Maggie Stiefvater Quotes

I don't think there's anything worse than your parents being alive and telling you to go give them some money and just act like they're dead.

My mother wasn't any better than my father.

My father was never around, and my mother used to worry that the kids won't grow up to be connected to him.

Any kid who grew up with an alcoholic parent will tell you how nauseating it feels never to know what it will be like when you come home.

Of course, screwed up families are not the exclusive province of the famous. Still, most families get to screw up in private.

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

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.

My parents got divorced when I was nine months old, and my father would only pop in and see me once a year, if that. I don't have much contact with him.

I didn't feel a strong bond with the parents who raised me, and I had anything but a happy childhood. My mother was overly sensitive; my father, ascetic. I was neither. I felt as if I were living with complete strangers. I suspect that my parents felt the same way.

I came from a dysfunctional family - very dysfunctional. And my father used to find great humor in throwing me down the stairs.

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

I have a very non-existent, dysfunctional relationship with my biological mother.

My mother, Carole Hedges, was my world until she walked out of our house when I was 7. Actually, she didn't walk out. Alcohol walked her out.

Me and my mum didn't see eye-to-eye for a lot of years, and I've never really felt connected with my dad, because he wasn't there.

I love my mum and dad, but they were shocking providers and carers.

I probably gave up on my dad when I was born.

There are ways of being abandoned even when your parents are right there.

You know . . . a lot of kids at school hate their parents. Some of them got hit. And some of them got caught in the middle of wrong lives. Some of them were trophies for their parents to show the neighbors like ribbons or gold stars. And some of them just wanted to drink in peace.

I knew how much it hurt to be the daughter of people who can't see you, not even if you are standing in front of them stomping your feet.

A lot can happen [because of the dysfunctional family]. People don't look at that. They think, "Oh, my kids are going to be fine. My kids are resilient." But at a certain point, the damage starts. They start to feel pain - and when they feel bad, they start to take painkillers. We want to kill the pain.

I'll just go over to the Duke's," I said. "Her parents already told me I could stay there. I'll go over there and open all my presents, and talk about how my parents neglect me, and then maybe the Duke will give me some of her presents because she feels so bad about how my mom doesn't love me.

What's so sad is when we're younger, if you have a bad parent, that is normal to you and that's what you think of as healthy.

I grew to resent the way my father treated his furniture like children, and his children like furniture.

The art of not experiencing feelings. A child can experience her feelings only when there is somebody there who accepts her fully, understands her, and supports her. If that person is missing, if the child must risk losing the mother's love of her substitute in order to feel, then she will repress emotions.

So You Want to Know All about her. Who she really is. (Was?) Why she swerved off the high road. Hard left to nowhere, recklessly indifferent to me. Hunter Seth Haskins, her firstborn son. I've been chocking that down for nineteen years. Why did she go on her mindless way, leaving me spinning in a whirlwind of her dust?