Welcome to My Country Quotes

“And I have the same heart in the same socket of chest, and it hammers the way it used to, and I find myself thinking the same words, safe again, trapped again. My palms sweat on the steering wheel. I remind myself: I am not that girl. I am not that girl. I've changed. I've grown. It's a long time ago.”
― Lauren Slater, Welcome to My Country: A Therapist's Memoir of Madness

“There is betrayal here, in what I do, but in betrayal I am finally camouflaged.”
― Lauren Slater, Welcome to My Country: A Therapist's Memoir of Madness

“To say I believe time is fluid, and so are the boundaries between human beings, the border separating helper from the one who hurts always blurry.”
― Lauren Slater, Welcome to My Country: A Therapist's Memoir of Madness

“I felt a clot in my throat, something that wouldn't let language come. ... And there is also a dream I have over and over again, of opening up my mouth and finding my tongue studded with broken glass, so every word is a wound.”
― Lauren Slater, Welcome to My Country: A Therapist's Memoir of Madness

“Wounds, I think, are never confined to a single skin but reach out to rasp us all.”
― Lauren Slater, Welcome to My Country: A Therapist's Memoir of Madness

“Bless those people, for they are a part of my faith’s firmness. Bless the stories my foster mother read to me, the stories of mine she later listened to, her thin blond hair hanging down a single sheet. The house, old and shingled, with niches and culverts I loved to crawl in, where the rain pinged on a leaky roof and out in the puddled yard a beautiful German shepherd, who licked my face and offered me his paw, barked and played in the water. Bless the night there, the hallway light they left on for me, burning a soft yellow wedge that I turned into a wing, a woman, an entire army of angels who, I learned to imagine, knew just how to sing me to sleep.”
― Lauren Slater, Welcome to My Country: A Therapist's Memoir of Madness

“I believe my strength has something to do with memory, with that concept of fluid time. For while I recall with clarity the terror of abuse, I also recall the green and lovely dream of childhood, the moist membrane of a leaf against my nose, the toads that peeled a golden pool in the palm of my hand. Pleasures, pleasures, the recollections of which have injected me with a firm and unshakable faith. I believe Dostoevski when he wrote, “If one had only one good memory left in one’s heart, even that may be the means of saving us.” I have gone by memory.”
― Lauren Slater, Welcome to My Country: A Therapist's Memoir of Madness

“I have not healed so much as learned to sit still and wait while pain does its dancing work, trying not to panic or twist in ways that make the blades tear deeper, finally infecting the wounds.”
― Lauren Slater, Welcome to My Country: A Therapist's Memoir of Madness

“Things are screaming inside me and my eyes feel hot.”
― Lauren Slater, Welcome to My Country: A Therapist's Memoir of Madness

“I found some way to recovery. But I know, have always known, that I could go back. Mysterious neurons collide and break. The brain bruises. Memories you thought were buried rise up.”
― Lauren Slater, Welcome to My Country: A Therapist's Memoir of Madness

“And I have the same heart in the same socket of chest, and it hammers the way it used to, and I find myself thinking the same words, Safe again, trapped again. My pals sweat on the steering wheel. I remind myself: I am not that girl. I’ve changed. I’ve grown. It’s a long time ago.”
― Lauren Slater, Welcome to My Country: A Therapist's Memoir of Madness

“One…two…three…getting closer, my heart hammering half with fear, half with relief. Safe again. Trapped again.”
― Lauren Slater, Welcome to My Country: A Therapist's Memoir of Madness

“When you die, there’s that much less breath to the world, and across continents someone supposedly separate gasps for air. When Marie, Joseph, peter, Moxi, Oscar, when I weep for you, don’t forget I weep as well for me.”
― Lauren Slater, Welcome to My Country: A Therapist's Memoir of Madness

“But the reflections came clear to me then, come still in quiet moments when past meets present so smoothly the seams disappear and time itself turns fluid. Sometimes I wish time stayed solid, in separable chunks as distinct as the sound of the ticking clock on my mantel. In truth, though, we break all boundaries, hurtling forward through hope and backward on the trail made by memory.”
― Lauren Slater, Welcome to My Country: A Therapist's Memoir of Madness

“I’m aware of the incredible elasticity of life, how the buckled can become straight, the broken mended. Watch what is on the ground; watch what you step on, for it could contain hidden powers and, in a rage, fly up all emerald and scarlet to sting your face.”
― Lauren Slater, Welcome to My Country: A Therapist's Memoir of Madness

“I, too.”
― Lauren Slater, Welcome to My Country: A Therapist's Memoir of Madness

“OH THAT I COULD GO TO THE SKY WHERE I MIGHT FIND A CLEAR KNOWING.”
― Lauren Slater, Welcome to My Country: A Therapist's Memoir of Madness