Colm Toibin Quotes

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.

My father died when I was five, but I grew up in a strong family.

I lost my dad when I was younger, and I know what it's like to lose a beloved parent.

Losing my mom at such a young age had a profound effect on my life.

When my mother died, and when my father died, it's big. Our parents are giants; they're titans of our lives, so of course it's going to be a big deal.

With 'Smoke Signals,' the character was so much like me growing up. I lost my parents, and I wish I'd had an opportunity to find out where they were. So I was reflecting on how I grew up, that feeling of abandonment. That whole film was a reality that I always held back and kept to myself.

My entire youth was spent with an incredibly ill parent... I don't think you can grow up that way and not be marked by that experience.

My childhood was kind of complicated. I have an older sister, but my father, my mother's husband, died when I was four years old. So I only had my mum and sister, really.

English Prime Ministers and American Presidents, it’s amazing how many of them have lost a parent in their childhood.

My mother left behind three daughters when she went to America and started a new life. I certainly felt abandoned when my father died of a brain tumour; I felt he had abandoned me to this terrible, volatile mother and I had no protection.

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.

When you grow up around sadness, it affects the way you see the world.

My father passed away when I was pretty young. I was 7 years old, and I think when that happens, there are a variety of ways that a young person can react to that loss. I think, for me, it kind of put me in a perpetual state of feeling like something is wrong with me and like I didn't belong, or everybody else had things that I didn't have.

Losing a parent is always a terrible thing for anybody. It's no more or no less for me.

I lost my mom when I was young.

I was so young when my dad died that I didn't think it had affected me. I had such tiny memories of him, just little glimpses, I thought I had been unaffected. But then I realised, somewhere in my late 40s I think, that probably the defining thing in my whole life was losing my dad.

My pops passed when I was little. I didn't have a dad around to tell me certain things. I didn't have my biological mother.

All the times I have suddenly realized that my parents are dead, even now, it still surprises me, to exist in the world while that which made me has ceased to exist

My mom died when I was 22. My stepfather, who I loved like a father, pretty quickly got involved with another woman. Suddenly there was another woman sleeping in my mother's bed, and it was very difficult. Their relationship brought up my profound loss, and the truth was that my family would never be the same again.

When anybody, no matter how old they are, loses a parent, I think it hurts the same as if you were only five years old, you know? I think all of us are always five years old in the presence and absence of our parents.

When I look in the mirror, I don't see my Dad, I see my grandmother. For a while it was my mother looking back at me. If only it was my Dad.

I always wonder, aside from even my name, what if my parents never split up? What if my mother never died? It swirls in my head all the time.

These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections-sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent-that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.

One reason you are stricken when your parents die is that the audience you've been aiming at all your life - shocking it, pleasing it - has suddenly left the theater.

Just as the Depression left a generation of dads feeling they never had enough money, so father deprivation is leaving a generation of sons and daughters with different psychic wounds.