Parents Quotes

To this day, being able to “take advantage” of someone is the measure in my mind of having a parent. For me and Lindsay, the fear of imposing stalked our minds, infecting even the food we ate. We recognized instinctively that many of the people we depended on weren’t supposed to play that role in our lives, so much so that it was one of the first things Lindsay thought of when she learned of Papaw’s death. We were conditioned to feel that we couldn’t really depend on people—that, even as children, asking someone for a meal or for help with a broken-down automobile was a luxury that we shouldn’t indulge in too much lest we fully tap the reservoir of goodwill serving as a safety valve in our lives.

~ J.d. Vance

It's like I'm dreaming of the imaginary friend Katie and I had when we were little. She'd been so real to us as kids. We each remembered Anna, that's what we'd called her, just like we remembered bits of our parents. But now, in this dreamscape of Paradise Lost, our imaginary third twin has all grown up.

~ Beatrice Rose Roberts

I am a divorced child, of divided, uncertain background. Within this division I - supposed fruit of their love - no longer exist. It happened nearly forty years ago, yet to me nothing is sadder than my parents' divorce.

~ Sylvia Kristel

People say they miss the deceased. I missed my father and my mother when they were still fully alive. They travelled through my childhood in the same way they moved around the hotel: my mother industrious, hurried, hidden; my father drunk, flamboyant, alone.

~ Sylvia Kristel

Sometimes your kids will say the nastiest things, won't they, Rose? You want to ask,'Whose child is this?'Rose chuckled.But usually, they're just in some kind of pain. They need to work it out.

~ Mitch Albom

Hal finds he rather envies a man who feels he has something to explain his being fucked up, parents to blame it on.

~ David Foster Wallace

Be nice to your children. They may grow up to be writers.

~ Katerina Stoykova Klemer

It felt strange to call them directly, to hear her father’s “Hello?” after the second ring, and when he heard her voice, he raised his, almost shouting, as he always did with international calls. Her mother liked to take the phone out to the verandah, to make sure the neighbors overheard: “Ifem, how is the weather in America?

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Sometimes we mistake patience for weakness, but the patient person often realizes that it's much more important for another person to discover his or her own gifts and shortcomings--the patient person doesn't feel a need to fix other people, and sometimes will let certain things slide until the other person recognizes the problems. Patient parents often let their kids make the same mistake two or three times because they know that a lesson learned oneself is almost always preferable to a lesson given to us by an authority figure like a parent.

~ Tom Walsh

No one can escape slavery, we are all slaves in some regards. We are slaves to our parent's expectations. We are slaves to the pressures of our peers. We are slaves to our own ideologies and faiths.

~ Mahima Martel

The pony is mad. She can go from a relaxed walk to a flat out gallop in seconds if something spooks her, and she won’t stop until she practically crashes into something. I’ve seen her buck, rear and spin around in circles. She’s completely unpredictable and I don’t even trust her on the ground. As far as I’m concerned, Alec’s welcome to her, and he relishes the challenge. For some reason, he loves that pony most of all. Perhaps it’s because no-one else would give her a chance, that they’d written her off as crazy, mean, dangerous. Alec admires her independent spirit, I think, and maybe he likes that she still has that strength of spirit, that she still challenges him every time he rides her. He can’t completely dominate her, and he doesn’t try. He wants a partnership with her. And slowly, slowly, his father is taking that away from him, bullying the mare and his son at the same time, seeking to fit them into the same mould, the only one he knows. The strong succeed while the weak fall behind.

~ Kate Lattey

It felt like so many years' worth of anxiety and worry were trying to escape all at once—maybe like an emotional volcano, only my mom and dad, they didn't run away to save themselves but sprinted right into my lava.

~ Matthew Quick

The only job a parent has is work themselves out of a job.

~ Holly Gates

Any parents are as ordinary human beings as others, making them angels or even more is up to their next generation.

~ Sandeep Sahajpal

You shouldn't call then anything. They're poor unfortunate people who cannot help the way they look

~ Jacqueline Wilson

The ultimate Maturing comes only when we lose our parent(s), we can keep them young though by maturing earlier as a responsibility.

~ Sandeep Sahajpal

The best words of wisdom that a parent can say to their child is I Am proud of you.

~ Unarine Ramaru

If you live long enough as a parent nowadays, you discover that you have made mistakes you didn't bother to know about along with the ones you do know about all too well. You are somewhat humbled at heart, sometimes disgusted with yourself.

~ Alice Munro

He died at the wrong time, when there was much to be clarified and established. They hadn’t even started to be grown-ups together. There was this piece of heaven, this little girl he’d carried around the shop on his shoulders; and then one day she was gone, replaced by a foreigner, an uncooperative woman he didn’t know how to speak to. Being so confused, so weak, so in love, he chose strength and drove her away from himself. The last years he spent wondering where she’d gone, and slowly came to realise that she would never return, and that the husband he’d chosen for her was an idiot.

~ Hanif Kureishi

When a child first catches adults out -- when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just -- his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.

~ John Steinbeck

Everyone else we knew growing up is the same: image of their parents, no matter how loud they told themselves they'd be different

~ Tana French

Only when you are grown up, perhaps only when you have children yourself, do you fully understand that your own parents had a full and intricate existence before you were born.

~ Ian Mcewan

That boy made me realize, for a while at least, that my parents were wrong, and I didn't have to be like them.

~ J.x. Burros

...when it comes to defining adulthood, nothing has made me feel more grown-up than knowing that one of the two people in the world who loved me the most, without condition, was no longer in the world.

~ Jean Hannah Edelstein

Your own life starts the moment you're born. Before that, even.I just, I feel like as long as I live with you, I won't... I'm not... It's like George Jefferson.From the TV show?Right. George Jefferson. As long as he was on 'All in the Family', he was just somebody who made Archie Bunker's story more interesting. He didn't have anything of his own. He didn't have a plot or supporting characters. I don't know if you ever even got to see his house. But after he got his own show, George had his own living room and kitchen... and bedroom, I think. He even had his own elevator. Places for him to exist in, for his story to happen. Like this apartment. This is something that's mine.

~ Rainbow Rowell

Teenagers - tired of being hassled by your parents?Act now!Move out, get a job, pay your own bills.....while you still know everything.

~ James Hauenstein

Oh bell-dumb heart, it makes you a fool to think you were ever closer to opening up the world — to art, to breaking it apart — than those who came before. But knowing that can't make you read or breathe more slowly. Since when did you listen to anyone? To give up on motivation is to give up on the work we do with alphabet and light. It's not enough to hunt or haunt our parents' hearts; we must occupy our own.

~ Ander Monson

Maybe you never stop feeling like an eight-year-old in front of your parents. You resolve to be your mature self, to react in this considered way rather than that elemental way, to breathe evenly from the bottom of your stomach and to see your parents as equals, but within five minutes your intentions are blown to hell, and you're babbling and screaming in rage like an angry child.

~ Hanif Kureishi

Our parents thought we might be corrupted by one another into becoming whatever it was they most feared: an incorrigible masturbator, a winsome homosexual, a recklessly impregnatory libertine. On our behalf they dreaded the closeness of adolescent friendship, the predatory behaviour of strangers on trains, the lure of the wrong kind of girl. How far their anxieties outran our experience.

~ Julian Barnes

I know more about my father than I used to know: I know he wanted to be a pilot in the war but could not, because the work he did was considered essential to the war effort… I know he grew up on a farm in the backwoods of Nova Scotia, where they didn’t have running water or electricity. This is why he can build things and chop things… He did his high school courses by correspondence, sitting at the kitchen table and studying by the light by a kerosene lamp; he put himself through university by working in lumber camps and cleaning out rabbit hutches, and was so poor he lived in a tent in the summers to save money… All this is known, but unimaginable. Also I wish I did not know it. I want my father to be just my father, the way he has always been, not a separate person with an earlier, mythological life of his own. Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.

~ Margaret Atwood

We realized that the version of the world [our parents] rendered for us was not the world they really believed in, and that for all their caretaking and bitching about crabgrass they didn't give a damn about lawns.

~ Jeffrey Eugenides

Your girlfriend's sibling or parents might be totally nuts, but always defend them. Always. All a girl wants to do is to get along with her family and if you are on the side of making it easy, you will be loved eternally. It might be easier to condemn them - especially if she's doing that already - but, remarkably, even if they are murderers, she will find the good in them, especially if you start trashing them.

~ Mindy Kaling

And I know I need to invite him over for dinner, because there's no question. This is serious.

~ Tamara Ireland Stone

We become weirder parents when we fall more and more in love with Christ.

~ Craig Groeschel

When you're pregnant, you can think of nothing but having your own body to yourself again, yet after having given birth you realize that the biggest part of you is now somehow external, subject to all sorts of dangers and disappearance, so you spend the rest of your life trying to figure out how to keep it close enough for comfort. That's the strange thing about being a mother: until you have a baby, you don't even realize how much you were missing one.

~ Jodi Picoult

A mother is always a mother, since a mother is a biological fact, whilst a father is a movable feast.

~ Angela Carter

Because even if the whole world was throwing rocks at you, if you still had your mother or father at your back, you’d be okay. Some deep-rooted part of you would know you were loved. That you deserved to be loved.

~ Jojo Moyes

I could say it all began with my mother.

~ Shannon Celebi

I want to go back to the tell-me-again times when I slept in her bed and we were everything together. When I was everything to her. Everything she needed.

~ Erica Lorraine Scheidt

And what if the other kids laugh at me?” Kerry complained to her parents as she nibbled on a piece of toast that morning. “I have a Cape Breton accent! They’ll know I’m from Canada and they’ll start asking me if I lived in an igloo or ate maple syrup, bacon and seal meat every day!”“You’re really overreacting,” Susan chuckled, sipping on a glass of orange juice. “Canada is a lot like the States and the only thing separating both countries is an imaginary boarder! If anyone laughs at you, tell them it doesn’t snow year-round, you got free health care while you were there and that you never rode a polar bear to school. Besides, do you know how many popular movies and TV shows from the States were filmed in Canada?”“It’s not just the Canada stuff mom,” Kerry sighed worriedly. “I’m from Dym, it’s an industrial dump!”“Yeah, and have you looked at Pittsburgh lately?” Susan asked. “Full of coal mines and steel mills, just like Sydney was when we lived there! I actually rather came to like the pollution, I don’t think I’d ever want to leave it.

~ Rebecca Mcnutt