Yoko Ono Quotes

Anybody who says, 'My childhood was completely happy,' is a person who isn't remembering the truth.

Our lives are determined less by our childhood than by the traumatic way we have learned to remember our childhoods.

If you didn't remember something happening, was it because it never had happened? Or because you wished it hadn't?

It is possible to resolve childhood repression safely and without confusion - something that has always been disputed by the most respected schools of thought.

One of the great things about the Fifties is there are so many secrets - people who've come back from the war and done these terrible things that they don't want to think about, or can't say what they did because they signed the Official Secrets Act.

I remember my childhood as a horrible time. My mother says that nothing so horrible ever happened to me as the things that I remember.

Apparently, as a kid, I used to eat spiders. Maybe there's some Freudian significance behind that.

One of the things that I share with Bryan Becket is this hole in my childhood memory. There's about five years of my life that's virtually gone. I've thought about it a lot, and I've come to the conclusion that it might be for my own protection that those memories are gone, and maybe I don't want to dredge up those things.

The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has shown great courage, in the face of spiteful vested interests, in demonstrating how easy it is for people to concoct memories that are entirely false but which seem, to the victim, every bit as real as true memories.

My memory stops at 14.

I think Dexter is a man who ... a part of himself is very much frozen, or arrested in a place that is pre-memory, pre-conscious, pre-verbal. Something very traumatic happened to him, he doesn't know what that is. And I think on some level he wants to know. He denies his humanity, he describes himself as someone who is without feeling, and yet I think that he maybe suspects - in a way that maybe isn't even conscious yet when we first meet him - that he is in fact a human being.

The truth about childhood, as many of us have had to endure it, is inconceivable, scandalous, painful. Not uncommonly, it is monstrous. Invariably, it is repressed. To be confronted with this truth all at once and to try to integrate it into our consciousness, however ardently we may wish it, is clearly impossible.

The scars left from the child's defeat in the fight against irrational authority are to be found at the bottom of every neurosis.

People are more willing to talk about child abuse. When this whole McMartin thing went down, I was at a dinner party with about eight people, all from different backgrounds and from all over the world. And every single person at that table had had some weird experience as a child. I think everyone has - whether it was with a babysitter, or playing doctor, but usually when some older person tries to come in contact with you. It's amazing how much we block out.

I have some memories of certain things that happened in high school when I was stoned out of my mind, but I talked with other people about them, and I trusted the aggregated memories.

We do not always remember the things that do no credit to us. We justify them, cover them in bright lies or with the thick dust of forgetfulness.

Painful memories didn't just ease back in-they shoved the door open hard, all of them and all at once

So many things have happened to me in my life that I could be phobic about.

Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.

A Lucky Child is an extraordinary story, simply and beautifully told. Heartbreaking and thrilling, it examines what it means to be human, in every good and awful sense. Perhaps most amazingly of all, Thomas Buergenthal remembers and renders the small mysteries and grand passions of childhood, even a childhood lived under the most horrific circumstances.

...and trauma had a way of burning memories deeper into the mind.

Photographs supplant and corrupt the past, all the while creating their own memories.

If you don't heal the wounds of your childhood, you bleed into the future.

Dementors caused a person to relive the worst moments of their life. What would spoiled, pampered, bullying Dudley have been forced to hear?

When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.