Joe Strummer Quotes

Mother, you had me, but I never had you.

I went to boarding school at seven and cried and cried.

Somewhere, sometime I'd stopped expecting my father to father.

I was sent to boarding school at the age of ten. I think Mummy was trying to protect me in her own way, trying to spare me living through the day-to-day reality of her illness.

Being sent away to school was no different from my biological mother giving me away.

I was just a very torn child, very wounded in so many areas, with no family support. I happened to the be the fifth child of my family. So everybody was already grown and had left home already.

I wasn't happy at all as a child. I was very privileged and knew extraordinary people, but I felt very lonely: my mother thought I was extremely difficult and my grandmother was extremely severe.

I was taken to a boarding school when I was four years old and taken away from my mother and my father, my grandparents, who I stayed with most of the time, and just abruptly taken away and then put into the boarding school, 300 miles away from our home.

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

All of us growing up have come to terms with too much pain. Although we repress it, it's still there. The worst pain is that of not being wanted, of realising your parents do not need you in the way you need them.

Heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy.

There is a movie called 'My Dog Skip,' starring my 'Outsiders' costar Diane Lane. I do not recommend it. If you have a child, particularly one about to leave home, watching this film is to be emotionally waterboarded.

The lonely wanderer, who watches by the seashore the waves that roll between him and his home, talks of cruel facts, material barriers that, just because they are material, and not ideal, shall be the irresistible foes of his longing heart.

I felt so alone as a boy because no one wanted to be friends with me.

I lost my childhood. I didn't play football or video games. Or have birthdays or the love of a family.

At school I'd want to be so small that nobody could see me, and so my work depicts and reflects me - what it felt like to grow up in a world of pain.

I think that's like the age-old psychological core issue for any situation. Anybody who has had an experience with a parent that is absent, it's going to manifest.

Moms and dads don't last forever. If you've got unfinished business, we need to face that, and that's not easy. Every child wants to love their mother and their father. Love is the most important thing, and when they feel rejected and unloved, that hole can never be filled by anyone else.

I remember being two, maybe, and hearing my mum's typewriter in the other room and sticking my hands under the door and screaming, 'Mum! Mum!' I was so angry she wouldn't come out. I got used to it quickly.

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 spent a lot of my childhood saying goodbye because I went to boarding school. I didn't resent my parents for sending me there so young as I understood the limitations of the education system in Africa, where we lived at the time.

I don't know the statistics, but I wouldn't be surprised to find out that a disproportionate number of comics come from broken homes.

I used to travel a lot as a kid and when I first moved to England I felt lonely and my parents were splitting up at the time.

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.