Mark Hunt Quotes

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

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 ended up living in fear for most of my childhood.

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

Most homeless kids are on the streets because they have been forced by circumstances that cause them to think that they are safer there than in any home they once knew.

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.

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

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.

The only thing my old man ever gave me was a beating.

He hit me 18 times while I was in the act of falling.

But even though all this was going on at home, if someone had tried to take me away and put me in a children's home, I couldn't have handled it. Even though my mother was very brutal, it was my home.

I come from a place where there's violence and inarticulacy. I worked in a pub from the age of 12 or 13. I used to see people smashing glasses over each other. I was never tough. I was scared of them.

When you live in an alcoholic family or an abusive family, you tiptoe, you don't want to step on any mines.

If we are to save our children then we must become people they will look up to. Children need heroes now more than ever because the poor children of this nation live with monsters every day. Monsters deprive them of heat in the winter, they don't fix their sinks and toilets, they let garbage pile up in their hallways, they kick them out of their homes, they beat them, shoot them, stab them-sometimes to death-they rape their bodies and their minds. Sometimes they lurk under the stairs. They scuttle around in the dark; you hear them in the walls gnawing, squeaking, occasionally biting a little finger.

I’m going to be beaten and unless some change takes place, badly beaten.

Any woman who stays with her abuser beyond the first incident is complicitous with him.

It's hunger. It's homelessness, often. It's underfunded, under-resourced schools. It's abuse beyond the chilling. It's having overwhelmed parents and caregivers. Those are the things that young people are struggling with beyond our view.

My father was very abusive, and it was hard for my mother at first to leave because we had depended on him for so long. Sometimes you kind of get adjusted to getting that beating.

I'd rather not have to come face to face with predators. I'd rather not be harassed. But no. Those weren't my choices to make, were they?

Let's not glamorize abuse.

For generations America and its institutions have refused to acknowledge the true severity of the harm that domestic violence imposes on our society.

I was in the streets at eight, nine years old.

I was in diapers when my parents left me with the babysitter to participate in an armored car robbery. They never came home.

Here stands a girl clutching a knife. There is grease on the stove, blood in the air, and angry words piled in the corners. We are trained not to see it, not to see any of it. . . . Someone just ripped off my eyelids.

My wife is my best friend. The thought that people are afraid to go home to their partners for fear of being abused physically or emotionally makes me feel sick. It's not easy but you need to get help and get out.