Because of my mother, who gave me definitions, I knew what I was committed to in life. ... I had the most satisfactory of childhoods because Mother, small, delicate-boned, witty, and articulate, turned out to be exactly my age.
My mother left behind three daughters when she went to America and started a new life. I certainly felt abandoned when my father died of a brain tumour; I felt he had abandoned me to this terrible, volatile mother and I had no protection.
I felt betrayed by him, extremely betrayed. He made me believe that if I followed a certain protocol of supplements and different drugs that I could become number 1 in the world.
We all get betrayed or we all betray. Life is so complex that it's almost impossible to avoid that. Betrayal is also a critical theme in all the world's great stories. If Christ had not been betrayed, would you have had the resurrection?
I was a child, and my mother was psychotic. She loved me, but I didn't really feel I had a mother. And when you live with somebody who is paranoid and thinks you're trying to kill them all the time, you tend to feel a little betrayed.
Winning the gold medal should have been the happiest day of my entire life, and it just wasn't. It felt like the saddest day of my life. Everyone was so angry with us, that Scott and I had fallen in love, because it was so unprofessional, and we were a disgrace and had betrayed everybody.
In the beginning, I was very passionate about it, I loved it. It wasn't until I actually reached the top that I became despondent. I felt like I was betrayed, betrayed by my family, my school. I felt very angry about the whole thing. You spend 12 hours a day, dancing, and then what?
When I made up my mind for Manchester, I felt I had betrayed Hiddink. I knew he wanted me to go to Chelsea, so I found it difficult.
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.
O admirable Mother of God! How many sins have I committed for which thou hast obtained pardon for me, and how many others would I have committed if thou hadst not preserved me? How often have I seen myself on the brink of Hell in obvious danger of falling into it but for thy most benign hand which saved me? How often would the Roaring Lion of Hell have devoured and swallowed up my soul had not the charity of thy heart opposed him? Alas! Without thee, my dearest and my all-good Mother, where should I be today? I should be in the fiery furnace of Hell from which I would never emerge!
In America, establishment politicians have betrayed our workers, they've betrayed our borders and, most of all, they've betrayed our freedoms.
[My mother] told me a little bit about the scene out there and I think, as a small child, I just always felt a connection to that history because my mother had described it to me.
I had been doing theater since I was a kid, so the stage really felt like home to me. It felt like the place where I trust myself the most in the world and felt the most confident.
I do not forgive myself for being born. It is as if creeping into this world, I had profaned a mystery, betrayed some momentous pledge, committed a fault of nameless gravity.
My mother was the making of me. She was so true and so sure of me, I felt that I had someone to live for - someone I must not disappoint. The memory of my mother will always be a blessing to me.
Having a baby had always seemed the easiest and most natural thing to do, and I had never felt - even in my most furtive days of coming out - that being gay would mean I could not become a mother.