The Evil Hours Quotes

“Trauma destroys the fabric of time. In normal time you move from one moment to the next, sunrise to sunset, birth to death. After trauma, you may move in circles, find yourself being sucked backwards into an eddy or bouncing like a rubber ball from now to then to back again. ... In the traumatic universe the basic laws of matter are suspended: ceiling fans can be helicopters, car exhaust can be mustard gas.”
― David J. Morris, The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

“The lesson taught by the war was clear: to be human is to be small, powerless, and subject to the forces of randomness.”
― David J. Morris, The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

“Later, I interviewed a prominent psychoanalyst, who told me that trauma destroys the fabric of time. In normal time, you move from one moment to the next, sunrise to sunset, birth to death. After trauma, you may move in circles, find yourself being sucked backwards into an eddy, or bouncing about like a rubber ball from now to then and back again. August is June, June is December. What time is it? Guess again. In the traumatic universe, the basic laws of matter are suspended: ceiling fans can be helicopters, car exhaust can be mustard gas. Another odd feature of traumatic time is that it doesn’t just destroy the flow of the present into the future, it corrodes everything that came before, eating at moments and people from your previous life, until you can’t remember why any of them mattered. What I previously found inconceivable is now inescapable: I have been blown up so many times in my mind that it is impossible to imagine a version of myself that has not been blown up. The man on the other side of the soldier’s question is not me. In fact, he never existed. The war is gone now, but the event remains, the happening that nearly erased the life to come and thus erased the life that came before. The soldier’s question hangs in the air the way it always has. The way it always will.   Have you ever been blown up before, sir?”
― David J. Morris, The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

“There comes a point in every man’s life when he sees that the magician’s hat is empty, that the government and the church are run by fools, and that virtue is far rarer than he’d been led to believe.”
― David J. Morris, The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

“My own view of the relationship between drugs and PTSD is reminiscent of what Frank Sinatra said when a reporter asked him about his philosophy of life—“Basically, I’m for anything that gets you through the night—be it prayer, tranquilizers, or a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.”
― David J. Morris, The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

“Later, I interviewed a prominent psychoanalyst, who told me that trauma destroys the fabric of time. In normal time, you move from one moment to the next, sunrise to sunset, birth to death. After trauma, you may move in circles, find yourself being sucked backwards into an eddy, or bouncing about like a rubber ball from now to then and back again.”
― David J. Morris, The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

“was the only incoming they’d taken in days. How do you go about telling a guy who is alive only because he didn’t use the shitter at the wrong time that he ought to go back home, go to school, get married and mortgaged, have kids, and commit to the world when he knows for a fact that nothing in this world is real except chance?”
― David J. Morris, The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

“The act of writing, especially of putting pen to paper, has always had a sacred quality. The process by which one creates a paragraph-of conceptualizing, framing, and sequencing a moment in time-is the same process that governs some of the most sophisticated psychotherapies.”
― David J. Morris, The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder