Lone Survivor Book Quotes

Once I accepted the fact that I was bad luck, I shied away from group activities. And groups. And activities. I started spending a lot of time in my room, tucked under my covers reading books. There’s only so much damage a book can do, and I wasn’t worried about hurting myself. Accidentally hurting yourself is way better than hurting other people. Sure, I got lonely for a while. But getting invited to slumber parties just wasn’t worth the stress of wondering if I might accidentally burn down the house with my flat iron or be the only survivor of a freak sleepover massacre. And loneliness is just like everything else—if you endure it long enough, you get used to it.

Having DID is, for many people, a very lonely thing. If this book reaches some people whose experiences resonate with mine and gives them a sense that they aren't alone, that there is hope, then I will have achieved one of my goals. A sad fact is that people with DID spend an average of almost seven years in the mental health system before being properly diagnosed and receiving the specific help they need. During that repeatedly misdiagnosed and incorrectly treated, simply because clinicians fail to recognize the symptoms. If this book provides practicing and future clinicians certain insight into DID, then I will have accomplished another goal. Clinicians, and all others whose lives are touched by DID, need to grasp the fundamentally illusive nature of memory, because memory, or the lack of it, is an integral component of this condition. Our minds are stock pots which are continuously fed ingredients from many cooks: parents, siblings, relatives, neighbors, teachers, schoolmates, strangers, acquaintances, radio, television, movies, and books. These are the fixings of learning and memory, which are stirred with a spoon that changes form over time as it is shaped by our experiences. In this incredibly amorphous neurological stew, it is impossible for all memories to be exact. But even as we accept the complex of impressionistic nature of memory, it is equally essential to recognize that people who experience persistent and intrusive memories that disrupt their sense of well-being and ability to function, have some real basis distress, regardless of the degree of clarity or feasibility of their recollections. We must understand that those who experience abuse as children, and particularly those who experience incest, almost invariably suffer from a profound sense of guilt and shame that is not meliorated merely by unearthing memories or focusing on the content of traumatic material. It is not enough to just remember. Nor is achieving a sense of wholeness and peace necessarily accomplished by either placing blame on others or by forgiving those we perceive as having wronged us. It is achieved through understanding, acceptance, and reinvention of the self.

No doubt, you’ve heard this story before. Marcus wrote a bestselling book about it, Lone Survivor, which became a hit movie starring Mark Wahlberg.

There’s a Twilight Zone episode, “Time Enough at Last,” about a book-lover desperate for more time so he can do nothing but read. He gets his wish; he’s the lone survivor of a global nuclear holocaust and ends up at a library with a lifetime’s worth of intact books. He’s excitedly sorting through them when his glasses fall off and shatter, leaving him unable to read.

Marcus’s book, Lone Survivor

His favorite book was Steven Pressfield’s Gates of Fire,

When the Satmar Rebbe announced his plans for a kehillah, a community, in Williamsburg, Zeidy pledged his allegiance before he even knew what it entailed, and in doing so he tied his whole family, and all of its future generations, to this community. Back in Europe, Zeidy’s family didn’t live like this. They weren’t extremists; they were educated people who had homes with wooden floors and Persian carpets, and they traveled freely throughout the Continent. It was the rebbe who decided I couldn’t read English books or wear the color red. He isolated us, made it so we could never blend in on the outside. If I wasn’t there when the agreement was made, why am I still obligated to follow all these rules? Can Zeidy really expect me to walk in the rebbe’s shadow as blindly as he did, when he was scared and lonely, as all the survivors were, and there was nowhere else to turn that felt safe?

we had almost nothing in common with the four-man team of American spec-ops assassins whose ordeal in the summer of 2005, just a few miles south of Keating, would later be chronicled in the book and the movie called Lone Survivor.