Damage Josephine Hart Quotes

Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive.

All damaged people are dangerous. Survival makes them so.' 'Why?' 'Because they have no pity. They know what others can survive, as they did.

That is my story, simply told. Please do not ask again. I have told you in order to issue a warning. I have been damaged. Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive.

Lucky people should hide. Pray the days of wrath do not visit their home.

They say that childhood forms us, that those early influences are the key to everything. Is the peace of the soul so easily won? Simply the inevitable result of a happy childhood. What makes childhood happy? Parental harmony? Good health? Security? Might not a happy childhood be the worst possible preparation for life? Like leading a lamb to the slaughter.

There was a full moon in the starless sky. I thought how rarely I had noticed such things. Some deep failure of the soul perhaps. An inherited emptiness. A nothingness passed from generation to generation. A flaw in the psyche, discovered only by those who suffer by it.

What really makes us is beyond grasping. It's way beyond knowing. We give in to love... because it gives us some sense of what is unknowable. Nothing else matters, not at the end.

When we mourn those who die young – those who have been robbed of time – we weep for lost joys. We weep for opportunities and pleasure we ourselves have never known. We feel sure that somehow that young body would have known the yearning delight for which we searched in vain all our lives. We believe that the untried soul, trapped in its young prison, might have flown free and known the joy that we still seek.

Our sanity depends essentially on a narrowness of vision--the ability to select the elements vital to survival, while ignoring the great truths.

Was my sin basically one of untruthfulness? Or, more likely, one of cowardice? But the liar knows the truth. The coward knows his fear and runs away.

Men and women find all sorts of ways to be together, all sorts of ways. Yours was high and dangerous. Most of us stay on the lower paths.

She was the split-second experience that changes everything.; the car smash; the letter we shouldn't have opened; the lump in the breast or groin; the blinding flash. On my well-ordered stage-set the lights were up, and maybe at last I was waiting in the wings.

..I always recognize the foces that will shape my life. I let them do their work. Sometimes they tear through my life like a hurricane. Sometimes they simply shift the ground under me, so that I stand on different earth, and something or someone has been swallowed up. I steady myself, in the earthquate. I lie down, and let the hurricane pass over me. I never fight. Afterwards I look around me, and I say, 'Ah, so this at least is left for me. And that dear person has also survived.' I quietly inscribe on the stone tablet of my heart the name which has gone forever. Th inscription is a thing of agony. Then I start on my way again.

The passion that transforms life, and art, did not seem to be mine. But in all essentials, my life was a good performance.

Children are the great gamble. From the moment they are born, our helplessness increases. Instead of being ours to mould and shape after our best knowledge and endeavour, they are themselves. From their birth they are the centre of our lives, and the dangerous edge of existence.

The day then trapped me in its iron bars of phone calls and meetings, letters to read, letters to write, decisions to make, promises to break.

I have been at the bedsides of the dying, who looked puzzled at their family’s grief as they left a world in which they had never felt at home.

There is an internal landscape, a geography of the soul: we search for its outlines all over our lives. Those who are lucky enough to find it ease like water over stone, onto its fluid contours, and are home. Some find it in a place of their birth; others may leave a seaside town, parched, and find themselves refreshed in the desert. there are those born in rolling countryside who are really only at ease in the intense and busy loneliness of the city. For some, the search is for the imprint of another; a child or a mother, a grandfather or a brother, a lover, a husband, a wife, or a foe. We may go through our lives happy or unhappy, successful or unfulfilled, loved, or unloved, without ever standing cold with the shock or recognition, without ever feeling the agony as the twisted iron in our soul unlocks itself and we slip at last into place.

When we mourn those who die young – those who have been robbed of time – we weep for lost joys. We weep for opportunities and pleasure we ourselves have never known. We feel sure that somehow that young body would have known the yearning delight for which we searched in vain all our lives. We believe that the untried soul, trapped in its young prison, might have flown free and known the joy that we still seek. We say that life is sweet, its satisfactions deep. All this we say, as we sleepwalk our time through years of days and nights. We let time cascade over us like a waterfall, believing it to be never-ending. Yet each day that touches us, and every man in the world, is unique; irredeemable; over. And just another Monday.

All damaged people are dangerous. Survival makes them so.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because they have no pity. They know that others can survive, as they did.

I have sometimes looked at old photographs of the smiling faces of victims, and searched them desperately for some sign that they knew. Surely they must have known that within hours or days their life was to end in that car crash, in that aeroplane disaster, or in domestic tragedy. But I can find no sign whatever. Nothing. They look out serenely, a terrible warning to us all. 'No I didn't know. Just like you ... there were no signs.' 'I who died at thirty... I too had planned my forties.' 'I who died at twenty had dreamed, as you do, of the roses round the cottage someday. It could happen to you. Why not? Why me? Why you? Why not?

Yet each day that touches us, and every man in the world, is unique; irredeemable; over. And just another Monday.

A romantic refuses to see the changes in people he loves, or in cities which hold amorous memories for him.

I have sometimes looked at old photographs of the smiling faces of victims, and searched them desperately for some sign that they knew. Surely they must have known that within hours or days their life was to end in that car crash, in that aeroplane disaster, or in domestic tragedy. But I can find no sign whatever. Nothing. They look out serenely, a terrible warning to us all.

Our sanity depends essentially on a narrowness of vision – the ability to select the elements vital to survival, while ignoring the great truths.

And because birth is always violent, I never looked for, nor ever found, gentleness

C'è un paesaggio interiore, una geografia dell'anima;ne cerchiamo gli elementi per tutta la vita.

The effort of containment robs our words of colour and expression.

To observe the joy of others, while in pain oneself, is to witness what looks like insanity overtaking ordinary people.

Our sanity depends essentially on a narrowness of vision – the ability to select the elements vital to survival, while ignoring the great truths. So the individual lives his daily life, without due attention to the fact that he has no guarantee of tomorrow. He hides from himself the knowledge that his life is a unique experience, which

will end in the grave; that at every second, lives as unique as his start and end. This blindness allows a pattern of living to hand itself on, and few who challenge this pattern survive. With good reason. All the laws of life and society would seem irrelevant, if each man concentrated daily on the reality of his own death.

to invite loathing or fear. To be in the game, but not playing with intent to win, is to be the enemy.

Whatever people say nowadays, marriage requires a woman to at least act out a certain kind of dependence. Money is sometimes the currency of that dependence. In a subtle woman, her economic independence is shaded, possibly hidden altogether.

Even as I went my own way, I felt I served some purpose of his. So it is with powerful personalities. As we swim and dive away from them, we still feel the water is theirs.

When we mourn those who die young – those who have been robbed of time – we weep for lost joys. We weep for opportunities and pleasures we ourselves have never known. We feel sure that somehow that young body would have known the yearning delight for which we searched in vain all our lives. We believe that the untried soul, trapped inside its young prison, might have flown free and known the joy that we still seek. We say that life is sweet, its satisfactions deep. All this we say, as we sleepwalk our time through years of days and nights. We let time cascade over us like a waterfall, believing it to be never-ending. Yet each day that touches us, and every man in the world, is unique; irredeemable; over. And just another Monday.

Ah, but those lost Mondays of our young dead friend! How much better they would have been! Years pass. Decades pass. And living has not been done.