Edward Hoagland Quotes

What a childhood I had. My parents sent me to a child psychiatrist. The kid didn't help me at all.

An alcoholic father, poverty, my own juvenile diabetes, the limited English my parents spoke - although my mother has become completely bilingual since. All these things intrude on what most people think of as happiness.

Childhood depression tends to be more common in inner cities, being most frequently related to serious social deprivation, bullying, domestic violence, wartime experience and famine. It is, for example, a serious problem among children who are traumatised refugees.

I had a really good childhood up until I was nine years old. Then a classic case of divorce really affected me and I moved back and forth between relatives all the time. And I just became extremely depressed and withdrawn.

You know . . . a lot of kids at school hate their parents. Some of them got hit. And some of them got caught in the middle of wrong lives. Some of them were trophies for their parents to show the neighbors like ribbons or gold stars. And some of them just wanted to drink in peace.

Any kid who grew up with an alcoholic parent will tell you how nauseating it feels never to know what it will be like when you come home.

For the first five years of my life, things felt pretty good. A lot went wrong after that, family-wise.

Appalling things can happen to children. And even a happy childhood is filled with sadnesses.

No family is sane, is it?

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.

I was an abused kid.

What must it be like for a little boy to read that daddy never loved mummy?

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.

We ought to regard the breaking of a child's spirit as a sin against humanity.

I didn't want to be the daughter of the crazy people.

My dad was an alcoholic, growing up, so I knew how scary that was from a child's perspective - the volatility.

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 had quite a turbulent upbringing. It was middle class, and everything was quite comfortable, but everyone was mental.

Many feel sorry for a person like David Platt. He was abandoned by his father, his mother wanted to abort him and his stepdad wanted him dead.

My dad had been in the second world war, had electric shock treatment, suffered from anxiety and was abusive to my mum. I kept a lid on my feelings at school but, when I was 18, dropped out of everything and couldn't even be bothered to get out of bed.

I grew up in a broken home.

As a kid I remember being frightened all of the time, and kind of sad. I was certainly troubled. But a lot of people were, y'know? I don't really know how to measure my trouble against somebody else's.

A child born today in the United Kingdom stands a ten times greater chance of being admitted to a mental hospital than to a university ... This can be taken as an indication that we are driving our children mad more effectively than we are genuinely educating them. Perhaps it is our way of educating them that is driving them mad.

But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes. The heart of a hurt child can shrink so that forever afterward it is hard and pitted as the seed of a peach. Or again, the heart of such a child may fester and swell until it is a misery to carry within the body, easily chafed and hurt by the most ordinary things.