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I am not a victim. I am an angry survivor.

Everybody is not a victim.

It's very attractive to people to be a victim. Instead of having to think out the whole situation, about history and your group and what you are doing... if you begin from the point of view of being a victim, you've got it half-made. I mean intellectually.

Mostly I'm telling people that they don't have to be victims.

It works both ways: there are victims of tragedy who come to me who have experienced grief of such magnitude that they cannot reconcile. Likewise, I cannot change the mentality of those who committed the crimes or the fools who followed them.

Definition of a victim: a person to whom life happens.

Sure, I've been a victim, but in retrospect, most of it has been of my own making. I allowed it to happen.

What's good about talking about being victimized is that it is the beginning of being able to stop it.

In my experience victims are more concerned with helping their families understand that they are still connected to them. In some rare experiences information comes through that helps understand what happened.

The idea of victimage is a dreadful thing, a product of a safe middle-class perspective. What people who are not safe develop is a tragic wisdom, a wisdom that embraces contradiction and seeks a sense of balance rather than going to extremes.