It just happens, and then life goes on. No one prepares you for it.