Jeanette Winterson Quotes

My father and mother split and I never saw my father until I was 20, nor did I see much more of my mother.

It is hard work to be good when you are very little and very hungry, and have many sticks to beat you, and no mother's lips to kiss you.

I've overcome neglect and deprivation, abandonment and abuse.

My father, my Mormon father, took off when I was a young man and, or actually very young, I was like six years old, so a young boy.

I didn't have much of a childhood, but that's O.K. I have a livelihood.

One win­ter, when I was 12, my older brother Frank (20) said to my father, 'We want you out of the house. We don't want any­thing other than the house we live in. We don't want any­thing from you. Just leave.' And he left.

When I was 3, my father stopped coming home.

'Who was your mother?' 'Never had none!' said the child, with another grin. 'Never had any mother? What do you mean? Where were you born?' 'Never was born!' 'Do you know who made you?' 'Nobody, as I knows on,' said the child, with a short laugh. . . . 'I 'spect I grow'd.'

I learned early on that family, as far as my mother and father, were not an option.

People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying school masters; the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years. Above all -- we were wet.

My childhood was bad. No father. Mother was greedy and brought me up awful - never made me breakfast once. I don't want to get started. One story is worse than another.

As my own father was sick, and miserably tied to his invalid's chair, he would have been abandoned had not an old servant performed for him a so-called service of love. My mother gave parties while he was perishing in solitude, and amused herself while he was suffering bitter agonies

Freud, Sigmund: A man so dissatisfied with his own mother and father that he devoted his life to convincing everyone who would listen — or better still, talk — that their parents were just as bad.

They may already know too much about their mother and father--nothing being more factual than divorce, where so much has to be explained and worked through intelligently (though they have tried to stay equable). I've noticed this is often the time when children begin calling their parents by their first names, becoming little ironists after their parents' faults. What could be lonelier for a parent than to be criticized by his child on a first-name basis?

You show me a boy who brings a snake home to his mother and I'll show you an orphan.

[On writing her first poem at age eight:] An ode to my dead mother and father, who were both alive and pretty pissed off.

I was born out of wedlock. Nobody brought me up.

Which means she to deceive, father or mother?

My mother never had time for me. When you're the middle child in a family of five million, you don't get any attention.

She was the murderous mother who cut us to the bone but left us alive, left us naked and bewildered as wrinkled newborn babies, as blind puppies, as sun-starved newly hatched baby snakes. She left us a dark Gulf and salt-burned land. She left us to learn to crawl. She left us to salvage. Katrina is the mother we will remember until the next mother with large, merciless hands, committed to blood, comes.

My father? My father left when I was quite young. Well actually, he was asked to leave. He had trouble metabolizing alcohol.

When my old man wanted sex, my mother would show him a picture of me.

You know what I mean. I'm telling you I was stupid over it. I thought it was about trying so hard to survive that you didn't have the time to be a good parent. Obviously, that's not it. Because you and I, we're both...wealthy in love.

My father died when I was 10; my sister got polio a couple of years later and was paralyzed. So there I was - my sister in a wheel chair, my father gone, and my mother a quiet little mouse. You see, it was the '30s in the South, so my mother was not prepared to cope. So I was scared to death. And being that scared, everything afterward became a struggle not to go down the drain. Struggling became a way of life for me.