Lily Collins Quotes

I think children in general have a very hard time - at least I did - expressing any pain because I didn't want to hurt the people that I loved.

Somewhere, sometime I'd stopped expecting my father to father.

My father never kissed me, hugged me or told me that he loved me. As my only living parent, he became the filter through which I saw myself, the possibilities for my life, the world and all men. He was a conflicted and dark filter.

I was told not to cry as a kid.

You know, when you have a father who's pretty well known but you don't see him, the last thing you want to do is start talking about him all the time to people.

I had a very distant relationship with my father. It was always just me and my mother. It was a shattering blow when she died. I was 16.

Being a child that grew up with a single mom back in the '70s, Father's Day to me was always a very uncomfortable time. At school, we would make Father's Day cards for our dads, and I usually mailed one to my dad, and he hardly ever responded.

I grew up not seeing my father, and it is a hole in my heart that will never heal.

My dad used to ignore me when I was a kid. He couldn't stand my voice, so he just used to ignore me, and then he'd impersonate me.

My father was gone when I was three years old.

I grew up in a family that despised displays of strong emotion, rage in particular. We stewed. We sulked. When arguments did occur, they were full-scale conniptions, and we regarded them as family failings.

But I still always felt the absence of a mother.

My father was never around. It was almost as if he didn't exist. I would tell my friends he was in Cleveland, on business. Sometimes, every six months or so, he would come by for dinner.

I remember when I was a little boy my father didn't love me; he couldn't. He loved my older brother but he couldn't love me somehow, at least not in a way I could understand it.

I wasn't happy at all as a child. I was very privileged and knew extraordinary people, but I felt very lonely: my mother thought I was extremely difficult and my grandmother was extremely severe.

I think that's like the age-old psychological core issue for any situation. Anybody who has had an experience with a parent that is absent, it's going to manifest.

I remember being two, maybe, and hearing my mum's typewriter in the other room and sticking my hands under the door and screaming, 'Mum! Mum!' I was so angry she wouldn't come out. I got used to it quickly.

Parents become very good at not hearing the explicit words and listening instead to what the child means but doesn't yet know how to say: 'I'm lonely, in pain, frightened' - distress which then unfairly comes out as an attack on the safest, kindest, most reliable thing in the child's world: the parent.

My dad died 11 years ago, I don't see much of my brothers, and I rarely speak to my mum. I don't hold a grudge, but being separated in those early years clearly had an impact. Our relationship didn't develop as it ought to.

I didn't grow up with my father in my life, and that bred a resentment in me, and it bred a mentality in me that made me very angry.

Cyborg was the first superhero that I've ever seen whose parent was around but just was not there for him emotionally, mentally. I related to that in a big way because, growing up, it was my mother and grandmother that raised me and my brother and sisters. I'm the second youngest of five; my father was never in the picture.

As a kid, watching your dad leave, that's pretty powerful.

I have no worthwhile memories of my father, therefore no idea of what a father's role should be.

Kids chase the love that eludes them, and for me, that was my father's love. He kept it tucked away, like papers in a briefcase. And I kept trying to get in there.

Everything he'd done with regard to her in the last three years had been calculated to foreclose the intensely personal sort of talks they'd had when he was younger: to get her to shut up, to train her to contain herself, to make her stop pestering him with her overfull heart and her uncensored self. And now that the training was complete and she was obediently trivial with him, he felt bereft of her and wanted to undo it.