Ellen DeGeneres Quotes

We weren't the kind of family that talked about our problems. We were a close family, in a kind of faraway way. It wasn't a being-with-each-other kind of close. We all went our own ways.

The tricky thing is, from what I've heard, I'm a bit emotionally unavailable.

Is it any wonder that for millions of men the only intimacy is physical, silent, and predictable?

I like my parents but they are just not good parents. They are nice enough people. I'm not interested in hurting their feelings.

When I remember my family, I always remember their backs. They were always indignantly leaving places.

I never had a real conversation with my father.

My father was hard to know and gave little indication that there was much to know. He claimed he remembered almost nothing about his childhood.

I didn't feel a strong bond with the parents who raised me, and I had anything but a happy childhood. My mother was overly sensitive; my father, ascetic. I was neither. I felt as if I were living with complete strangers. I suspect that my parents felt the same way.

I was an only child of a father who loved me deeply, but we didn't play catch, even though I was an athlete. We didn't go fishing or hunting or any of the things I wanted to do. Why not? He just didn't do that.

I had never confronted my parents with the true feelings I had for them, and I had certainly never expressed the depth of my feeling for my mother, being too selfish to try when I should have.

I don't want my poems to be sentimental, though I do acknowledge that sentiment is probably rather under-reported in a lot of people's feelings a lot of the time.

I'm drawn again and again to relationships between people who really, really want to connect and just can't get out of their own way to do it.

If your woman is asleep every time you get home, she's just really tired. Of you.

Now, Marlon and I - for some reason, even today - even today, we can't say two words to each other. We really can't talk to each other. You know, I say to him - Marlon can't talk. I mean, he'd talk to you. But he can't talk.

It hurts real bad to have that protection barrier between parent and child.

I grew up not liking my father very much. I never saw him cry. But he must have. Everybody cries.

One reason people get divorced is that they run out of gift ideas.

There was no place at all for me in my father's military world.

One of the things that people complain about is loneliness, disconnectedness. If you live in a society where your life is rarely threatened and most of your relationships are more on an economic exchange basis, then this could leave people feeling less connected.

I remember having crushes and longings, but there were all these missed opportunities or things that seemed like such a big deal, but you really don't understand what the other person is going through.

Detachment produces a peculiar state of mind. Maybe that's the worst sentence of all, to be deprived of feeling what a human being ought to be entitled to feel.

I lived with my mother all my life until she died, and I don't really think I knew her, because I was always using her as my mother, if you know what I mean.

My mother and I never got along, not even when I was a child.

Mama had her little cough. Once or twice, some quiet sobbing, out of sight... Or the slamming of kitchen cupboard doors. That was her language.

Our uniqueness makes us special, makes perception valuable - but it can also make us lonely. This loneliness is different from being 'alone': You can be lonely even surrounded by people. The feeling I'm talking about stems from the sense that we can never fully share the truth of who we are. I experienced this acutely at an early age.