Jim Crace Quotes

Most of me was glad when my mother died. She was a handful, but not in a cute, festive way. More in a life-threatening way, that had caused me a long time ago to give up all hope of ever feeling good about having had her as a mother.

I've been lucky enough - well, maybe unlucky enough - to have had a lot of friends who have had their ups and downs. And for an actor, that's good. Life experience in any regard is good. So I've seen a lot and I've had my own experiences.

Most people are remarkably resilient. Even those who have been through war or great loss often find reservoirs of strength. But the legacy of trauma is a heavy burden to bear.

It's important to wallow and grieve when you have a health issue. I don't think you really get the best stuff out of life until you've had the worst stuff.

My dad died of a heart attack when I was 15. I was bullied mercilessly in middle school. I went through a divorce - those not-so-great things are all a part of me, and they give me a place to go when I cover those stories on the news. I'm more empathetic, more relatable because of them.

There's many, many people who have been through a lot worse things than I went through. I lost my dad when I was 14 and to violence.

Some families can experience terrible tragedy and deal with it, and others not. I find those things fascinating.

My mom got shot. My dad got shot. Some of the craziest stuff. All that happened to me.

Be serious. Life hurts. Reflect what hurts. I don't mean that you can't also be funny, or have fun, but at the end of the day, stories are about what you lose.

We are far betting dealing with the big losses-death, divorce, debt, and debilitating illness-than with the daily onslaught of little losses.

I've always had a little bit of darkness, and I've always been someone who was grieving. I had kind of had a tumultuous upbringing living in an abusive home, so for me, writing has always been a point of catharsis.

I think there is pressure on people to turn every negative into a positive, but we should be allowed to say, 'I went through something really strange and awful and it has altered me forever.'

I like that I've been through things, that when something happens, it resonates with something that already happened. It's not that things like loss are more or less painful. But they're deeper. I find that fascinating.

The experience of pain or loss can be a formidably motivating force.

When I was 19 years old, both of my parents died in the same year; my mom of cancer and my dad in a car accident. Through the next two or three years and a series of bad decisions - all my own, I might add - I ended up literally homeless, before that was even a word. I even slept occasionally under a pier on the Gulf Coast.

I did not realize how broken I was until I saw how broken Mama was.

I didn't write about my mother much in the third year after she died. I was still trying to get my argument straight: When her friends or our relatives wondered why I was still so hard on her, I could really lay out the case for what it had been like to be raised by someone who had loathed herself, her husband, even her own name.

And from my place, and from the time that I went through my divorce, I also had my father pass away in the middle of all that. And it kind of made everything else just kind of like the back burner, you know.

When I was 4 years old, my brother and sister died of hunger, so I achieved my success through confidence, self-motivation and my hard work.

When things happen to you in the worst way, you live with it, you go over it, you think, 'What else could I have done?'

I'm not saying that experiencing loss is why I can cope with darker worlds - I'm not saying that for a second - but I think it opens up a side of you in terms of work that wouldn't be as accessible had that stuff not happened.

Even when a person has all of life's comforts - good food, good shelter, a companion - he or she can still become unhappy when encountering a tragic situation.

When my family fell apart, it was such a troubled part of my life... I think I could understand what I was going through, but I didn't have the vocabulary for it.

I have been touched by extreme violence, and I have been robbed of the life I always wanted by someone who chose to do evil.

I lost my mother and my brother when I was 15 in two separate car accidents. I was doing well at school. I was a good sportsperson, but at that point, I gave up on all of those things that were there to be done. I couldn't deal with them.