Alan Cheuse Quotes

I think being raised by a single mother put me on the outside, and I would watch my mother's married friends and think, 'Why does she put him down in public?' or, 'Why is he so rude to her?' It seemed to me that there were very few marriages where the couple were genuinely in a supportive, loving partnership.

Living with one woman is horrific.

It doesn't take a bruise or a broken bone for a child to be a victim of domestic violence. Kids who witness domestic violence are victims, too.

For most of my life, I believed that my father had broken many of my bones. They were emotional and psychological bones; things no one could see, things that caused me to limp through life clutching for and holding on to people and situations that often rendered me immobile.

There are endless new variations on how to hurt a woman physically, emotionally, financially, and socially.

I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern.

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.

The writer is both a sadist and a masochist. We create people we love, and then we torture them. The more we love them, and the more cleverly we torture them along the lines of their greatest vulnerability and fear, the better the story.

My father was a monster. A monster! I cut with my family when I was 23 and I never see them again.

The worst violence we can do to each other often is psychological, especially in families. I dwell a lot on domestic danger. That's the backdrop of most of my novels - what kind of damage is done without ever lifting a finger.

If any wife behaves badly, her husband may whip her. But then they shall look each other in the face and laugh together, and have no more ill will.

Female violence is a specific brand of ferocity. It's invasive. A girlfight is all teeth and hair, spit and nails - a much more fearsome thing to watch than two dudes clobbering each other.

No one can doubt that the sufferings of the sober, virtuous woman, in legal subjection to the mastership of a drunken, immoral husband and father over herself and children, not only from physical abuse, but from spiritual shame and humiliation, must be such as the man himself can not possibly comprehend.

My parents would, like, argue in front of us and it wasn't a big deal, whereas I know some people's parents who, if they argued, it was like, 'Oh, my God.'

I grew up watching my mom and my stepdad fight.

Reading 'Ghost Waltz' and 'Nine and a Half Weeks' side by side, Day's vulnerabilities come shimmering into view. Both books examine the consequences of relationships marked by withholding - be it her lover's effortless domineering humiliation or her parents' shutting the door on discussing Herr Seiler's deep-seated Nazi ties.

She was in a terrible marriage and she couldn't talk to anyone. He used to hit her, and in the beginning she told him that if it ever happened again, she would leave him. He swore that it wouldn't and she believed him. But it only got worse after that, like when his dinner was cold, or when she mentioned that she'd visited with one of the neighbors who was walking by with his dog. She just chatted with him, but that night, her husband threw her into a mirror.

There are battered husbands. Apparently this happens when the woman is real big, the man is very small, and they each drink a quart of whiskey a day.

An abusive relationship is worse than being in prison. I mean literally, not figuratively.

My family's messed up, for real.

A relationship can be deeply damaging without anyone leaving marks on you. So many people - especially young women - end up trying to maintain those emotionally abusive relationships because we don't think it's that bad and that we are really some of the lucky ones because we haven't experienced 'real' abuse.

Growing up in my mother's Pueblo household, I never imagined a world in which I would be represented by someone who looked like me.

Violence was very much a part of my mother's upbringing - a little less so with my father's, but my father was an angry man when he was young. He was angry and frustrated and had no idea how to channel anger.

Domestic violence and violence against women in general seems to be a big problem everywhere in the world. It seems to me this problem comes from stress, pent up anger, frustration, and all kinds of negativity within human beings.

I wonder how many ways there are for a mother to produce that wreckage in her own daughter, and my muscles tense as I think of them.