Spalding Gray Quotes

My dad was a serious alcoholic, and ultimately, that's why he died. When you're a child of someone who struggled with things like that, you look for the common thread. Is there a pattern? Is there an inheritance of pathology in some way? That haunts me.

Yes, I've been very preoccupied with the survivor all through my work.

I don't think it's healthy to have 68-year-old men, 70-year-old men thinking regularly about a traumatic experience that happened to them and thinking that they cannot talk about it with anybody, and no one wants to listen.

Is my job as a child, even as an adult, is my job to heal the wounds of my parents' childhoods?

Sons of suicides seldom do well.

When people kill themselves, they think they're ending the pain, but all they're doing is passing it on to those they leave behind.

I know I have a very self-destructive tendency since my mother died, I have got to be honest.

I thought about dying whenever I got bad news about other people.

I called my mother up and I said, 'You know, I've been to the best doctors in the world and I've spent almost half a million dollars and they're telling me I have symptoms of a P.O.W. and all I did was grow up in your home.'

I think my biggest focus for myself is learning how to continue to get through the trauma that my father has caused in my life.

I did not realize how broken I was until I saw how broken Mama was.

My father told me abuse is generational.

Let's suppose somebody abused you sexually. You still had a choice, though not a good one, about what to tell yourself about the abuse.

I saw Suicide in '74 and it was pretty horrifying.

When in times of turmoil and breakup, do not cut or shave your head, because it will never end well.

My uncle's house burned down when I was 6 years old. We got out safely. But ever since, I've had a nightmare of dying in a fire.

I think kids growing up, if they were picked on and feeling inferior at 12, they're going to feel that way at 72. You just deal with it better. I'm serious.

It's kind of a mystery to me, as far as my own life experiences and what I've witnessed - why some people can just move on through traumatic experiences, in childhood particularly, and why other people are just paralyzed by it. I just don't know how and why that is.

A suicide kills two people, Maggie, that's what it's for!

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.

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.

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

When you're traumatized, you pick out one thing you remember more than anything else.

I believe I encountered death, which was a bit too much for a seven-year-old.

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