Anne Lamott Quotes

I can understand a family that's imploding. I have experience of that in my own life.

My mother wasn't any better than my father.

My family's messed up, for real.

I remember the bad times as a succession of painful emotional snapshots: Me walking into the library at 24 Sussex, seeing my mother in tears, and hearing her talk about leaving while my father stood facing her, stern and ashen.

My mother and father didn't love each other, so they were always fighting.

My parents' marriage was very rocky. They were always arguing. When they split up when I was in my 20s, my brother and I were both delighted because we knew they weren't good for each other.

I used to tell my mum to leave my dad when I was, like, nine. I loved my father, don't get me wrong. I really loved him, but he wasn't a good dad, and he wasn't a good husband.

My mother used to go out on her own, and I used to have to keep a look out for my stepfather coming home.

For every veteran who goes through a divorce, a wife goes through one, too. For every veteran alone in the basement, there is a wife upstairs, bewildered, isolated and in despair from the dark clouds of war that hangs over family life.

I couldn't think of anything worse than being in an unhappy marriage. It worries me because I've seen it destroy people.

I had a very angry father and was disconnected from my family.

My kids have never seen me scream at anybody. They've never seen an argument. There's never been even a cold silence. And those are things that I grew up with because my parents did end up divorcing.

I loved my parents... but that can never change the fact that my father's violence ruined my childhood.

I have no memory at all of my mother shouting at me or at my sister. But I do have horrible memories of my father and the way he behaved. He was so tough on our mother.

My family - my mother and father had gone through such a hard time that by the time I graduated from sixth grade, they were separated.

I grew up in a little bit of a broken home.

Since I was probably eight years old, just about everyday, all the way until I was 14 or 15 years old, just about everyday my mom and my stepdad would roll around in the living room fighting.

My father was a food lover and a deadbeat dad, and maybe a connection between good food and bad dads was forged early, in the deepest folds of my subconscious, where we make so many decisions about our parents.

People shouldn't stay married because of the kids. That's torture for everyone.

The seeds of divorce are often sown and the problems of children begin when Mother works outside the home.

My father was always so mingled with rage at his life.

I don't know that anyone comes from a truly functional family.

My family went through divorces and remarriages and the later, blended home - and then watched that home explode, too.

You think about child abuse and you think of a father viciously attacking a daughter or a son, but in my family it was my mother. My mother, I would say, was a... very brutal disciplinarian.

My father was a very unhappy person, very sarcastic, and my mother was very nervous and worried about what people thought. They weren't monsters, but it wasn't a good childhood.