Peter De Vries Quotes

You know . . . a lot of kids at school hate their parents. Some of them got hit. And some of them got caught in the middle of wrong lives. Some of them were trophies for their parents to show the neighbors like ribbons or gold stars. And some of them just wanted to drink in peace.

I had a very angry father and was disconnected from my family.

My mother was physically and emotionally abusive. My father was an extremely cold man.

Children are often the silent victims of drug abuse.

My husband used to shout at my mother, 'What is wrong with your daughter? I'm married to a man.'

My father was a monster. A monster! I cut with my family when I was 23 and I never see them again.

My father who was there in the house, he wasn't at all a role model. And my mother, who was trying to protect me from him as best she could, she took me everywhere with her, which gave me a tremendous amount of sensitivity to the things women go through.

I loved my parents... but that can never change the fact that my father's violence ruined my childhood.

Daddy loves you, but he smacks you, and he can shout at you and smash things, but Daddy still loves you. So when you get into a relationship with someone who does all of that, why would it be unusual?

My brother and I tortured my mother growing up.

The only thing my old man ever gave me was a beating.

We're divorced from my father because he did some mean and scary things to us.

My mother didn't try to stab my father until I was six, but she must have shown signs of oddness before that.

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 have no memory at all of my mother shouting at me or at my sister. But I do have horrible memories of my father and the way he behaved. He was so tough on our mother.

I can understand a family that's imploding. I have experience of that in my own life.

My mother ran away from my father after 16 years of being married to him. She was 16 when she hooked up with him. She left him after having six kids.

Yes, I was a bully. But the scrapping on the streets was my way of dealing with the anger I felt towards my parents.

A foul-mouthed oaf, a drunken laborer lying in a drain, a beaten wife with blackened eyes and torn clothes, cannot be made romantic to a child who sees how other children suffer from bad-tempered parents, from drunken fathers to termagant mothers.

So you grow up with those messages, "You're a failure, you embarrass me, that's why I dress you in dark colors etc." or even when parents commit suicide, the child may think they were a failure as a child causing that. The majority of those people who weren't loved turn to drugs and alcohol and suicide.

Sociologists well understand that chaos at home causes violent behavior, educational failure and social alienation among children. Yet, many of us in America stay far, far away from this topic. That in itself is a national scandal. Bad parenting is gravely harming this nation.

Any kid who grew up with an alcoholic parent will tell you how nauseating it feels never to know what it will be like when you come home.

My mother used to go out on her own, and I used to have to keep a look out for my stepfather coming home.

It's extraordinary what children put up with. I happened to see two of my uncles put my father up against the wall of my grandmother's house and knock his teeth out, because he'd been unpleasant to my mother. The next day I went upstairs and found my father making a rather half-hearted attempt to gas himself.

My sister used to say I had a frail chest and she 'd beat me up all the time.