survivor

While my sister and I were reminded we did not cause this pain, it was knowing that because we broke our silence about what had been done to us, our parents were hurting. That knowledge was hard on us.

You're a survivor because every day you make a choice not to be governed by their harsh words or actions. No one has the right to take away your happiness

It doesn't matter if you come from money or you are poor: If your family has already made you feel that you are not worthy, you begin to believe it, and when someone comes along and tells you that you are beautiful/special/wonderful and showers you with attention and gifts, or offers you money when you desperately need it, you are vulnerable and ready to trust

You have to fight the odds in life to be able to reach a greater height.

I look upon the gift of my life as a wondrous journey.

Baby, you__e not the one who__ broken. The assholes who mistreated you, they__e the broken ones. You did what you had to do to survive them.

The thing that most people didn't understand, if they weren't in his line if work, was that a rape victim and a victim of a fatal accident were both gone forever. The difference was that the rape victim still had to go through the motions of being alive.

At times I am flabbergasted that my memory is considered false and my alcoholic father's memory is considered rational and sane. Am I not believed because I am a woman? If Peter Freyd were a man who lived in my neighborhood during my childhood instead of my father, would he and his wife be so believable? If not, what is it about his status as my father that makes him more credible?

When faced with pain and evil, we have to make a choice.We can choose to be taken by the evil.Or we can try to embrace the good.

Hope starts as a promise made to yourself, the first drop of rain in a parched land, the first step onto dry earth for a shipwreck survivor. It is a listening crowd for a lonely heart.What we hope in must be greater than us; therefore, we will always need something greater than man to believe in. Good and evil may be a necessity to perceive our world, but hope is a prerequisite for life.

The act of shopping for what he needed, and of setting up the bare necessities for himself, had lulled Strike back into the familiar soldierly state of doing what needed to be done, without question or complaint.

I'm a survivor - a living example of what people can go through and survive.

Maybe that is the greatest of wonders: that we can be shaped so much by those we've known closely, and equally by those we've never known at all - and that we too can change the world long after we've left it.

Miriam is upset. Her voice is stretched and I can't look at her. Perhaps they beat something out of her she didn't get back.

It was a catch-22: If you didn__ put the trauma behind you, you couldn__ 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.

Those who were molested or beaten as children or teenagers might later be vulnerable to sexual abuse or violence, because their natural impulses to protect themselves and protest (physical and verbal) were extinguished. Expectation of hurtful treatment by others or one's own failed capabilities can stubbornly persist despite overwhelming evidence that such is no longer the case.

There is much more joy in being a survivor than been a quitter.

I can sit in denial of my life because in looking around I see how lucky I am to have survived it.