Aleksandra Gold

“Well, I admit it. I had the greatest respect for the Afghan people, even while I was shooting and killing them. I still do. You could even say I love them. I like their songs and prayers, as peaceful and timeless as their mountains.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War

“The way to sacrifice our victimhood in the aftermath of trauma is to respond to the shattering effect of the trauma with imagination and symbolism and to reassemble the fragments into a new whole.”
― Ursula Wirtz, Trauma and Beyond: The Mystery of Transformation

“The true opposite of depression is neither gaiety nor absence of pain, but vitality—the freedom to experience spontaneous feelings. It is part of the kaleidoscope of life that these feelings are not only happy, beautiful, or good but can reflect the entire range of human experience, including envy, jealousy, rage, disgust, greed, despair, and grief. But this freedom cannot be achieved if its childhood roots are cut off. Our access to the true self is possible only when we no longer have to be afraid of the intense emotional world of early childhood. Once we have experienced and become familiar with this world, it is no longer strange and threatening.”
― Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self

“If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden.”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden