Childhood Suffering Quotes

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.

Childhood is the one prison from which there's no escape, the one sentence from which there's no appeal. We all serve our time.

I take the most wrenchingly painful moments of my life, brush them off and present them for the amusement of others. Luckily for me, my childhood was torture.

When I was a child I experienced moments of not wanting to see the ugliness, not wanting to see not being wanted. This lack of love went into my eyes and into my mind.

Love and pain become one in the same in the eyes of a wounded child.

I grew up as a really sick kid; I had really bad childhood asthma and was at home all the time in New York.

My childhood was full of deep sorrows - colic, whooping-cough, dread of ghosts, hell, Satan, and a Deity in the sky who was angry when I ate too much plumcake.

No social problem is as universal as the oppression of the child

Oprah is signed on to help, and a lot of celebrity friends have agreed to help me raise money for Make-A-Wish. We want to make the world a better place for innocent children. I cried my heart out when my father died from cancer. I wish I was smarter, wiser like a doctor, to save these children from dying.

Mother Goose, she's on the skids. Sure ain't happy, neither are the kids.

Mom always said people worried too much about their children. Suffering when you are young is good for you, she said. It immunized your body and your soul.

I was just a very torn child, very wounded in so many areas, with no family support. I happened to the be the fifth child of my family. So everybody was already grown and had left home already.

I always try to see things with children's eyes. Are they happy? Sad? What do they need? Everywhere I went, I realized that children are society's victims ... We have a duty to speak to political leaders, to influence people to give these children a better future.

I guess I always knew there was something wrong with me, but I thought it was because of my father, or my mother, and the pain they bequeathed to me like a family heirloom, handed down from generation to generation. - Tobias Eaton

I was miserable as a kid.

The bottomless bitter misery of childhood: how little even now it is understood. Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair.

Worse than the ordinary, miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.

I went through pain as a child so my children wouldn't have to.

The child was diseased at birth, stricken with a hereditary ill that only the most vital men are able to shake off. I mean poverty-the most deadly and prevalent of all diseases.

I have two cousins with juvenile diabetes. They both contracted the disease before the age of 5, and it was so heartbreaking watching them go through daily blood tests and injections. It is such a difficult disease to live with and requires constant attention; a tough thing to explain to a child.

A harrassed and dubious childhood under the hand of a well-meaning but barbarous mother's help from County Armagh led me to think of the North of Ireland as prison and the South as a land of escape.

Hurts of childhood live on; in one form or other they are there to the end.

If we are to save our children then we must become people they will look up to. Children need heroes now more than ever because the poor children of this nation live with monsters every day. Monsters deprive them of heat in the winter, they don't fix their sinks and toilets, they let garbage pile up in their hallways, they kick them out of their homes, they beat them, shoot them, stab them-sometimes to death-they rape their bodies and their minds. Sometimes they lurk under the stairs. They scuttle around in the dark; you hear them in the walls gnawing, squeaking, occasionally biting a little finger.

My childhood was the worst thing on earth. I'm very lucky to have gotten out of that, but I spent 15 years of my life being so incredibly emotionally abused.