Steve Ellerhoff > Steve's Quotes

“I consider love to be the matrix for this transformation, which calls new being into existence. Love has the power to reawaken and bring to the fire what has been entombed or distorted by traumatic forces or has retreated out of defensiveness and self-protection. Without love and compassion for the fragility of human identity in the face of death and the reality of evil, the madness found in these barren spaces of the soul might not be meaningfully encountered. For the stripping away of the constricting cocoon of traumatic fixations and the untangling of what has become distorted and convoluted during painful traumatization, love is needed.”
― Ursula Wirtz, Trauma and Beyond: The Mystery of Transformation

“Who knows how things happen when one is on a quest or writing a book? It is as if one searches and searches and then, if one can move past the ego's demands and is lucky, sometimes a space opens where books seem to fall open in one's lap and things and people appear, as if magically, to help. Some call it synchronicity or being in the flow; I find it to be a blessed, though often short-lived, state of grace for which I am deeply grateful.”
― Claire Douglas, The Old Woman’s Daughter: Transformative Wisdom for Men and Women (Volume 11)

“I should advise you to put it all down as beautifully & as carefully as you can—in some beautifully bound book. It will seem as if you were making the visions banal—but then you need to do that—then you are freed from the power of them. . . . Then when these things are in some precious book you can go to the book & turn over the pages & for you it will be your church—your cathedral—the silent places of your spirit where you will find renewal. If anyone tells you that it is morbid or neurotic and you listen to them—then you will lose your soul—for in that book is your soul.”
― C.G. Jung, Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given 1930-1934

“Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“Life never misses an opportunity to upscuttle us, I think. Life likes to tell us it told us so.”
― Sara Baume, Spill Simmer Falter Wither

“Don't be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.”
― George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone

“It is so often surprising, who rescues you at your lowest moments.”
― Aimee Bender, The Color Master: Stories

“I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“Novelists have, on the average, about the same IQs as the cosmetic consultants at Bloomingdale’s department store. Our power is patience. We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it takes is time.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

“Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.”
― Joseph Campbell

“Literature is the supreme means by which you renew your sensuous and emotional life and learn a new awareness.”
― F.R. Leavis

“Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-"God damn it, you've got to be kind.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“Every arrangement in life carried with it the sadness, the sentimental shadow, of its not being something else, but only itself. ”
― Lorrie Moore, Birds of America: Stories

“This hobble of being alive is rather serious, don’t you think so?”
― Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles

“Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.”
― Mark Vonnegut

“The tectonic layers of our lives rest so tightly one on top of the other that we always come up against earlier events in later ones, not as matter that has been fully formed and pushed aside, but absolutely present and alive. I understand this. Nonetheless, I sometimes find it hard to bear.”
― Bernhard Schlink, The Reader

“It is an exceptional thing to find beauty, youth, compatibility, intelligence, your own point of view—softened and charmingly emotionalized—in another.”
― Theodore Dreiser, Jennie Gerhardt

“It's easy to be a naive idealist. It's easy to be a cynical realist. It's quite another thing to have no illusions and still hold the inner flame.”
― Marie-Louise von Franz

“Early relational trauma results from the fact that we are often given more to experience in this life than we can bear to experience consciously. This problem has been around since the beginning of time, but it is especially acute in early childhood where, because of the immaturity of the psyche and/or brain, we are ill-equipped to metabolize our experience. An infant or young child who is abused, violated or seriously neglected by a caretaking adult is overwhelmed by intolerable affects that are impossible for it to metabolize, much less understand or even think about.”
― Donald Kalsched, Trauma and the Soul: A Psycho-Spiritual Approach to Human Development and Its Interruption

“I'm an eye. A mechanical eye. I, the machine, show you a world the way only I can see it. I free myself for today and forever from human immobility. I'm in constant movement. I approach and pull away from objects. I creep under them. I move alongside a running horse's mouth. I fall and rise with the falling and rising bodies. This is I, the machine, manoeuvring in the chaotic movements, recording one movement after another in the most complex combinations.

Freed from the boundaries of time and space, I co-ordinate any and all points of the universe, wherever I want them to be. My way leads towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world. Thus I explain in a new way the world unknown to you.”
― Dziga Vertov

“[T]he chief goal of Jungian psychology: how to be responsibly alive to all aspects of one's self without restriction.”
― Claire Douglas, Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given 1930-1934

“Trauma healers make it their mission to reform structural relationships by removing abuse and violence and to work actively for a more humane society.”
― Ursula Wirtz, Trauma and Beyond: The Mystery of Transformation

“Anything that splits or destroys meaning can be accounted as evil.”
― Ursula Wirtz, Trauma and Beyond: The Mystery of Transformation

“The encounter with evil may elicit one of four typical responses: fight, flight, freezing, or fragmentation. ... It is the context and dimensions of evil that determine the human response to it. ... [Marie-Louise] von Franz points out that not all evil contains creative, transformative potential. She warns of being contaminated by evil. Archetypal evil has the power to make us fall into a complex-ridden state of possession, in which the ego's strength is overcome. She warns that many dark powers must be kept at a distance, and sometimes the only appropriate response is flight.”
― Ursula Wirtz

“A process of remembering, imagining, ordering, and revaluing ... leads to the creation of meaning and a consciousness of solidarity and new relationships in the social network.”
― Ursula Wirtz, Trauma and Beyond: The Mystery of Transformation

“Trauma research has shown that what is primarily responsible for the consequences of trauma ... is ... the meaning that the victim ascribes to it in the context of his or her entire life.”
― Ursula Wirtz, Trauma and Beyond: The Mystery of Transformation

“What is important is not to remain stuck in the past but to pay attention to the power of human creativity and with this in mind to work with others to make the world a better place.”
― Ursula Wirtz, Trauma and Beyond: The Mystery of Transformation