Rodney Dangerfield Quotes

I ended up living in fear for most of my childhood.

Everyone picked on me in school because I was in foster care.

Often and often afterwards, the beloved Aunt would ask me why I had never told anyone how I was being treated. Children tell little more than animals, for what comes to them they accept as eternally established.

My father died when I was 9 years old. The miserable condition of my family at that time is beyond description. My family, solitary and without influence, became at once the target of much insult and abuse.

I went out every single night so I was never alone with my stepfather. At 12, I stopped going on holiday with them. The times I was alone with him I always made sure I was all covered up.

I wasn't supported, I wasn't given any self-esteem.

Every parent can imagine the joys of child abuse.

Because in a small dark room, a broken child lies on a filthy bed and stares up at a high window. He waits for me, too. And I—I who have failed at everything and have failed everyone—I must not, I cannot, I will not fail him.

I was in diapers when my parents left me with the babysitter to participate in an armored car robbery. They never came home.

There were times I'd be nervous walking home from elementary school, thinking, 'If that red tag from the power company saying our lights are turned off is on the door handle, I don't know what I'll do.'

I don't know how to be hurt.

In the Dolezal family, you couldn't always count on your parents to keep you safe.

I felt abandoned at a young age. That's where most of my anger came from, I guess.

Home was never a safe place for me. I felt safer on the streets.

At 14, I was beehived out. I'm glad there are no pictures!

I spent a lot of my life afraid as a kid, even throughout high school.

Saying it out loud as a child is scary, but saying I felt unstable out loud as an adult with children was really scary. The fear of losing your children stops you from saying anything. It's a never-ending battle.

That morning she pours Teacher's over my belly and licks it off. That afternoon she tries to jump out the window.

I feel I am a child that's lost its mother. I feel like a calf whose mother has gone off to slaughter.

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.

Next morning I awoke, looked out the window and nearly died of fright. My screams brought Atticus from his bathroom half-shaven. "The world's endin', Atticus! Please do something -!" I dragged him to the window and pointed. "No it's not," he said. "It's snowing.

I think I asphyxiated my children.

You must hurt, or be hurt.

I'm overwhelmed by shame that the people who had the responsibility to take care of the tender ones violated that trust and caused them great pain.

I was full of rage. My self-esteem was so low that I actually slept on the floor every night, because I didn't believe I deserved a bed to sleep in.