Meg Tilly Quotes

I was badly bullied when I was in the seventh grade - relentlessly, mercilessly - by a group of 12-year-old girls. And it left me with a determination that no matter what, I had to throw my shoulders back, stick out my chin, and project a sense that no one and nothing could hurt me. That turned out to be a life-changing mistake.

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.

What distresses me at times is that I meet a lot of people in their 40's, 50's, 60's, who still say they're a victim of child abuse.

That's the thing about being a victim; you start to think it'll happen to you on a regular basis. It's living with the reality of your own vulnerability, and it sucks.

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.'

It's extraordinary what children put up with. I happened to see two of my uncles put my father up against the wall of my grandmother's house and knock his teeth out, because he'd been unpleasant to my mother. The next day I went upstairs and found my father making a rather half-hearted attempt to gas himself.

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.

Over the years you encounter just about every kind of crime. It doesn't harden you, but you become capable of reporting on just about anything human beings can do. However, any time we're dealing with the murder of a child it is always difficult.

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

It's a universal truth that no parent wishes to acknowledge that the fear and phobias we are in thrall to in adulthood almost invariably connect back to childhood experiences.

I was an abused kid.

Trauma creates one of four types of people: victims, rescuers, or perps - and if you're really lucky and really strong and very willing and brave, survivors.

The great thing about all my siblings is we all agree we had a horrendous childhood. It's not like it doesn't affect us now; it affects us every day, in everything we do.

We live in an emotionally fragile culture. We are in touch with every hurt past, present, and perceived. We are the walking wounded, and we want everyone to know.

If you give me any problem in America I can trace it down to domestic violence. It is the cradle of most of the problems, economic, psychological, educational.

Many great stories are father issues, mother issues or death.

I was motivated to write about violence because I believe it's not unusual. I see it as just a part of life, and I think we get in trouble when we separate people who've experienced it from those who haven't.

I did have imprinted on me the idea of trauma that changes things dramatically and suddenly. As a writer, I return to that again and again because it fascinates me, and it's where I come from, in a sense.

The healthy man does not torture others - generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.

My parents were not perfect, but no one's parents are. As childhoods go, mine was pretty comfortable and good in a lot of ways, and yet I still ended up with anxiety.

I think that when something happens when you're growing up, like a death or divorce, it does open the world slightly because things aren't as straightforward.

The physical part was one thing. Whatever - I broke my face; that'll heal. The mental aspect was the biggest shock to the system. You just don't know how to experience stuff like that. You don't have any control over it, either. It's just how your body and brain reacts to something like that happening.

When I did these psychological characters like the drug addicts, the ones who were rejected and dejected, I started to feel a sort of melancholia which was very unnatural for me to have at a teenage. Then I avoided those characters.

I don't want to sound like a whiner here, but if you get beat up all the time, it affects you.

We have a pandemic of childhood trauma.