Madi > Recent Status Updates

Without flexible, active frontal lobes people become creatures of habit, and their relationships become superficial and routine. Invention and innovation, discovery and wonder - all are lacking.

Treatment needs to reactivate the capacity to safely mirror, and be mirrored, by others, but also to resist being hijacked by others’ negative emotions.

Being able to move and do something to protect oneself is a critical factor in determining whether or not a horrible experience will leave long-lasting scars.

Trauma by nature drives us to the edge of comprehension, cutting us off from language based on common experience or an imaginable past. This doesn’t mean that people can’t talk about a tragedy that has befallen them. Sooner or later most survivors […] come up with what many of them call their “cover story” that offers some explanation for their symptoms and behaviour for public consumption.

[on forcing a patient down to administer a feeding tube] ‘ I realized then our display of “caring” must have felt to her much like a gang rape. This experience, and others like it, helped me formulate this rule for my students: if you do something to a patient that you would not do to your friends or children, consider whether you are unwittingly replicating a trauma from the patient’s past. ‘

Yes, boys can break your heart and betray you, but not in the same stinging way girls can.

“The weather may not have human emotions, but it does cause them.”

“Our gazes entwined. I felt calmer. I was thinking about the people I used to be, and how they fought and scrapped and survived for moments like this one.”

“And so I try to turn toward that scattered light, belly out, and I tell myself: This doesn’t look like a picture. And it doesn’t look like a god. It is a sunset, and it is beautiful, and this whole thing you’ve been doing where nothing gets five stars because nothing is perfect? That’s bullshit. So much is perfect. Starting with this. I give sunsets five stars.”

"For days now, my brain has refused to allow me to finish a thought, constantly interrupting with worries. Even my worries get interrupted - by new worries, or facets of old worries I had not adequately considered. My thoughts are a river overflowing its banks, churning and muddy and ceaseless."

"You don't have to make yourself OK for a good mother; a good mother makes herself OK for you."

"She always made sure the bad was outweighed by so much good. I...well, I didn't do that for her. I made it fifty-fifty. Which is about the cruelest thing you can do to someone you love, give them just enough good to make them stick through a hell of a lot of bad."

[cont..] When he met the kid he said "I'm a time traveler." The kid was confused. Gilbert said "You like science fiction?"
The kid said, "Yeah."
Gilbert said, "I do, too, and I'm a time traveler. I'm from the future. I went to bed one night when I was sixteen, then I woke up in prison as a fifty-year-old man."
That hit home.

"Knowing that the scared-straight method didn't work, Gilbert and the other lifers had access to the kids' files to find out not only what their crimes were but what their interests were. Gilbert saw one particular kid was a fan of science fiction like he was. [cont..]

"From infancy on we develop the masks we wear to get by, pretending we're not scared or hurt, that things are alright."

"Even in prison, I had fellow prisoners doing my laundry and cleaning my cell. My dad was the same, but the prisoner was my mother She did everything for him. And she needed him, too. To feel like she had purpose. An identity. They were so fucked up together, but they were even more fucked up apart, so they got back together. In a way, I took it as another betrayal."

From doing heroin at age 12 to being in prison with Charles Manson, Trejo’s life story is almost beyond belief. Only at the 50 page mark, this is going to be one hell of a ride.

“Your private place. It’s always there, waiting for you. In your mind. It’s where you went when you were a kid and things got bad. It saved your life when the mission went all wrong.”

“Get me Vito’s cigarettes! […] You know, I quit and I quit - but it seems I’m never more than one nasty night away from my next coffin nail. Self-control - it’s so easy to lose.”

“Power doesn’t come from a badge or a gun. Power comes outta lying and lying big and getting the whole damn world to play along with you.”

"Never give an inch. Never. Never let the monster out."

"Now that there...is a damn fine coat you're wearing."

"The thing about being smart is that you don't actually need to remind people that you're smart every five seconds. It makes people want to kill you."

“I ask you: is dullness a gift? Intelligence a curse?”

“The. They set out along the blacktop in the gun-metal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other’s world entire.”

"We each owe a death, there are no exceptions, I know that, but sometimes, oh God, the Green Mile is so long."

“In Scientology, there is a phrase that explains mob psychology: Contagion of Aberration, meaning that groups of people can stimulate each other to do things that are insane”

A prime example of irony. These people truly are sadistic cult followers. Scientology should be abolished.

“Scientology is evil, its techniques evil, its practice a serious threat to the community, medically, morally and socially; and its adherents sadly deluded and often mentally ill.”

From what I have read of this novel so far, this seems the most apt description of Scientology and its origins.

Most of us can't rush around, talking to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven't time, money or that many friends. The things you're looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine percent of them is in a book.

“Don’t,” Odile whispered. “It only takes a word. I can see the crows circling in your head.”