Emily Meade Quotes

Bambi, to a kid, was scary.

Because I once became so distraught watching the film 'Watership Down,' my parents were happier to let me watch action adventures featuring humans and warriors rather than cute animals.

There is a psychic cost children bear when they grow up in fear.

I didn't know a time when there wasn't a war because I spent all my time from the age of two or three to eight in a coal cellar really.

As much as 'It Chapter One' is a movie about friendship and the power of unified belief, the second part is more about trauma.

I'm a child who was abused. I know the difference. I clearly know the difference. The whipping for correction and then their child abuse.

The first movie I ever saw was a horror movie. It was Bambi. When that little deer gets caught in a forest fire, I was terrified, but I was also exhilarated.

No severe or prolonged bodily illness followed this incident of the red-room: it only gave my nerves a shock, of which I feel the reverberation to this day.

You grow up with your father holding you down and covering your mouth so another man can make a horrible searing pain between your legs.

My dad died when he was 60. I was only 17 and I think, psychologically, that had a huge impact on me, probably more than I realised.

I have this helicopter crash, and I fall in love with this man who was in the crash with me. I must have been suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome.

I was obsessed with clowns. My dad had to get rid of them. I thought there were clowns under my bed for years.

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.

One of my few childhood memories is as an eight-year-old, refused permission to watch the Hitchcock season on Irish television, sneakily viewing 'The Birds' though a crack in the living-room door. It transformed my hitherto perfectly enjoyable half-mile walk to school, down a country lane patrolled by watchful birds, into a terrifying ordeal.

I don't react to a tragic happening any more. I took so many bad things as a kid and some people think I don't care about anything. It's just too hard for me to get emotional. I can't cry no more.

Writing 'Redeployment' shook me in ways I never expected.

I had written two or three books before my husband noticed that in every one of them a family member was missing. He suggested that it was because my father's death, when I was five, utterly changed my world. I can only suppose he is right and that this is the reason I am drawn to a narrative where someone's life is changed by loss.

I'm pretty mad at horror films for ruining my childhood.

My parents' divorce left me with a lot of sadness and pain and acting, and especially humour, was my way of dealing with all that.

I began to speak well at a very advanced age - 15, 16, 17 years old. It was psychological: the trauma of war, my family and growing up on my own. I was more or less a street kid.

They say that abandonment is a wound that never heals. I say only that an abandoned child never forgets.

I think a lot of the Disney cartoons are scary when you watch them at a young age.

Losing a part of a breast or all of one or both has, obviously, serious psychological consequences.

A fearful child cannot learn.

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