Lynn Johnston Quotes

I come from a broken home. My parents split up when I was nine. Everyone gave me a good wallop. But I come from a time when you just put up with that, you got on with things rather than sitting moaning about them.

My parents were brutal to each other, so I slept in the basement by an old coal-fired furnace. I became a street kid. Occasionally, I'd live with aunts or uncles, then I'd run away to live in the woods, trapping and hunting game to survive. The wilderness pulled at me; still does.

I was brought up in a very poor and very violent household. I spent much of my childhood being afraid.

Shortly after I turned 13, Child Welfare took me into care. I was sent to a residential centre where girls with behavioural problems were 'evaluated'. My time there comes back to me now only in flashes of smells, images and sounds.

After my father died when I was seven and my mother entered into an abusive relationship, I shuffled between houses - staying with friends, families from church, and relying on the kindness of teachers and people throughout my community to help me grow up essentially without parents.

I got a mother who's very strong after taking the whippings that she took from my father.

Growing up in a violent home is a terrifying and traumatic experience that can affect every aspect of a child's life, growth, and development.

My mind boggles at the amount of violence inflicted upon children in today's society.

I've overcome neglect and deprivation, abandonment and abuse.

I have spoken honestly about being born into a home where there was discord and chaos. I saw my mom have a rough time with my dad being very controlling, which is why I push back whenever I feel like someone is trying to box me in. It makes me run for the hills.

I hated my childhood. It was loathsome. My parents were deaf and dumb. Profoundly so. They could make noises when they were emotionally aroused, but they couldn't form it into speech.

I had a very difficult father. I lived in a war zone. My parents were very unhappy, and I lived through my mother's pain. Throughout my childhood, I was constantly trying to protect her from my father.

It's a painful thing to talk about my childhood. I kind of don't talk about it much.

The one thing that made me somewhat of an animal is I didn't have anything growing up.

In the Dolezal family, you couldn't always count on your parents to keep you safe.

It's extraordinary what children put up with. I happened to see two of my uncles put my father up against the wall of my grandmother's house and knock his teeth out, because he'd been unpleasant to my mother. The next day I went upstairs and found my father making a rather half-hearted attempt to gas himself.

I called my mother up and I said, 'You know, I've been to the best doctors in the world and I've spent almost half a million dollars and they're telling me I have symptoms of a P.O.W. and all I did was grow up in your home.'

He used to sit on my lap. I was sort of ambivalent about that. He was surviving any way he could.

I pretended I was living with a television family and there was no yelling at home and no one hit me.

Children in dysfunctional homes at risk of abuse are kept in danger for too long because politically correct rules mean we won't challenge unfit parents.

When you have been born in a war like me, living in a war as a child, when you have been in wars as a war correspondent all your life - trust me! You develop a form of fatalism; you are always ready to die.

I grew up in an abusive home and was told on a daily basis by my father that I would never amount to anything and that I looked like a boy.

I lost my mother when I was 7 and they put her in a mental hospital. My brother and I watched her being taken away in a strait jacket. That's something you never forget. And my stepmother was like in the movie 'Precious.' I couldn't handle it. So I said to myself, 'I don't have a mother. I don't need one. I'm going to let music be my mother.'

Most of me was glad when my mother died. She was a handful, but not in a cute, festive way. More in a life-threatening way, that had caused me a long time ago to give up all hope of ever feeling good about having had her as a mother.

I was an abused kid.