Doris Lessing Quotes

Sometimes I think we're exposed to things we shouldn't be exposed to too early. I think that sets the tone to a person's whole life. Trauma.

But I don't think I've grown up to be a damaged adult.

My theory is that Kurt had a lot of residual pain from his childhood. And when you pile that on top of his experience in World War II - he was in Dresden when it was bombed and saw a city annihilated. When you combine those two things, my impression of Kurt Vonnegut at 84 was that he was a very pained and haunted man.

My entire youth was spent with an incredibly ill parent... I don't think you can grow up that way and not be marked by that experience.

My mom died of cancer when I was really young. I'm not someone who tries to work out their own stuff with a role, but I think that happened despite my best efforts to keep myself separate from it.

In your twenties, if you have any amount of complexity in your childhood, or any trauma that you haven't dealt with, it comes out. That's why you have a lot of artists that don't make it through.

For the first five years of Luca's life, I desperately wanted to be a good mother and not to pass on this trauma and darkness that his father and I had experienced, but there's a danger of suffocating your kids, too.

I got a mother who's very strong after taking the whippings that she took from my father.

When you have been born in a war like me, living in a war as a child, when you have been in wars as a war correspondent all your life - trust me! You develop a form of fatalism; you are always ready to die.

I think anybody who has been abused as a kid - and I was abused as a kid, by various people - will say it's irrational because violence is irrational.

Losing my mom at such a young age had a profound effect on my life.

War destroys people's souls. Most people focus on physical injuries, but the invisible injuries can take a lifetime to heal and affects the lives of generations to come.

One of the things you realize when you have a health crisis in your immediate family is that life does not stop so that you can go through that experience.

I have worked very hard on being aware of my childhood but moving forward and not letting it bring me down emotionally. That is a hard thing - especially when you have children of your own and you remember what happened to you at that age.

My father fought on the side of the Central Powers, as a soldier in the Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Army, my maternal grandfather fought in the British Army, on different sides, and both were so traumatized by the experience that they never talked about it.

When breast cancer took my mom, it met its biggest enemy.

Childhood trauma is the rocket fuel for addictive pathology, and this fundamental truth is laid bare in 'Patrick Melrose.'

My dad had been in the second world war, had electric shock treatment, suffered from anxiety and was abusive to my mum. I kept a lid on my feelings at school but, when I was 18, dropped out of everything and couldn't even be bothered to get out of bed.

I think that definitely any trauma - whether it's childhood or later in life - affects you negatively, especially when it's suppressed, but there's so much of us which is already in place.

When I was growing up as a kid, it was always, 'Oh, you're being bullied. Well, toughen up. Get some tough skin and deal with it.' That's how we were told to deal with it, and it's not that simple.

I knew for years I wanted to write a novel that addressed the personal trauma of my older sister, who suffered - and still suffers - from mental illness. For a long time I imagined - and I know it's absurd - that she was an indirect casualty of the Vietnam War.

I've been hit in the head a lot, but I don't think I have any problems, but I can't, for the life of me, remember a lot of my road stories and good times. When times are bad enough, that's all you can ever think about.

Unhappy and unsettled childhood helps in writing.

I've seen the best and worst of times. My parents were divorced when I was a child. I was brought up by my father.

Shame--what happened when my mother, the dragon, huffed and puffed and blew my self down.