Lucinda Williams Quotes

It is hard work to be good when you are very little and very hungry, and have many sticks to beat you, and no mother's lips to kiss you.

All I'm trying to do is survive and make good out of the dirty, nasty, unbelievable lifestyle that they gave me.

Ghettos and barrios and abusive homes and trauma wards may produce scarred souls; they can cripple more human spirits than they strengthen.

I was in a terrible mess in my childhood.

I used to sleep on floors and face racial abuse.

For Mum, life was fundamentally hell. You went blind, you got raped, people forgot your birthday, Nixon got elected, your husband fled with a blonde from Beckenham, and then you got old, you couldn't walk and you died.

Experience is valuable only when it has brought suffering and when the suffering has left its mark upon both body and mind.

I think there are so many children being brought up in some form of violence, be it violence of poverty or sexism or racism or homophobia or transphobia. That violence takes a life to transform or overcome. I don't think people should be spending their lives dealing with that. I think people should be thriving, playing, creating, evolving.

I think in life everyone needs to be broken in some way.

When you've suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling.

It isn't the things that happen to us in our lives that cause us to suffer, it's how we relate to the things that happen to us that causes us to suffer.

But I'm very thankful that no one is slamming my head against the wall anymore.

I never had a true childhood.

I've seen the hell these people go through.

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

I didn't have a childhood.

I come from a world where the word 'trauma' doesn't exist, because we are too poor. I didn't have an easy life compared to the average European. But compared to the average African, it wasn't all that bad.

However, if you listen to me I think you can hear years of abuse in my voice - both bad abuse and good abuse.

Appalling things can happen to children. And even a happy childhood is filled with sadnesses.

My father's death, my move, and my frightening and difficult delivery created a tremendous amount of stress, pain, and sadness for me. I was practically devastated beyond recovery.

I've overcome neglect and deprivation, abandonment and abuse.

Poverty makes you sad as well as wise.

The stories my pupils told me were astonishing. One told how he had witnessed his cousin being shot in the back five times; another how his parents had died of AIDS. Another said that he'd probably been to more funerals than parties in his young life. For me - someone who had had an idyllic, happy childhood - this was staggering.

I had a very difficult upbringing.

I didn't have a childhood.