Damian Lewis Quotes

I resisted writing a book for a long time because I didn't want to invade anyone else's privacy or hurt anyone or anger anyone.

I didn't grow up with my father in my life, and that bred a resentment in me, and it bred a mentality in me that made me very angry.

I just felt from personal observation that there is nothing more dislocated or alienated than a lifelong military person trying to cope in civilian life. It's like two completely separate planets.

If you had an essentially happy childhood, that tends to dwell with you.

Your memories from your early childhood seem to have such purchase on your emotions. They are so concrete.

I grew up in a military family. I was moved around from school to school, so people aren't always the most welcoming to new girls in school.

In common with many who have a brain injury, I initially lost my confidence and felt very vulnerable, as if a protective layer of skin had been stripped away.

The lives of prisoners of war after they are returned is almost never discussed, never explored.

I was an angry, angry child at times.

For a long time I thought I could deal with my anger and hostility on my own. But I couldn't. I denied that it had affected me, and yet I was so frantic on the inside with other people: I needed to be constantly reassured.

Up until the age of 9 or so, I was an incredibly happy, pretty well-adjusted, funny kid who made my parents laugh all the time. I was a bit of a clown, and I was really happy. And then my parents divorced, and I kind of turned into a different person.

I do go through a mini depression because one minute there are people yelling and screaming for me on stage and the next I'm at home and it's dead quiet. So it takes a while to come down.

When you start suppressing feelings at an early age, it hurts you down the road. Full expression of anger and pain is very important.

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.

Now when I was a teenager, I was angsty as any teenager was, but after 17 years of having a mother who was in and out of my life like a yo-yo and a father who was faceless, I was angry.

Sometimes our childhood experiences are emotionally intense, which can create strong mental models. These experiences and our assumptions about them are then reinforced in our memory and can continue to drive our behavior as adults.

Boarding school is a wicked thing.

An angry man is again angry with himself when he returns to reason.

I was neurotic and weird from an early age.

I've always turned my anger inwards towards self-destruction.

My parents divorced when I was seven. Because divorce is messy, for good or ill, they sent me to boarding school.

I think I've got better at expressing my emotions. But going through the education system I went through - I don't think you can go to boarding school and come out without feeling a little repressed - yes, it does leave its mark on you.

I've been fascinated with the subject of loss for a long time. In particular, I'm interested in how people, consciously or unconsciously, spend their lives replacing the things they lost when they were children.

Between the time I was 16 until I was about 20, the books I read were by people like Thomas Mann, James Baldwin, Thom Gunn, Elizabeth Bishop. All gay, of course, although I swear I didn't know that at the time. Yet all of them, it turned out, had had a parent who died during their childhood. Sexuality is nothing compared to that.

I have at last admitted that not only was I angry with my mother, but, in fact, I wanted to destroy her as a child. And I was so concerned to be a woman who was different from my mother that I had this vast architecture of rules.