Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

My mother was physically and emotionally abusive. My father was an extremely cold man.

What makes a narcissistic mother so scary? Her absolute power and controlling influence. A narcissistic mother is your only 'friend,' at least until you're old enough to go to school.

It's no wonder the narcissistic mother will always have a place in literature: she's a freak of nature.

My father was a monster. A monster! I cut with my family when I was 23 and I never see them again.

If your parents ignored you, or if they are just not emotionally available, or if they yell a lot, that is a type of trauma.

A foul-mouthed oaf, a drunken laborer lying in a drain, a beaten wife with blackened eyes and torn clothes, cannot be made romantic to a child who sees how other children suffer from bad-tempered parents, from drunken fathers to termagant mothers.

I won't waste your time with the injuries of my childhood, with my loneliness, or the fear and sadness of the years I spent inside my parents' marriage, under the reign of my father's rage, afer all, who isn't a survivor from the wreck of childhood?

Family was a fertile breeding ground for the kind of psychological bacteria that warped minds and devoured hope.

My brother and I tortured my mother growing up.

The worst violence we can do to each other often is psychological, especially in families. I dwell a lot on domestic danger. That's the backdrop of most of my novels - what kind of damage is done without ever lifting a finger.

We're divorced from my father because he did some mean and scary things to us.

A bully is playing a game, one that he or she enjoys and needs. You're welcome to play this game if it makes you happy, but for most people, it will make you miserable.

My father was a mean, controlling and manipulative person for most of his life. He was unpredictable and unstable. As a result, the atmosphere of our home was super-charged with fear because you never knew if what you did would make him mad or not.

I have been driven to the edge by parental alienation for many years now. You have to go through this to understand.

No one can doubt that the sufferings of the sober, virtuous woman, in legal subjection to the mastership of a drunken, immoral husband and father over herself and children, not only from physical abuse, but from spiritual shame and humiliation, must be such as the man himself can not possibly comprehend.

My mother endlessly told me I was too fat, that I wasn't a patch on my sister. It wasn't much fun growing up with her and her almost irrational social climbing in that huge house of my dull stepfather Hughdie Auchincloss in Washington.

It doesn't take a bruise or a broken bone for a child to be a victim of domestic violence. Kids who witness domestic violence are victims, too.

If I called my kids a moron, I think it would traumatize them. I don't think they even know what the word is.

My dad was abusive. And so he would say, 'You're my favorite.' Being a favorite of an abusive parent is not really a good thing, necessarily.

I have no memory at all of my mother shouting at me or at my sister. But I do have horrible memories of my father and the way he behaved. He was so tough on our mother.

My father was actually controlling and abusive.

My parents tried to sell me. I was looking for a way to share my feelings, so I started to rap to talk about the painful experience of being a girl.

I wonder how many ways there are for a mother to produce that wreckage in her own daughter, and my muscles tense as I think of them.

If power corrupts, the reverse is also true; persecution corrupts the victims though perhaps in subtler and more tragic ways.