Robert Wagner Quotes

I was bullied as a boy - lots of kids are, but hopefully most of us get on with our lives and grow up.

What can I say? I deal with it. I think I have come to terms with my absolutely hateful and vile childhood. No, I have, really. But I did hate it at the time. I resented it. There were elements of it that were positively Dickensian.

I can look at myself in the mirror every night knowing I've never ever pretended to be someone I know I'm not for the sake of showbiz industry. I believe that it's important to live by your truth in order to be able to sleep peacefully when you rest your head at night. I've gone off and taken breaks, not necessarily by choice, but life has a way of giving you breaks, even when you don't want them, especially in this industry. So, I've had a chance to raise my children and to be a mom, and to come back to do more in film and television. I really cannot complain.

A child who is disillusioned abruptly, by his peers or siblings, being ridiculed for his faith and imagination, may choose never to believe in anything- tangible or intangible- again. To never trust or wonder.

The knowledge that you were beaten and that this, as your parents tell you, was for your own good may well be retained (although not always), but the suffering caused by the way you were mistreated will remain unconscious and will later prevent you from empathizing with others. This is why battered children grow up to be mothers and fathers who beat their offspring

Even where love has run thin the child's soul musters strength... the rush of purpose to make a life worth living past abandonment building the layers up again over the torn hole.

As a child, he had hardened his heart and learned to take their punches. He had learned to spit back and take down anyone who cast a jaundiced eye or who made a comment about either him, his mother, or his sister. He’d told himself that he didn’t need anyone’s love or caring. And so he had learned to live like a feral animal, always ready to strike out when someone tried to touch him.

So you go away from where you were afraid. Some stay; some go; it's a big difference, leaving the humiliations of childhood, the morbid fear. We didn't have much to say to each other, the ones that left and the ones that stayed. Children get shamed by fear but you can't tell the adults that; they don't care. They make children into dead things like they are. If there's something left alive in you, you run. You run from the poor little child on her knees; fear burned the skin off all right; she's still on her knees, dead and raw and tender.

He doesn’t love me. He might still love me as I was at fifteen, when I didn’t know any better. When I trusted everyone. I’m not that person any more. He’s just a boy. He was the first to really hurt me, but he’s just a boy. There were a lot of them.

'Who was your mother?' 'Never had none!' said the child, with another grin. 'Never had any mother? What do you mean? Where were you born?' 'Never was born!' 'Do you know who made you?' 'Nobody, as I knows on,' said the child, with a short laugh. . . . 'I 'spect I grow'd.'

This ability to exist in pieces is what some adults call resilience. And I suppose in some way it is a kind of resilience, a horrible resilience that makes adults believe children forget trauma.

Beating heroin is child's play compared to beating your childhood.

It was then that Hook bit him. Not the pain of this but its unfairness was what dazed Peter. It made him quite helpless. He could only stare, horrified. Every child is affected thus the first time he is treated unfairly. All he thinks he has a right to when he comes to you to be yours is fairness. After you have been unfair to him he will love you again, but he will never afterwards be quite the same boy. No one ever gets over the first unfairness; no one except Peter.

All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.

Comedy comes from pain, and no one knows that better than this woman Roseanne Barr—who was molested as a child. Uch. That poor molester. Roseanne never got over it. She felt violated. She had trust issues. She never got the candy he promised her.

A Russian child asked his mother : "does God know we don't believe in Him?"

I really didn't have any childhood. When you don't know where you are going to sleep for the night.. or find food.. you can't think with the mind of a child. You have to think with the mind of a man.

[On writing her first poem at age eight:] An ode to my dead mother and father, who were both alive and pretty pissed off.

I often went to bed without supper cause I hated my mother's cooking. So, to go to bed without supper was not a torture to me. If she was gonna hurt me, she'd make me eat.

I'm sure everything has a bearing on what I'm doing. My family is a lower-middle-class family, there's lots of children, seven brothers, two sisters grew up together, fighting with each other, went to school. My mother went to school up to 4th grade. My father went to school up to 8th grade. So that's about the education level we had in the family.

I believe that this neglected, wounded, inner child of the past is the major source of human misery.

But somewhere within each of us, buried at varying depths depending on the age and degree of neglect or abuse, shame or coercion we endured, there is a resistant, daydreaming, rebellious, creative, unique child -- a true self who is waiting.

I saw Todd Bridges talk about being abused on Oprah. Something that he said, or an expression that he made that gave me that little boost I needed to be open about it and to talk about it as transparently as I did. When I told my wife, she couldn't believe it. She was petrified, because it's such a no-no, taboo, a hands-off subject. But I'd have to say hearing Todd Bridges on Oprah was my watershed moment.

I thank thee, Mother Nature, that thou hast put ingenuity enough in the brain of a child, when attacked by a brutal parent, to throw up a little breastwork in the shape of a lie.

We know about the issue of children being sold and adopted and taken away but what is so extraordinary is how these two people come through something like - how both of them do, in actual fact. I think that she's one of the most considerable people I've ever met, Philomena.