Bryan Cranston Quotes

I was barely 17 when our father decided to part ways with my mother.

My father and mother separated when I was two months old.

When one has not father, or mother, or brother, and all one's friends have barely bread enough for themselves, life cannot be very easy, nor its crusts very many at any time.

My parents, like others of "The Greatest Generation" who lived through the Great Depression and World War II, wanted to provide the best possible life for their children. My mother and father both attended college but dropped out to earn a living during the Depression, working the rest of their lives at blue-collar work.

My father and mother split and I never saw my father until I was 20, nor did I see much more of my mother.

I literally didn't know my father. My mother had been a secretary, and after she and my father split, she went back to work for an advertising executive. So my older brother and I were "latch-door kids." We went home for lunch and after school by ourselves.

I grew up wanting a guitar, my family was very poor. When I was fourteen my mother bought me a Gibson ES 125 thin body. That was a bunch of money in those days - $125.00.

My mom moved up north to make more money to support the family, and I was left with my dad and I was just bounced around from one family to another.

Of all my travels in America, nothing has affected me more, nothing even close I have to tell you, than the time I have spent with the mothers and fathers who have lost their children to violence spilling across our borders, which we can solve, we have to solve it!

I spent many years not knowing where my dad was... Not knowing if my dad was alive, even. He turned up when I was 16 out of the blue.

My father died when I was two years old. But my mother was quite capable. She raised three children with his war pension which was peanuts. Yet we did not want for anything. We grew up with a certain parsimony, which is a nice thing. Then if life gives you more good, otherwise you get used to. I'm still thrifty.

I remember when I was 26. My father died when I was young and my mother didn't have a lot of money, so I thought, 'I want to own a flat by the time I'm 26.' So I worked towards that, literally trying to scrimp and save. But sometimes those plans don't go as you expect.

We just kept moving back and forth because my mother never had a job. We kept getting kicked out of every house we were in. I believe six months was the longest we ever lived in a house.

My parents would make huge crops of sometimes 55 to 60 bales of cotton. Being from a big family where there were 20 children, it wasn't too hard to pick that much cotton. But my father, year after year, didn't get too much money and I remember he just kept going.

My friends and I had taken dancing lessons, although none of us would ever admit it. In those depression days, a friend of my mother was trying to make a living by teaching dancing in the evening, in an upstairs dance studio. There was a back door to the place, and she arranged it so the young men could come up through the back way without being seen.

I inherited my ability from both parents; my mother's ability for spending money, and my father's ability for not earning it.

My mother told me I said to her, at age three, 'I'm going to go to Italy and get my father in a tractor.' 'You've never seen quite so fierce a little boy as you were,' she told me. She tried to explain that I couldn't get my father in a tractor. Apparently I looked at her and narrowed my eyes and said, 'In that case, I'm going in a double-decker bus,' and stomped off. Which is kind of funny, but it's very sad, as well.

I know it. I know I shall make beastly mistakes, Father-" "The world does not forgive mistakes so quickly, my girl." He sounds bitter and sad. "If the world will not forgive me," I say softly, "I shall have to learn to forgive myself." He nods in understanding. "And how will you marry? Or do you intend to marry?" I think of Kartik, and tears threaten. "I shall meet someone one day, as Mother found you.

If poverty is the mother of all crimes, lack of intelligence is the father.

As a mother, I - like everyone else - have to fill my gas tank in my car. I have to feed my family. I have to be able to make sure that I can keep a roof over their heads and, with things escalating the way they are, it's very difficult. People are losing their homes.

Poverty is a divine stepmother who does for youths what their own mothers were unable to do. It introduces them to frugality, to the world and to life.

Poverty is the step-mother of genius.

My father left us three times when I was between three and six. You just couldn't tell - suddenly one day he would leave and then maybe he would come back after six months without telling you why. And then maybe he would disappear again after a year and it's very difficult to take when you are four or five. You just don't know how to handle it and nobody in the family wants to talk about it. My mother didn't know how to tell us and she needed to work because we needed money to live.

My sense of humor was a tool for me getting past my mother and father separating, my older brother having cerebral palsy, and the bullies in the schoolyard. I had to make them laugh to keep them off my ass. I brought that to my professional career.

Just as the Depression left a generation of dads feeling they never had enough money, so father deprivation is leaving a generation of sons and daughters with different psychic wounds.