Susan Shreve Quotes

You know, as an only child, you're kind of in a bubble, and there are all sorts of things about my childhood that I still can't really place.

Because I was an only child, I lived in a very grown-up world.

Growing up an only child with a single parent is probably why I'm an actor.

I grew up as an only child. My parents weren't great conversationalists. We had a quiet house. I'm not very verbal.

Without siblings you get quite a skewed vision of yourself and of the world. I always felt I didn't understand how it worked. I remember feeling quite lonely.

I was an only child and grew up in York where my parents ran a surgical supplies shop. When I say I wish I had brothers and sisters, friends say it's not what it's cracked up to be, but I think it must be good to have someone who knew you from the beginning.

I didn't grow up with a lot of babies in my life because I only grew up with my parents - I didn't have any brothers or sisters - and I didn't have my family close by.

I grew up in a small house with just my mam and felt quite lonely at times.

I certainly feel sad about the alienation from my son.

I was an only child, and I spent a lot of time alone. My dad was an only child, too, so we didn't have a big family, and I was really close with both of my parents. Like any kid, I thought I knew more than they did.

My head was - I wasn't screwed up, but I feel like I was shifted away from my family a lot with this basketball stuff. You have people coming around you saying they are family or whatever. They try to keep you away from your real family. That kind of got me.

I think I was always this weird, watchful kind of kid, and there was an awful lot of coming and going in my house as a result of my father being a doctor and then, later, a politician... We'd literally be having to get through the window some days because we couldn't get in the door.

I was lonely as a kid. Since I had no siblings, I spent a lot of time by myself and a lot of time reading.

I wasn't lonely as a child. I was the eldest of four and always had lots of people around me.

One summer I was made housekeeper to my own family, making menus and shopping lists. It was my mother's idea of teaching me to be a grown-up. The main thing I remember is my father being so delighted to get roast duck.

I used to travel a lot as a kid and when I first moved to England I felt lonely and my parents were splitting up at the time.

I've never been comfortable with sharing anything: I was a single child.

As a kid, you're so at the mercy of the people around you, the people raising you, your environment.

When I was nine years old, my father went to Spain to work for three years, and I was in Portugal. He has a sports store. I only saw him once a month, which was difficult. I was alone with my mother and my sister, who is younger than me.

As a child my life felt like an adventure, because my dad is such a fun guy. I had a brother and sister who were in and out of hospital a lot – one had a congenital heart problem and the other had a cleft palate. But my parents never stopped smiling.

I've never been super close to family. I've never relied on anyone.

I'm really the only artist in my family. I have one cousin who is a painter. I think I developed all of that from television and books - from being, essentially, an only child. I'm my mom's only child and my dad's fourth child, but separated by 14 years.

My father was extremely loving to me and funny and wise and understanding, and at other times extremely demanding, critical, calculating, exacting. When you're a young woman, I think you want to please a lot, so maybe you accept more of the criticism than you would as an older person. But criticism can be very wounding. It certainly was to me.

My mother taught me how to read very early on and at school I was ahead of everyone in class... Reading was always something that I liked because I could do it alone and I was alone a lot of the time with my mother working the hours she did. Books became my friends very early on.

My Lolita remarked: "You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own"; and it struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply did not know a thing about my darling's mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile cliches, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate - dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable convulsions.