Bill Ayers Quotes

Divorce in and of itself, and with children, is devastating.

The word 'divorce' wasn't foreign to me. As a child of the 1970s, I grew up as part of a generation of kids whose parents got divorced, and it wasn't seen as this terrible thing. Maybe that's why I believed what my father told me and Reina that day: that everything would be okay. But it wasn't.

I was taken to a boarding school when I was four years old and taken away from my mother and my father, my grandparents, who I stayed with most of the time, and just abruptly taken away and then put into the boarding school, 300 miles away from our home.

I think - you know, the big trauma in my life, personally, was the fact that at 14, I was taken out of Poland unwittingly because my parents were divorced. Left the country - my mother left for England with her new husband. I wasn't even aware that she'd married him.

Me and my older brother were taken from my mother at the same time so we were pretty tight.

I don't want to rip families apart. I don't want to be sending parents away from children.

My father and mother separated when I was two months old.

I remember hearing myself start to whimper, a five-year-old, crouched by the side of the road, staring into my father's eyes, whimpering because it was so dark and there was no one coming to help, whimpering because my mother was back in the crushed car, not moving, and my father was lying here in the dirt, not answering me, not holding me, not comforting me, not helping my mother get out of the car, and there was blood, so much blood, and broken glass everywhere, and it was so dark and so cold and no one was coming to help.

A girl my age had been murdered in these woods and I'd seen her last terrified moments, watched her bleed to death in this forest. A life like mine had ended here, and it didn't matter how many times I'd seen deaths in movies, it wasn't the same, and I wasn't ever going to forget it.

The little boy leaned against his father's chest and slowly nodded. "Yes," he said. "I heard all of the names, but I don't remember the other two… just the man who hurt Gillian." "That's the name I most want," Brodick said softly. "Who is he, Alec?" "Alec, please," Gillian began. "Tell me, Alec. Who is he?" "Baron," Alec whispered. "His name is Baron.

I don't think people fully appreciate the trauma associated with losing. It takes a lot out of you, year after year.

I went back to a small town in Poland where my dad grew up. It was a very traumatic experience for me as a young man to know that my father's family were killed by Nazis, killed by Hitler. And that left, you know, if not intellectually, at least an emotional part of me which said, God, we have got to do everything we can to end this kind of horrific racism or anti-Semitism. And I have spent much of my life trying to fight that.

Seeing your mother naked is not something you easily recover from. Seeing your mother naked and jumping from one side of a king-sized bed to the other with a nurse's hat on while your father, who is also naked, is chasing her with a bandanna around his neck, is reason to put yourself up for adoption.

Then one day my sister abandoned me at the 1939 World's Fair, and that incident is the essence of In the Night Kitchen. I was standing there with hundreds of other people waving back at the little midgets dressed like bakers when I turned around and my sister was gone! The next thing I know I'm screaming and crying and policemen are taking me to a big place with tons of kids who had all been abandoned like me. At least I was old enough to give them a name and an address.

Once again, her parents' problems had run through her life like a piece of heavy equipment, smashing everything in their way.

I learned early on that family, as far as my mother and father, were not an option.

He doesn’t just look upset—he looks newly blind. There is such loss in his eyes, and it permeates every other part of his body.

I met my father for the first time when I was 28 years old. I made up my mind that when I had children, my children were going to know who their father was.

Father died last year. I don't subscribe to the theory by which we only become truly adult when our parents die; we never become truly adult.

It took a lot of water to down just that f-king bat's head, let me tell you. It's still stuck in my f-king throat, after all these years. People all over the world say, 'You're the guy who kills creatures? You still do it? You do it every night?' It happened f-king once, for Christ's sake.

I was in analysis for years because of a traumatic childhood; I was breast-fed through falsies.

My father's family were liquidated during the Cultural Revolution in China because they were landowners. He was the only one to escape. I was born and brought up in Taiwan. But you absorb the trauma. My parents had no sense of security.

I don't really remember much before was eight, but I do remember that my dad brought me to drop me off at my grandmother's house, and he was a very emotional guy, but that was the first time I really saw him cry, cos I knew it killed him to have to give me up, but he knew I needed some family structure. That was the last time I'd see him or talk to him when he was sober for the next 10 years.

Once, when she was six years old, she had fallen from a tree, flat on her stomach. She could still recall that sickening interval before breath came back into her body. Now, as she looked at him, she felt the same way she had felt then, breathless, stunned, nauseated.

If my superiors shall permit me to come home, I hope it will be soon; if they mean I should stay abroad, I am not able to say what I shall do, until I know in what capacity. One thing is certain, that I will not live long without my family.