Gary Chapman Quotes

Our children are the only people on whom we can safely take revenge for what was done to us.

My father is the reason I am the way I am today. He's why I acted up and he's why I prayed to be the opposite of him. We made up before he died but I vowed to never raise my kids like how he raised me.

I think my biggest focus for myself is learning how to continue to get through the trauma that my father has caused in my life.

I grew up in a dysfunctional family.

My father's violence is the central fact of my art and my life.

The great thing about all my siblings is we all agree we had a horrendous childhood. It's not like it doesn't affect us now; it affects us every day, in everything we do.

I was never taught how to raise a child, because I wasn't raised properly.

My father rebelled ferociously against his conservative upbringing where his father physically abused him.

My mother's feeling about men in general were always a bit of a mystery to me. She had difficulties in Puerto Rico with the men in her life. Her brothers abused her. It's very easy to be judgmental, but more often than not, there are mitigating circumstances, and children are not usually aware of those.

I've seen the best and worst of times. My parents were divorced when I was a child. I was brought up by my father.

I think there are so many children being brought up in some form of violence, be it violence of poverty or sexism or racism or homophobia or transphobia. That violence takes a life to transform or overcome. I don't think people should be spending their lives dealing with that. I think people should be thriving, playing, creating, evolving.

It's impossible to expect polite behavior from people who've never witnessed it.

I think so much of my early life, even though I grew up White and middle class, I was completely shattered by the horrifically violent atmosphere I grew up in. I am a consequence of violence. That opened a door to many realities that I would not have experienced had I not survived what I did.

Parents can ruin children, and sometimes that's a learned behavior. Sometimes you can't blame your parents for it, sometimes you can. I think to me, that's what the whole paradox is, is people that have children that don't even know how to raise them.

I've been so mistreated by male authority in my life that I had a terrible time in my marriage trying to be a submissive wife. I wanted to rule the roost in everything. And it wasn't even really that I was rebellious; I was afraid of being hurt. And I think that a lot of people that choose these alternative lifestyles, I think it's because they've been hurt somewhere along the line very badly.

Let's just say that I was raised by my grandparents.

I think we all are people that are the product of our backgrounds. It's wrong to think that you're not.

Seeing my son getting roughed up by the police is not fun. It brings back memories of when I got roughed up by them. He grew up totally different than how I grew up, and to me, he shouldn't have to go through that.

I think people who come from abuse and/or people who have mental illnesses, have terrible self-esteem problems.

The one thing we can all relate to is family, and family has its traumas sometimes. Sometimes things don't go well for people. Sometimes things are tough. So everybody kind of knows someone who's been in this situation before, and I think that's what makes it work.

The thing with psychoanalysis is I know basically what happened in my childhood. I know where things went wrong and I know what my mother said at one point and what my father said at one point.

No child is born a delinquent. They only became that way if nobody loved them when they were kids. Unloved children grow up to be serial murderers or alcoholics.

He was the boy that made mix tapes with themes and hand-colored covers until the day he hit my sister and stopped crying.

Let's start working towards wellness, a healing in our community, a healing in relationships, so male and female can finally sit down and understand that that young boy or young girl saw behavior exhibited by their parents that was negative and abusive and they're going to pass it on.

I think so much of what informs us as performers is what we had to endure as kids growing up. I was the youngest in my family. I always got a lot of attention.