Toyah Willcox Quotes

Bambi has a profound effect on children because it's about losing your mother.

Most of me was glad when my mother died. She was a handful, but not in a cute, festive way. More in a life-threatening way, that had caused me a long time ago to give up all hope of ever feeling good about having had her as a mother.

Despite everything my mom and doctor and dad have said to me about blame, I can't stop thinking what I know. And I know that my aunt Helen would still be alive today if she just bought me one present like everybody else. She would be alive if I were born on a day that didn't snow.

I had a very distant relationship with my father. It was always just me and my mother. It was a shattering blow when she died. I was 16.

I, personally, have had to rise above my feelings of inferiority to my sister Anjelica, not to mention feeling sorry for myself because I lost my mother so young.

Being the 8th out of 10 kids, and being the one that stayed in trouble, I sort of became a momma's boy.

I didn't write about my mother much in the third year after she died. I was still trying to get my argument straight: When her friends or our relatives wondered why I was still so hard on her, I could really lay out the case for what it had been like to be raised by someone who had loathed herself, her husband, even her own name.

My sister was a twin, and the other baby died in childbirth, and I was three at the time, and I always kind of thought it haunted me. It was a weird thing. My dad was an ob-gyn, and so it was confusing that the other baby didn't come home from the hospital.

My sister died and my mum was really distant, as you do - you don't expect your offspring to die before you. I thought I was bulletproof up until that stage.

I had written two or three books before my husband noticed that in every one of them a family member was missing. He suggested that it was because my father's death, when I was five, utterly changed my world. I can only suppose he is right and that this is the reason I am drawn to a narrative where someone's life is changed by loss.

I had an older brother who passed away recently, an older sister and a younger brother.

In 2008, while the film version of my book 'Choke' was coming to market, my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. That meant that I had to appear in public to promote a comedy about a son trying to save his dying mother - the plot of Choke - while privately I was caring for my own dying mother. It was torture.

My mother never breast fed me, she told me she only liked me as a friend.

I think that when something happens when you're growing up, like a death or divorce, it does open the world slightly because things aren't as straightforward.

I know a lot of people who've lost their siblings and blame themselves.

Even losing my mother, I wanted my mother. That's who you want instinctually when you're having a hard time.

I was only a young girl of 13 when my father passed away from a sudden heart attack, leaving us unprepared to take on life without him. We had been protected from life's challenges so far. But without warning, all that changed overnight.

Growing up without my parents by my side is a weight I still carry today.

My dad died 11 years ago, I don't see much of my brothers, and I rarely speak to my mum. I don't hold a grudge, but being separated in those early years clearly had an impact. Our relationship didn't develop as it ought to.

I lost a brother and a sister, and I came down with rheumatic fever.

My dad passed away when I was 10.

Any child who has lost a parent probably knows every single photograph in existence of that parent.

My dad was a serious alcoholic, and ultimately, that's why he died. When you're a child of someone who struggled with things like that, you look for the common thread. Is there a pattern? Is there an inheritance of pathology in some way? That haunts me.

I had a real bad attitude after my dad passed of liver cancer. I was 9, and we were really close.

When my dad passed, I felt like I had to grow up very quickly.