Susan Shreve Quotes

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 come from a broken home. My parents split up when I was nine. Everyone gave me a good wallop. But I come from a time when you just put up with that, you got on with things rather than sitting moaning about them.

It's extraordinary what children put up with. I happened to see two of my uncles put my father up against the wall of my grandmother's house and knock his teeth out, because he'd been unpleasant to my mother. The next day I went upstairs and found my father making a rather half-hearted attempt to gas himself.

I remember how being young and black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was purely hell.

If anything is life-changing, being the descendant of a slave is.

My mom died of cancer when I was really young. I'm not someone who tries to work out their own stuff with a role, but I think that happened despite my best efforts to keep myself separate from it.

I grew up being terrified of my parents, particularly my father figures.

For the first five years of Luca's life, I desperately wanted to be a good mother and not to pass on this trauma and darkness that his father and I had experienced, but there's a danger of suffocating your kids, too.

I got a mother who's very strong after taking the whippings that she took from my father.

I think a lot of what is going on with kids who get pushed too far and attempt either murder or suicide is that they are trying to deal with their own non-existence for the people who are supposed to care most for them.

I would find myself backing away from all of the 'isms', all of the communities. I have always been able to be misused by every community But that is OK. I would rather be misused than neglected.

I told my mother at about the seventh year of therapy that I had been abused sexually by my father, and she hung up the phone on me.

There's sometimes a weird benefit to having an alcoholic, violent father. He really motivated me in that I never wanted to be anything like him.

My parents split up, and a lot of things going on in the outside world made me want to immerse myself in an alternative world.

I hated my childhood. It was loathsome. My parents were deaf and dumb. Profoundly so. They could make noises when they were emotionally aroused, but they couldn't form it into speech.

When I was 14, I felt very rundown; I had a home to go to, but I felt like I was 60 or something, older than I feel now. And I don't know if it's something that happens at 14, or whether it was adolescence or whether I was gay, or closeted gay, or whatever it was, I felt that.

My family - it wasn't an abusive family - they meant well, but they were in their own world.

My mother's feeling about men in general were always a bit of a mystery to me. She had difficulties in Puerto Rico with the men in her life. Her brothers abused her. It's very easy to be judgmental, but more often than not, there are mitigating circumstances, and children are not usually aware of those.

At one time in my life, from the time I was seven until I was about 13, I didn't speak. I only spoke to my brother. The reason I didn't speak: I had been molested, and I told the name of the molester to my brother who told it to the family.

My mother always thought if her mother hadn't left her, she would have been happy. All the problems she had never would have happened.

My dad was a violent alcoholic. Really aggressive.

Fatherlessness didn't strike me as being an event. It was a state of life.

When I went to prison, for three years I didn't say a word to another human being until, going into the fourth year, when I realized, 'You know what, I have to find a way to live.'

When I was a kid, dealing with trying to discover myself, I didn't have anybody to talk to. I didn't have any Internet and didn't have any friends. You felt very alone and very frightened.

I choose not to see my parents because I value myself - and they didn't value me or my mind.