Childhood Adversity Quotes

My father died when I was 14, and my mother juggled two jobs so she could make sure my sister and I were OK.

When you're adopted, no matter what, you've got issues with unconditional love. And you find out you're the product of the worst situation for a young girl to be in and start her life, and I'm so grateful that my birth mom made the decision she made. She came from a rough situation.

My mother had me when she was 15. My father died before I was born. So my mother was a teenage widow, and she used herself as her greatest example so I wouldn't end up in her position.

The truth about childhood, as many of us have had to endure it, is inconceivable, scandalous, painful. Not uncommonly, it is monstrous. Invariably, it is repressed. To be confronted with this truth all at once and to try to integrate it into our consciousness, however ardently we may wish it, is clearly impossible.

Hate builds up from the childhood when your world was a slum, but you haven't got the right to blow it to kingdom come.

I don't react to a tragic happening any more. I took so many bad things as a kid and some people think I don't care about anything. It's just too hard for me to get emotional. I can't cry no more.

... miserable and almost friendless objects are ushered upon the stage of life, inheriting those vices, which idleness, and the bad example of their parents naturally produce.

I grew up poor in India, and there were days when we struggled to find food and other basic necessities. Our mother worked odds and ends jobs to keep the family together and educate us.

I'm from Brooklyn. I grew up very poor- seven people, four rooms. My dad had no education.

Children surviving childhood is my obsessive theme and my life's concern.

As a child I experienced firsthand the severe effects of poverty and illiteracy, especially upon women and children. My parents taught me the importance of education and that it was a key to improving an individual's life.

I had a really hard time growing up; we were a large family, and we didn't have much money at home.

I was only 13 years old when I was forced to face the fragility of my own life. A routine surgery landed me in a medically induced coma for two weeks with a mere 1% chance of surviving. But survive I did.

Everything was an escape for me when I was younger. I had a tumultuous home life thanks to the unsavoury characters my mom would marry. My brother just sort of evaded, and my dad lived far away, so I was left alone.

Life at home wasn't very good and I had really left by the time I was 16 and didn't go back until after Cambridge when I went to look after my mother when she was dying.

You get tough when you grow up unloved. People described me as a boyish girl - rather shy, but I didn't show it. I had an attitude. I was rather wild. I lied a lot because I knew the alternative was to be punished. As I got older I realised I didn't have to lie any more and it was a nice feeling. I could be myself.

...after all, who isn't a survivor from the wreck of childhood?

My mom and dad both worked when I was little... My mom, her mom died when she was 11, so she had a rough childhood as well. She put herself through college in three years at the University of Texas - while working a job to pay for it.

My mom Marina and I were poor and hungry. We could sometimes not afford to eat - seriously. We lived together in a small town, called Berdyansk, in Ukraine. I was an only child. I don't think we would have survived if there had been more kids.

I grew up in a broken home, working class. My paternal grandmother raised me and my brother; my father was with us, and my mother lived in Jersey.

I was born to a black childhood of confusion and poverty. The memory of that beginning influences my work today, It is impossible now to photograph a hungry child without remembering the hunger of my old childhood.

I'm raised by a single mom and didn't have pops around for the most part of my life. And she, by any means necessary, gave me the best opportunities that she knew how to give me.

Everyone picked on me in school because I was in foster care.

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.

When I was a boy, we were the only Jewish family in a terribly anti-Semitic neighborhood. Those streets weren't any fun for us but our parents never found that out. In a way, you avoid telling your parents what happened to you during those days.