Parents Quotes

“It’s especially hard to admit that you made a mistake to your parents, because, of course, you know so much more than they do.”

“Mom pointed her chopsticks at me. ‘You see?’ she said. ‘Right there. That’s exactly what I’m saying. You’re way too easily embarrassed. Your father and I are who we are. Accept it.’ ‘And what am I supposed to tell people about my parents?’ ‘Just tell the truth,’ Mom said. ‘That’s simple enough.‘”

“Good wombs have borne bad sons.”

“That’s what my dad is like-he really disappeared a long time ago, which is maybe why it didn’t bother me much.”

“He was a complicated man, my father; a man of great mental capacity who was driven to succeed yet humbled into mediocrity by his own emotional limitations.”

“Deprived of Victim, Mom and Dad holler at each other. I turn up the music to drown out the noise.”

“There’s nothing like your mother’s sympathetic voice to make you want to burst into tears.”

″‘Don’t tell me from genetics. What’ve they got to do with it?’ said Crowley. ‘Look at Satan. Created as an angel, grows up to be the Great Adversary. Hey, if you’re going to go on about genetics, you might as well say the kid will grow up to be an angel. After all, his father was really big in Heaven in the old days. Saying he’ll grow up to be a demon just because his dad became one is like saying a mouse with its tail cut off will give birth to tailless mice. No. Upbringing is everything. Take it from me.‘”

She frowned because she remembered that her father and mother had never talked to her about anything in particular. Certainly they had never told her things.

“Mom sobbed something into Dad’s chest that I wish I hadn’t heard, and that I hope she never finds out that I did hear. She said, ‘I won’t be a mom anymore.‘”

“Children have an amazing ability to perceive this need in the parent(s). A child seems to know it unconsciously. By taking on the role of supplying his shame-based parents narcissistic gratification, the child secures love and a sense of being needed and not abandoned.”

“Good children are defined as meek, considerate, unselfish and perfectly law-abiding. Such rules allow no place for vitality, spontaneity, inner freedom, inner independence and critical judgment. These rules cause parents, even well-intentioned ones, to abandon their children. Such abandonment creates the toxic shame I’ve been describing.

“Time ensures children never know their parents young.”

“My dad was a man of infinite varieties of bitterness, rage, distaste. In my lifelong struggle to avoid becoming him, I’d developed an inability to demonstrate much negative emotion at all… It was a constant problem: too much control or no control at all.”

“I figured if anything happened to Mom, I would be alone on this planet.”

“To have a child is the greatest honor and responsibility that can be bestowed upon any living being.”

“When and where you are born, what your parents did for a living, and what the circumstances of your upbringing were make a significant difference in how well you do in the world.”

“For every woman who juggles a child in her arms, there is one who yearns for the cry of a child to comfort. For every family that fills a home, there are those who will never become parents.”

“A mother cannot give birth to a child and not lose a piece of herself. The child takes a part of the parent with them, holding it as their own. Whether it be their heart or soul, they are now connected for always.”

“No matter what, you don’t talk back to your parents, teachers, elders.”

“Supposedly, he had a great-great-grandfather who had stolen a pig from a one-legged Gypsy, and she put a curse on him and all his descendants. Stanley and his parents didn’t believe in curses, of course, but whenever anything went wrong, it felt good to be able to blame someone.”

“In future feminist movement we need to work harder to show parents the ways ending sexism positively changes family life. Feminist movement is pro-family. ”

“My mom says it’s time for me to give up now, and that what I’m doing is futile.”

″ When he smiled he showed a row of strong white teeth. ‘God never made a finer woman than my mother and my daddy’s heart was pure gold,’ he said.”

“When I was 5, he said, my family forgot & left me at the fair. I wandered around in the bright sounds & smells of hot sawdust & cotton candy for hours. It was already too late by the time my parents found me. I haven’t been fit for decent society since.”

“Nobody -- that’s my name. Nobody -- so my mother and father call me, all my friends.”

Like a girl, a baby running after her mother, begging to be picked up, and she tugs on her skirts, holding her back as she tries to hurry off—all tears, fawning up at her, till she takes her in her arms… That’s how you look, Patroclus, streaming live tears.

“When one parent dies, the world is dramatically altered, absolutely, but you still have another one left. When that second parent dies, it’s the loss of all ties, and where does that leave you? You lose your history, your sense of connection to the past.”

“There’s something completely unnerving about seeing your parents upset. I suppose it’s because they’re supposed to be the strong ones, but that’s not just it. Ever since people are kids they use their parents as some sort of measurement for how bad a situation is.”

“All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.”

“Parents are like God because you wanna know they’re out there, and you want them to think well of you, but you really only call when you need something.”

“Have my parents forgotten that they were young once? Apparently, they have. At any rate, they laugh at us when we’re serious, and they’re serious when we’re joking.”

“The innocent and helpless creature bestowed on them by heaven, whom to bring up to good, and whose future lot it was in their hands to direct to happiness or misery, according as they fulfilled their duties towards me.”

“It occurred to me that the reason my parents had no money was me. I’d sapped the family savings with Phalanxifor copays, and Mom couldn’t work because she had taken on the full-time profession of Hovering Over Me.”

“I went to Support Group for the same reason that I’d once allowed nurses with a mere eighteen months of graduate education to poison me with exotically named chemicals: I wanted to make my parents happy.”

“At long last he was unencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of his parents and peers, a world of abstraction and security and material excess, a world in which he felt grievously cut off from the raw throb of existence.”

“Parents rarely let go of their children, so children let go of them. They move away. The moments that used to define them—a mother’s approval, a father’s nod—are covered by moments of their own accomplishments. It is not until much later, as the skin sags and the heart weakens, that children understand; their stories, and all their accomplishments, sit atop the stories of their mothers and fathers, stones upon stones, beneath the waters of their lives.”

“Louis Creed, who had lost his father at three and who had never known a grandfather, never expected to find a father as he entered his middle age, but that was exactly what happened.”

“I don’t think children ever forget the lies their parents tell them.”

“My parents have a way of ruining things like this.”

“Desire is both imitative (we like what others like) and competitive (we want to take away from others what they have). As children, we wanted to monopolize the attention of a parent, to draw it away from other siblings. This sense of rivalry... makes people compete for the attention.”

Unbeknowest to them they have been put into boarding schools not just because they are orphans, but because their parents were part of a rebellion.

“Strong gates,” said Pod, “gates you can’t open. What are they there for?” “Against the mice?” said Arrietty. “Yes,” agreed Pod uncertainly, as though he gave her half a mark, “but mice never hurt no one. What else?” […] “Cats?” echoed Arrietty, surprised. “Or to keep you in?” suggested Pod.

“My father took one look at me when I was born and must have thought I had the face of someone dignified and sad like an old-fashioned queen or a dead person, but what I turned out like in plain, not much there to notice.

“The slave girl didn’t have a name; she didn’t know how old she was. She had lived at Huangling Palace since her parents had sold her to Lan when she was a small child.”

“Well...I went around the world.”

“Last summer when Olivia was little, her mother showed her how to make sand castles.”

“Olivia lives with her mother, her father, her brother, her dog, Perry, and Edwin, the cat.”

“They don’t need another one and it’s a shame because he is spoiling it for everyone else. He is called Minal Cricket and he tends to be utterly a nuisance. He is nonstop whining and causing other people to get themselves in trouble.”

“I can stay up for as long as three minutes. I showed my mother, my father, and Fudge how I can do it right in the living room. They were all impressed. Especially Fudge. He wanted to do it too. So I turned him upside down and tried to teach him. But he always tumbled over backward.”

“Beegu told her parents all about life on Earth. How Earth creatures were mostly big and unfriendly, but there were some small ones who seemed hopeful.”

“Your parents, both strong in the world, both ambitious, and the Master of Jordan holding you in the balance between them.”

“You see, there were kids at school—they hated their parents or they hated other people so much that you knew—it wasn’t just being angry, it was hating. I can’t explain what I mean, but I could feel the unhappiness.”

“I learned from my mom and dad, who didn’t have a formal education but had doctorates of love. They told me that if you gave 110 percent all the time, a lot of beautiful things will happen. I may not always be right, but no one can ever accuse me of not having a genuine love and passion for whatever I do.”

‘I have fallen in love,’ Anastasia told her parents one morning at breakfast. It made her feel a little shy to talk about it. But she felt that her parents ought to know. Her father blew a ripple into his coffee thoughtfully. ‘You seem a little young for that,’ he said.”

“Sunday, February 1st. Fourth after Epiphany. There was a lot of shouting downstairs late last night. The kitchen waste-bin was knocked over and the back door kept being slammed. I wish my parents would be a bit more thoughtful, I have been though an emotional time and I need my sleep.”

“Hari was shocked by the story but he did not like to be thought of as another orphan in Jagu’s care. He did have parents after all—even if one was a drunkard and the other an invalid—and a home, a proper home, not just a place on a railway platform.”

“Jamie was quiet for a minute, then he said, ‘We probably have no conscience. I think we ought to be homesick. Do you think Mom and Dad raised us wrong? They’re not very mean, you know; don’t you think that should make us miss them?’ ”

“This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most.”

Journey to the River Sea is the story of Maia whose parents are tragically killed abroad. ... Together with her new governess, Miss Minton, they travel to Brazil to start their new lives but are disappointed to find that their relatives, the Carters, do not want Maia but do want the allowance that comes with her.

“I still don’t know what to do.” He fell quiet. I never knew how to reel a conversation back after the Dead Mother topic.”

“When he asks his parents about what happened, he learns that Daniel’s father, as well as his own parents, are against the government dictatorship. ”

“You are Stellaluna. You are my baby.”

His parents smile after reading this, and his father says, “Well, we’d better buy a chess set.” Subtle account of how children can take action against something with which they disagree.

“When I closed my eyes I could hear him saying those things out loud. Whenever I would send him a flare email, his response was always relentlessly positive and made me feel like I was part of a tribe, a team. That someone was taking care of me. I knew, then and now, that this was a rare relationship for a child to have with a parent. For the most part, parents love and want to protect their children, but how many of us really know one another? I wondered what caused this sense of closeness, and I realized I’d never even asked him this.”

“We love being your parents, but we also like being your fellow travelers on this part of the road.”

The story centers around Tod, a young boy whose parents are separated and is living at Grandma’s with Mom and 2 sisters. It’s dysfunctional but it works.

“I advise you to stop sharing your dreams with people who try to hold you back, even if they’re your parents. Because, if you’re the kind of person who senses there’s something out there for you beyond whatever it is you’re expected to do - if you want to be EXTRA-ordinary- you will not get there by hanging around a bunch of people who tell you you’re not extraordinary. Instead, you will probably become as ordinary as they expect you to be.”

″...she knew in her heart that nature has a preference for a particular order: parents die, then children die. But it was a harsh design, offering little relief from pain, for being in accord with it means that the fortunate find themselves orphaned.”