Top 36 Quotes About Difficult Childhood
#1. One of the reasons that I think I do love to write is because I did have a difficult childhood and not so great teenage years. It always helped me escape from my problems.
Meg Cabot
#2. Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina is a coming-of-age novel about Ruth Ann (Bone) Boatwright and a difficult childhood made even harder by her violent and predatory stepfather.
Nancy Pearl
#3. I had a very difficult childhood. I was surrounded by people who had both parents, which made me feel different. Having a bit of a rougher existence early on, it made me appreciate the work ethic that my grandparents instilled in me.
George Lopez
#4. [A difficult childhood gave me] a kind of cocky confidence ... I could never have so little that I hadn't had less. It took away my fear.
Jacqueline Cochran
#5. My mother had a very difficult childhood, having seen her own mother kill herself. So she didn't always know how to be the nurturing mother that we all expect we should have.
Amy Tan
#6. I had been riding horses before my memory kicked in, so my life with horses had no beginning. It simply appeared from the fog of infancy. I survived a difficult childhood by traveling on the backs of horses, and in adulthood the pattern didn't change.
Monty Roberts
#7. I used to have a very difficult childhood because I was always the tallest girl in school, and everybody was staring at me and saying, 'You are very different.' Now, different is good.
Tao Okamoto
#8. There is a saying, 'it's never too late to have a happy childhood'. I'd rephrase that. I'd say, it's never too late to stop a difficult childhood from turning us into unhappy adults.
Sally Brampton
#9. I'm sure that my parents' behavior has entered my work, I'm sorry to say. I don't think you need to have a difficult childhood to be funny, but it helps.
Roz Chast
#10. I felt differently about her [Gypsy Rose Lee] during every phase of the research and writing process. Often, I felt incredibly sorry for her; she had an extremely difficult childhood and a complicated 'to say the least' relationship with her family, her mother especially.
Karen Abbott
#11. My dad was a terrible father. Dreadful. But he had a very difficult childhood. He was fostered - he never knew who his father was. So he had a very different attitude to family and kids. I don't have any issues. I'm not suffering some secret angst.
Mark Billingham
#12. My childhood proved to me that there could be no enjoyment of football without community. But it becomes difficult when this community is having problems with its identity. That's when we experience all possible forms of nationalist exaggeration.
Orhan Pamuk
#13. When you're hurt very badly in your childhood, the area that it has the greatest effect on is relationships. Once you feel like you can't trust people, once you feel like that they don't care about you, that they're really not going to take care of you, it gets very difficult in relationships.
Joyce Meyer
#14. The most difficult journey any of us ever take in our adulthood is the return to our parents' house. A home visit makes us recall all of the childhood events that formed us. Returning home reacquaints us with family members and our former self.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#15. We take the most difficult relationship of our childhood... and we MARRY it.
Rick Cormier
#16. I prayed to rediscover my childhood, and it has come back, and I feel that it is just as difficult as it used to be, and that growing older has served no purpose at all.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#17. Although he never speaks of how or what or why, I know that his childhood was difficult, that his parents broke his heart. Books and excess poundage are his insulation against pain.
Dean Koontz
#18. I'm very comfortable with the nature of life and death, and that we come to an end. What's most difficult to imagine is that those dreams and early yearnings and desires of childhood and adolescence will also disappear. But who knows? Maybe you become part of the eternal whatever.
Hugh Hefner
#19. Do you remember how this life of yours longed in childhood to belong to the grown-ups? I can see that it now longs to move on from them and is drawn to those who are greater yet. That is why it does not cease to be difficult, but also why it will not cease to grow.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#20. The knowledge that [he] had passed a loveless, institutionalized childhood and had escaped from his origins by prodigies of pure intellect, at the cost of all other human qualities, helped one to understand him - but not to like him.
Arthur C. Clarke
#21. I am now writing a book called 'Far Enough,' very loosely based on my childhood. This is difficult because it forces me to remember people I loved who are gone.
Nancy Farmer
#22. I had always shown childhood as something difficult, something you want to get the hell out of, but now I wanted to do a story that was the opposite, about that moment in time when you're in that world of discovery, doing what you want to do. That fleeting moment when you're in your zone.
Gilbert Hernandez
#23. I had a happy childhood, with many stimulations and support from my parents who, in postwar times, when it was difficult to buy things, made children's books and toys for us. We had much freedom and were encouraged by our parents to do interesting things.
Christiane Nusslein-Volhard
#24. A lot of my childhood memories involve walking home in floods of tears. At that age, feeling unpopular is difficult to handle.
Rachel Stevens
#25. Reading was such a formative part of my childhood (along with 'Loony Tunes'), that it is difficult to pin point the most influential book. But, under an interrogation light I would probably have to say 'Jane Eyre' by Charlotte Bronte.
Ann-Marie MacDonald
#27. Sometimes I would be very upset because my memories are very murky from my childhood, but there are certain emotional memories or emotional truths that are painful, and things that I know to be the case and I had to nail them down, and that was difficult.
Justin Torres
#28. A person's integrity develops early in life. Once formed, it is difficult to alter, change, or improve.
Scott K. Edinger
#29. I had spent my childhood and the better part of my early adulthood trying to understand my mother. She had been an extraordinarily difficult person, spiteful and full of rage, with a temper that could flare, seemingly out of nowhere, scorching everything and everyone who got in its way. [pp. 40-41]
Dani Shapiro
#30. From my childhood, obedience was something I could not get out of my system. When I entered the armed service at the age of twenty-seven, I found being obedient not a bit more difficult than it had been during my life to that point. It was unthinkable that I would not follow orders.
Adolf Eichmann
#31. Fogs are like dreams that feed the soul, and without their mysterious embrace, childhood, courtship, poetry and the composition of music become all the more difficult.
Michael Leunig
#32. Past certain ages or certain wisdoms it is very difficult to look with wonder; it is best done when one is a child; after that, and if you are lucky, you will find a bridge of childhood and walk across it.
Truman Capote
#33. It is difficult to remember just how formal middle-class life was in the 1930's and '40s. I wore a suit and tie at home from the age of 18. One dressed for breakfast. One lived in a very formal way, and emotions were not paraded. And my childhood was not unusual.
J.G. Ballard
#34. Do you recall, from your childhood on, how very much this life of yours has longed for greatness? I see it now, how from the vantage point of greatness it longs for even greater greatness. That is why it does not let up being difficult, but that is also why it will not cease to grow.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#35. Very few old folk are happy, Irina. Most of them are poor, aren't healthy, and have no family. It's the most fragile and difficult stage of life, more so than childhood, because it grows worse day by day, and there is no future other than death.
Isabel Allende
#36. It is very difficult for people to believe the simple fact that every persecutor was once a victim. Yet it should be very obvious that someone who was allowed to feel free and strong from childhood does not have the need to humiliate another person.
Alice Miller
