Maurice Sendak Quotes

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.

I was a child, and my mother was psychotic. She loved me, but I didn't really feel I had a mother. And when you live with somebody who is paranoid and thinks you're trying to kill them all the time, you tend to feel a little betrayed.

I remember when I was a kid I used to come home from Sunday School and my mother would get drunk and try to make pancakes

Come awake, Tom. Fathers can willfully hurt their children. They can be addicts too weak to give up their vices, no matter the pain it causes. Mothers can turn you invisible with neglect. They can erase you with a denial, a refusal to see. Friends can deceive you. People lie. It is a cold, hard world. I do not blame Nell Hawkins for retreating from it into a madness of her own choosing.

You love me. You ignore me. You save my life, then you cook my mother into soap.

There was mental and physical abuse in my family.

She encouraged any artistic impulse I had, and my father discouraged any artistic impulse I had. They took out their problems with each other on me and my sister.

My father would invite me sweetly to come and sit on a stool at his feet, and, as I let myself trustingly down, he would gently kick the seat from under me - and laugh.

The real demon in my life is my father.

I hated my childhood. It was loathsome. My parents were deaf and dumb. Profoundly so. They could make noises when they were emotionally aroused, but they couldn't form it into speech.

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

Till I was 13, I thought my name was 'Shut Up.'

My father and mother - I figured if I could make them laugh, they'd stop fighting. I stole all their material.

My father used to be away for months at a time, and he'd never leave any money for food, so my brother and I had to go out and nick it.

I had my kids convinced it was a civics lesson rather than child abuse.

I had a very rocky, difficult, emotional childhood with my parents.

My stepfather was fond of letting me know, quote, 'I ain't your... damn daddy.' That was something that was painful, to put it mildly.

I can't remember a dish my mother made that to me was pleasant. To this day I have a phobia of instant noodles.

My mother moves so fast I do not even see it coming. But she slaps my face hard enough to make my head snap backward. She leaves a print that stains me long after it’s faded. Just so you know: shame is five-fingered.

For my father the one calamity was that my brother and sister and I never learned to swim. My father, who was very macho, was a strong swimmer and was terribly disappointed to have children who didn't swim. Once when my mother was sitting in a beach chair - I can still see the big umbrella - she called to my father, "Throw them in! Throw them in! They'll swim!" So he did. Then he looked down, and there were the three Sendak children lying perfectly still underwater, not fighting for life!

Bruises fade father, but the pain remains the same. And I still remember how you kept me so afraid.

One time, my mother told me that I always eat like I'll never see food again. And I said, "I won't unless I bring it home." That shut her up.

The thing with psychoanalysis is I know basically what happened in my childhood. I know where things went wrong and I know what my mother said at one point and what my father said at one point.

No child is born a delinquent. They only became that way if nobody loved them when they were kids. Unloved children grow up to be serial murderers or alcoholics.

I never saw my mother happy with me and proud of me for doing something: She only knew me as being a wild kid running the streets, coming home with new clothes that she knew I didn't pay for. I never got a chance to talk to her or know about her. Professionally, it has no effect, but it's crushing emotionally and personally.