Neil Strauss Quotes

If my father had hugged me even once, I'd be an accountant right now.

My brother and I tortured my mother growing up.

We'll love you just the way you are if you're perfect.

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.

I grew up in a house of no love or emotion - it kind of sticks with you.

Parents do bear some of the responsibility if they don't talk to their kids, are never around, even deny their kids the love that young girls often crave when they decide to have a baby.

I never heard 'I love you' as a child. I never felt pretty or cared for.

There will be no 'Mommie Dearest' in the lives of my children, and no books like the one the Crosby boy wrote about Bing, or Bette Davis's daughter has written. My children love me very much, and they are loved.

My mother never breast fed me, she told me she only liked me as a friend.

I wish my parents hadn't made me feel that how I looked was linked to how much they loved me. But I do also see how hard it must be to see your child pile on the pounds and trust they'll find their own way back to a healthy weight.

All of us wish we'd had perfect childhoods, with a mother and father who modeled ideal parental attitudes and taught us to internalize the tenets of self-love. Many of us, however, did not.

I always have to brace myself when I visit my parents. My mom often greets me with a slew of nonconstructive criticisms: 'Jimmy, why is your face so fat? Your clothes look homeless and your long hair makes you look like a girl.' After 30 years of this, my self-image is now a fat homeless lesbian.

My father loved me and was devoted to me until he knew I was gay, and then our relationship went south. So I always make sure that I let my sons know that I will love them, no matter what they do or who they become, for the rest of their lives.

If you grew up in a house where you weren't loved, you didn't know there was an alternative.

I never experienced any feelings of closeness and caring from my parents.

When I was a kid, my mother's parenting style teetered between benign neglect and intense bouts of violence.

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.'

My mother seemed to undermine so much of what I did, subtly belittling my choices and my activities in light of her greater, more important ones.

Parents are your teachers until a certain point, and if they don't give you love, you'll go somewhere else to find it.

I can encourage my daughter to love her body, but what really matters are the observations she makes about my relationship with my own body.

I do not want any child in America to have my childhood because it was taken away from me because I just wasn't good enough; well I am good enough now.

It's too distracting to read about yourself. You want to be perfect and you want everyone to love you, and that's never going to happen.

I'm lucky that I have a supportive partner who loves me when I'm bigger as well as slim.

When I grew older and awkward, when my parents divorced and life had gone all to hell, Demetrie stood me at the wardrobe mirror and told me over and over, 'You are beautiful. You are smart. You are important.' It was an incredible gift to give a child who thinks nothing of herself.

I never felt like I had a mother.