Beatrice Dalle Quotes

Shortly after I turned 13, Child Welfare took me into care. I was sent to a residential centre where girls with behavioural problems were 'evaluated'. My time there comes back to me now only in flashes of smells, images and sounds.

But even though all this was going on at home, if someone had tried to take me away and put me in a children's home, I couldn't have handled it. Even though my mother was very brutal, it was my home.

I was put in White City children's home when I was 15.

Most incarcerated women have stories that are similar to mine. They suffered great trauma as children.

For some people, it is easier to command a nation, to send thousands to their deaths in unnecessary wars, to separate children from their families and inflict terrible suffering, than to process their own trauma and pain.

No matter how much poverty you grow up with, you shouldn't be subjected to violence and abuse.

There are so many people around young kids nowadays it can make it very tough and difficult - people who think they are going to care for those kids but do the opposite.

I came from a tough childhood. There was a lot of stuff that I'd actually forgotten or that I'd blocked or hidden away until I started addressing it.

I had a very rough upbringing.

That morning she pours Teacher's over my belly and licks it off. That afternoon she tries to jump out the window.

For Mum, life was fundamentally hell. You went blind, you got raped, people forgot your birthday, Nixon got elected, your husband fled with a blonde from Beckenham, and then you got old, you couldn't walk and you died.

I think of the security of cages. How violence, cruelty, oppression, become a kind of home, a familiar pattern, a cage, in which we know how to operate and define ourselves.

But the real tragedy was that 15 hadn't been colored yet.

I think I asphyxiated my children.

I'm overwhelmed by shame that the people who had the responsibility to take care of the tender ones violated that trust and caused them great pain.

With my old man I got no respect. When he took me hunting he gave me a three minute head start. Then on the way home he tied me to the fender and put the deer in the car.

I've never had a surprise birthday party. I've had every other type of surprise. I've had surprise beatings, surprise drug tests, surprise daughter I think.

Born down in a dead man's town, The first kick I took was when I hit the ground, You end up like a dog that's been beat too much, Till you spend half your life just covering up...

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.

I grew up in a school system . . . where nobody understood the meaning of learning disorder. In the West Indies, I was constantly being physically abused because the whipping of students was permitted.

I was an ugly child. I got lost on the beach. I asked a cop if he could find my parents. He said, 'I don't know. There's lots of places for them to hide'.

When Amos Moses was a boy his daddy would use him for alligator bait, tie a rope around his neck and throw him in the swamp.

Don't abuse yourself or withhold self-love or self-care.

Whores, instead of claiming what's rightfully yours. Pierced a hole in my heart from all the pain you caused, with no direction you left your first born lost.

I'll never forget you. Your husband will beat you with an extension cord and the bus will pull away leaving you standing there in tears, but you were my mother.