Ellen Bass > Quotes

“to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you've held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.”
― Ellen Bass

“So often survivors have had their experiences denied, trivialized, or distorted. Writing is an important avenue for healing because it gives you the opportunity to define your own reality. You can say: This did happen to me. It was that bad. It was the fault & responsibility of the adult. I was—and am—innocent.” The Courage to Heal by Ellen Bass & Laura Davis”
― Ellen Bass, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse

“Everyone has the right to tell the truth about her own life.”
― Ellen Bass, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse

“There is comfort in knowing that you don’t have to pretend anymore, that you are going to do everything within your power to heal.”
― Ellen Bass, Beginning to Heal: A First Book for Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse

“Thinking for yourself and making your own decisions can be frightening. Letting go of other people’s expectations can leave you feeling empty for a time. And yet seeing yourself as an independent adult who can stand up for your own choices frees you to accept yourself as you are.”
― Ellen Bass, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse

“If you’ve managed to do one good thing,
the ocean doesn’t care.
But when Newton’s apple
fell toward the earth,
the earth, ever so slightly, fell
toward the apple as well.”
― Ellen Bass

“I know you're in a world of pain, but that pain will lessen. At the beginning you can't see that. You can only see your pain and you think it will never go away.
But the nature of pain is that it changes— it changes like a sunset. At first, it's this intense red-orange in the sky, and then it starts getting softer and soften. The texture of pain changes as you work through it. And then one day, you wake up and realize that life isn't just about working through your incest; it's about living, too.
- survivor of child sexual abuse”
― Ellen Bass, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse

“If You Knew

What if you knew you'd be the last
to touch someone?
If you were taking tickets, for example,
at the theater, tearing them,
giving back the ragged stubs,
you might take care to touch that palm
brush your fingertips
along the lifeline's crease.

When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase
too slowly through the airport, when
the car in front of me doesn't signal,
when the clerk at the pharmacy
won't say thank you, I don't remember
they're going to die.

A friend told me she'd been with her aunt.
They'd just had lunch and the waiter,
a young gay man with plum black eyes,
joked as he served the coffee, kissed
her aunt's powdered cheek when they left.
Then they walked half a block and her aunt
dropped dead on the sidewalk.

How close does the dragon's spume
have to come? How wide does the crack
in heaven have to split?
What would people look like
if we could see them as they are,
soaked in honey, stung and swollen,
reckless, pinned against time?”
― Ellen Bass, The Human Line

“People don’t need to be forced to grow. All we need is favorable circumstances: respect, love, honesty, and the space to explore.”
― Ellen Bass, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse

“Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.”
― Ellen Bass

“When You Return

Fallen leaves will climb back into trees.
Shards of the shattered vase will rise
and reassemble on the table.
Plastic raincoats will refold
into their flat envelopes. The egg,
bald yolk and its transparent halo,
slide back in the thin, calcium shell.
Curses will pour back into mouths,
letters un-write themselves, words
siphoned up into the pen. My gray hair
will darken and become the feathers
of a black swan. Bullets will snap
back into their chambers, the powder
tamped tight in brass casings. Borders
will disappear from maps. Rust
revert to oxygen and time. The fire
return to the log, the log to the tree,
the white root curled up
in the un-split seed. Birdsong will fly
into the lark’s lungs, answers
become questions again.
When you return, sweaters will unravel
and wool grow on the sheep.
Rock will go home to mountain, gold
to vein. Wine crushed into the grape,
oil pressed into the olive. Silk reeled in
to the spider’s belly. Night moths
tucked close into cocoons, ink drained
from the indigo tattoo. Diamonds
will be returned to coal, coal
to rotting ferns, rain to clouds, light
to stars sucked back and back
into one timeless point, the way it was
before the world was born,
that fresh, that whole, nothing
broken, nothing torn apart.”
― Ellen Bass, Like a Beggar

“The truth about our childhood is stored up in our body, and although we can repress it, we can never alter it. Our intellect can be deceived, our feelings manipulated, our perceptions confused, and our body tricked with medication. But someday the body will present its bill, for it is as incorruptible as a child who, still whole in spirit, will accept no compromises or excuses, and it will not stop tormenting us until we stop evading the truth.”
― Ellen Bass, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse

“... it is possible to heal. It is even possible to thrive. Thriving means more than just an alleviation of symptoms, more than Band-Aids, more than functioning adequately. Thriving means enjoying a feeling of wholeness, satisfaction in your life and work, genuine love and trust in your relationships, pleasure in your body.”
― Ellen Bass, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse

“Until lions start writing down their own stories, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter.” —AFRICAN PROVERB”
― Ellen Bass, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse

“As you heal, you see yourself more realistically. You accept that you are a person with strengths and weaknesses. You make the changes you can in your life and let go of the things that aren’t in your power to change. You learn that every part of you is valuable. And you realize that all of your thoughts and feelings are important, even when they’re painful or difficult.”
― Ellen Bass, Beginning to Heal: A First Book for Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse

“Gate C22

At gate C22 in the Portland airport
a man in a broad-band leather hat kissed
a woman arriving from Orange County.
They kissed and kissed and kissed. Long after
the other passengers clicked the handles of their carry-ons
and wheeled briskly toward short-term parking,
the couple stood there, arms wrapped around each other
like he’d just staggered off the boat at Ellis Island,
like she’d been released at last from ICU, snapped
out of a coma, survived bone cancer, made it down
from Annapurna in only the clothes she was wearing.

Neither of them was young. His beard was gray.
She carried a few extra pounds you could imagine
her saying she had to lose. But they kissed lavish
kisses like the ocean in the early morning,
the way it gathers and swells, sucking
each rock under, swallowing it
again and again. We were all watching–
passengers waiting for the delayed flight
to San Jose, the stewardesses, the pilots,
the aproned woman icing Cinnabons, the man selling
sunglasses. We couldn’t look away. We could
taste the kisses crushed in our mouths.

But the best part was his face. When he drew back
and looked at her, his smile soft with wonder, almost
as though he were a mother still open from giving birth,
as your mother must have looked at you, no matter
what happened after–if she beat you or left you or
you’re lonely now–you once lay there, the vernix
not yet wiped off, and someone gazed at you
as if you were the first sunrise seen from the Earth.
The whole wing of the airport hushed,
all of us trying to slip into that woman’s middle-aged body,
her plaid Bermuda shorts, sleeveless blouse, glasses,
little gold hoop earrings, tilting our heads up. ”
― Ellen Bass, The Human Line

“For girls who've been pressured into sex they didn't want, growing into a woman's body can be terrifying. Anorexia and bulimia can be an attempt to say no, to assert control over their changing bodies. Compulsive overeating is another way.”
― Ellen Bass, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse

“You have the right to set ground rules. This means deciding if, when, and how you want to see the people in your family. Many survivors feel that if they open up the channels at all, they have to open them up all the way. When you were a child you had two options—to trust or not to trust. Your options are broader now.”
― Ellen Bass, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse

“It's a hard time to be human. We know too much
and too little.”
― Ellen Bass, Like a Beggar

“If the people who said they loved you abused or neglected you, it can feel terrifying to love again…Commitment or love with a family feeling can be scarier still. The child in you still equates commitment with being locked into a situation where there’s no escape. So as you get closer, you may become paralyzed by all your old defenses & memories.”
― Ellen Bass, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse

“Healing isn’t just about pain. It’s about learning to love yourself. As you move from feeling like a victim to being a proud survivor, you will have glimmers of hope, pride and satisfaction. Those are natural by-products of healing.”
― Ellen Bass, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse

“Healing was a terrifying and painful experience and my life was as full of struggle and heartache as it had always been. Several years after I started therapy, I began to feel happy. I was stunned. I hadn't realized that the point of all this work on myself was to feel good. I thought it was just one more struggle in a long line of struggles. It took a while before I got used to the idea that my life had changed, that I felt happy, that I was actually content. Learning to tolerate feeling good is one of the nicest parts of healing.”
― Ellen Bass, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse

“To heal from child sexual abuse you must believe that you were a victim, that the abuse really did take place. This is often difficult for survivors. When you’ve spent your life denying the reality of your abuse, when you don’t want it to be true, or when your family repeatedly calls you crazy or a liar, it can be hard to remain firm in the knowledge that you were abused.”
― Ellen Bass, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse

“This choreography of ruin, the world breaking
like glass under a microscope,
the way it doesn’t crack all at once,
but spreads out from the damaged cavities.
Still for a moment it all recedes.
The backyard potatoes swell quietly
buried beneath their canopy of leaves.
The wind rubs its hands through the trees.”
― Ellen Bass, Like a Beggar

“They Lied"

They lied, my friend. They injected
their despair beneath your skin
like a parasitic insect laying eggs
in the body of another species.

Nothing they said is true,
everything about you is honorable. Every pore
that opens and closes—a multitude
along the expanse of your body, the
follicles from which hair sprouts
emerging again and again like spiders’ floss
spun from a limitless source.

You wait, huddled. Or carry yourself from
place to place like a burden. As if
you would stash yourself, if you could,
in a bus station locker, or somewhere smaller.
You don’t really hope, but
you can’t give it up completely.

Some stubborn nugget
is lodged like a bullet in bone.
Though each breath stings with the cold
suck of it, you can know the truth.
Every cell of your body vibrates with its own intelligence.
Every atom is pure.”
― Ellen Bass

“Deciding to actively heal is terrifying because it means opening up to hope. For many survivors, hope has brought only disappointment.
Although it is terrifying to say yes to yourself, it is also a tremendous relief when you finally stop and face your own demons.
There is something about looking terror in the face, and seeing your own reflection, that is strangely relieving. There is comfort in knowing that you don't have to pretend anymore, that you are going to do everything
within your power to heal. As one survivor
put it, "I know now that every time I accept
my past and respect where I am in the present, I am giving myself a future."
- The Courage to Heal”
― Ellen Bass, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse

“In spite of the horror, in spite of the
tragedy, in spite of the weeks of sleepless
nights, I'm finally alive. I'm not pretending.
I feel real. I'm not playing charades anymore. I wouldn't go back to the way I was for anything. I'm really like a different person. I'm where I am, and I'm making the most of it. I know I'm courageous now. I found out I had it in me to face this. — Barbara”
― Ellen Bass, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse

“Receiving feels wonderful once you get used to it. But first you must acknowledge how scary it is to be open. If, as a child you were left to fend for yourself or there were strings attached to getting what you needed, you learned that nurturing was either unavailable or unsafe. But now, receiving doesn’t have to mean owing something back. Start asking for at least one thing you want every day.”
― Ellen Bass, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse

“Survivors are often good at both resolving and generating crisis. While this capacity to handle crisis can make you a good emergency room worker or ambulance driver, it can also be a way for you to keep yourself from feeling. If you are addicted to intensity and drama...you may be running from yourself.”
― Ellen Bass, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse

“You can look at my life and say there’ve been some real tragedies, and there have been. But there’ve also been some exquisitely beautiful times. To me, those far outweigh the others.”
― Ellen Bass, Beginning to Heal (Revised Edition): A First Book for Men and Women Who Were Sexually Abused As Children