Quote

The shock of any trauma, I think changes your life. It's more acute in the beginning and after a little time you settle back to what you were. However it leaves an indelible mark on your psyche.

There is so much inherent drama in the matter of change. Disappointment in yourself and others, coping with the fact that life is essentially shipwreck, becoming a person you yourself could not imagine yourself to be, for good and for bad, and then ultimately there is the basic matter of loss.

I did have imprinted on me the idea of trauma that changes things dramatically and suddenly. As a writer, I return to that again and again because it fascinates me, and it's where I come from, in a sense.

Every situation has changed me as a person.

We all get damned in our lives, and there are ripple effects. One thing can determine a life, and it's hard to overcome that if the event is really traumatic. Your life is completely condemned by it.

The older that we get and the different stages we go through in life, it seems like we become different people. But I think that the truth is you are always the same person. You just discover these new things about yourself.

You can't start changing things in your past. Everyone has challenges and lessons to learn - we wouldn't be who we are without them. I certainly wouldn't be who I am.

The only thing about my life that's really changed is the fact that a lot of people know me now. I'm still the same person.

To transcend limitations and form positive new patterns of life based on who you know you can be rather than who you were yesterday, you must give up the modes of thinking, feeling and behaving that only keep you chained to your past.

A lot of times when you go through a very traumatic situation and it's emotionally difficult to deal with you come back spiritually stronger. It changes you in a way.