Maureen Johnson Quotes

Family breakdown is blighting the lives of far too many children.

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

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.

Families, generally, suck. And I say that as someone who, like my husband, had parents who proved the proverbial exception to the rule.

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

Every family is dysfunctional, whether you want to admit it or not.

Everybody has some dysfunction in their families.

There was a lot of turmoil in my family.

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

My family's messed up, for real.

Why is the awfulness of families such a popular reason for starting another?

Mum's serial misbehavior over the years had driven me, despairing, to write her scolding - occasionally scalding letters.

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.

I can say, out of my whole life, my dad left the situation at an early age for me; he left. But my mum turned her back on me.

Families just have so many secrets and dysfunctions.

Airing the family's laundry can make people upset.

My parents used to fight a lot, and I think they fought a lot at night, and they would turn the television up to hide the sound of their fighting.

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 a very rocky, difficult, emotional childhood with my parents.

Everybody has a dysfunctional family.

My father kicked me out of the house by the time I was 16.

When I was a little girl, my family was extremely close, loving and really happy, and then overnight, things just became a nightmare, and instead of them becoming a nightmare and getting better, they became a nightmare and just kept getting worse.

My family is broken.

I grew up in a broken home.