Zadie Smith Quotes

I met Roy's father once... And I think that Roy's relationship with his father is still at the heart of what Roy does. But at the end of the day, he's trying to prove himself to a father he'll never really please.

I think my biggest focus for myself is learning how to continue to get through the trauma that my father has caused in my life.

Many of our deepest motives come, not from an adult logic of how things work in the world, but out of something that is frozen from childhood.

My childhood was marked by a tension between privilege on the one hand and emotional dysfunction on the other.

I was adopted into this incredible home, a loving, positive environment, yet I had this yearning, this kind of darkness that was also inside me.

I had to get in touch with the source, I had to go back into my abandonment issues with my mother, I had to go into issues with my father I hadn't even looked at before.

I have at last admitted that not only was I angry with my mother, but, in fact, I wanted to destroy her as a child. And I was so concerned to be a woman who was different from my mother that I had this vast architecture of rules.

It's maybe hard to believe, but as a kid I really had a lot of self-doubts. My father was very ill - he was an alcoholic - so there were a lot of things that built up for me. And because I was going to a Catholic school in a small German town, a lot of it was suppressed. I was angry and didn't know how to get it out.

I had my footballing heroes such as Bryan Robson and Diego Maradona but my dad was a rugby league star, and he was my real hero. But the relationship with my mum was rocky and we saw things that would affect any youngster.

Many of my deepest insecurities stem from my issues with my dad.

For everybody in the world, the answers to the mysteries in your life usually lie in your childhood, your upbringing, and your parents.

Until I began to build and launch rockets, I didn't know my hometown was at war with itself over its children and that my parents were locked in a kind of bloodless combat over how my brother and I would live our lives.

A lot of people ask questions that they don't want to answer themselves, and if we're honest about the intimacy that we have with our parents, you wish them the best and you wish them the worst more than anybody else in the world. I think everyone has had a moment in their life where they wished a parent ill, and I think it's perhaps a very romantic idea that that doesn't happen.

Remember that you own what happened to you. If your childhood was less than ideal, you may have been raised thinking that if you told the truth about what really went on in your family, a long bony white finger would emerge from a cloud and point to you, while a chilling voice thundered, "We *told* you not to tell." But that was then. Just put down on paper everything you can remember now about your parents and siblings and relatives and neighbors, and we will deal with libel later on.

I think it became blurry because I grew up in a very private family. I mixed privacy and secrecy up somewhere along the line. Everything became a secret, and I thought that was how you should live. Lying about everything. The mask I put on as a kid to survive was the funny lady. Then the funny person all of a sudden became harder to do without substances. Substances let me keep the mask on longer. Until it doesn't work anymore and you're just a mess.

I think Dexter is a man who ... a part of himself is very much frozen, or arrested in a place that is pre-memory, pre-conscious, pre-verbal. Something very traumatic happened to him, he doesn't know what that is. And I think on some level he wants to know. He denies his humanity, he describes himself as someone who is without feeling, and yet I think that he maybe suspects - in a way that maybe isn't even conscious yet when we first meet him - that he is in fact a human being.

The pattern often has been entrenched since childhood... [abusive people] don't think that there is anything wrong with them because that is the way they were brought up in their family.

I think Im extremely vulnerable and that in some ways I seek out rejection. Never feeling like youre getting that pat on the back from dad is probably at the heart of that. Im working through it, which is good. As an actor, I think that you want to keep your demons to some extent, but you also have to exorcise them so you can use them instead of them using you.

Nothing is quite so horrifying and paralyzing as to win the Oedipal struggle and to be awarded your mother as the prize.

What's so sad is when we're younger, if you have a bad parent, that is normal to you and that's what you think of as healthy.

You think we're a family,' Cody said, turning back. 'You think we're some jolly, situation-comedy family when we're in particles, torn apart, torn all over the place, and our mother was a witch.

Our children will not survive our habits of thinking, our failures of the spirit, our wreck of the universe into which we bring new life as blithely as we do. Mostly, our children will resemble our own misery and spite and anger, because we give them no choice about it. In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.

A Course in Miracles tells us that although 'we think that without the ego, all would be chaos, the opposite is true. Without the ego, all would be love.'

Although some people will say it's a cliché, I think not having had a father when I was growing up affect me negatively because I didn't have a good role model to follow.

As we try to change, we will discover within us a fierce struggle between our loyalty to that battle-scarred victim of his own childhood, our father, and the father we want to be. We must meet our childhood father at close range: get to know him, learn to forgive him, and somehow, go beyond him.