Brooke Hayward Quotes & Sayings

I had never confronted my parents with the true feelings I had for them, and I had certainly never expressed the depth of my feeling for my mother, being too selfish to try when I should have. — Brooke Hayward

Out of perverseness, I jumped on the subway and went down to a sound stage on Fourth Street to watch the shooting of Kay Doubleday's big strip scene in Mad Dog Coll, a gangster film that can still, to my embarrassment, be seen occasionally on late-night TV... Kay Doubleday was in my class at Lee Strasberg's; it was in the interest of art, I told myself, to watch her prance down a ramp, singing and stripping her heart out. — Brooke Hayward

This book is a personal memoir; but it is also a larger story-about carelessness and guilt, and the wreckage they can make of lives. — Brooke Hayward

I contemplated the phone for some time. Never had I heard her so oddly gay and forthright; as a matter of fact, we hadn't discussed sex since adolescence. Her entire inner life was secretive and mysterious, and no one dared violate it. She sent out powerful "No Trespassing" signals and I had learned to honor them. It crossed my mind that my sister was drunk. — Brooke Hayward

Our lives were a series of extremes. A thanksgiving of riches was bestowed on us at birth: grace and joy and a fair share of beauty; privilege and power. Those blessings which luck had overlooked could be bought. We seemed to exist above the squalor of suffering as most people know it. We were envied. But there were also more expectations... — Brooke Hayward

I wept for my family, all if us, my beautiful, idyllic, lost family. I wept for our excesses, our delusions and inconsistencies; not that we had cared too much or too little, although both were true, but that we had let such extraordinary care be subverted into extraordinary carelessness. We'd been careless with the best of our many resources: each other. It was as though we had taken for granted the fact that there would be more where we had come from too; another chance, another summer, another Brooke, Bridget or Bill. — Brooke Hayward

My parents were very unusual people, but it was more valuable to have other people say that than me. — Brooke Hayward

I wrote in a bedroom crowded with ghosts," Brooke Hayward says. "My mother would disapprove, and my father would be horrified. The moral of my book is that you pay for everything. They were rich, accomplished, famous and beautiful. We were drowned in privilege, yet it ended in all this hideous tragedy." (interview from People magazine (May 23, 1977) — Brooke Hayward

I remember at the reception you said to me, 'I'm the daughter of a father who's been married five times. Mother killed herself. My sister killed herself. My brother has been in a mental institution. I'm twenty-three and divorced with two kids.' I said, 'Brooke, either you've got to open the window right now'--we were on the tenth floor--'either you've got to open the window right now and jump out, or say "I'm going to live," because you're right, it's the worst family history that anybody ever had, and either you jump out the window or you live. — Brooke Hayward

I have a series of splintered relationships. Why should I get married again? It's a miserable compromise at best. But I believe in marriage and still have fantasies about it. — Brooke Hayward