Parents Quotes

At a certain age our parents offhandedly start telling us things we’ve never heard before, about themselves and their families, their upbringing and history. They’re turning their lives into stories, trying to make sense of them in retrospect and pass them on while there’s still time. You begin, embarrassingly belatedly, to see them as people with lives long preceding your own.

~ Tim Kreider

Some of our parents were always on our side. Some of our parents chose to banish us rather than see us for who we were. And some of our parents, when they found out we were sick, stopped being dragons and became dragonslayers instead. Sometimes that’s what it takes—the final battle. But it should take much, much less than that.

~ David Levithan

My father had a lifelong terror, phobia whatever, about hospitals. Makes a lot of sense in hindsight. He was so scared of doctors, he passed that on to me. That's what parents exist for: to pass their phobias on generation to generation.

~ Jackie Kay

He has little hope that university, when he gets there next year, will be any different. Like right now, all these pupils taking notes as if their life depended on it. All for what? he wants to shout. To get into the top university, so that you can somehow convince yourself you are better than the great unwashed? So that your parents can convince themselves that they are better parents than the great unwashed? So that Mum and Dad’s fourteen-hour days at the office, paying for a fucking private education you never asked for, wasn’t just a pathetic waste of a life?

~ Tabitha Suzuma

A mother is the person who takes care of you when you're sick. The one who holds you when you're afraid. The one who follows the bus to school on the first day to make sure you made it okay. I have only one mother, Nana; he just happens to be my father, too.

~ Kat Attalla

Patients are almost always preceded by their parents, because no matter how fast an ambulance can drive, terrified parents can drive faster.

~ John Green

When we are very young, our parents inadvertently program us to be what we eventually become. ~ Peggy Toney Horton

~ Peggy Toney Horton

The parents have a right to say that no teacher paid by their money shall rob their children of faith in God and send them back to their homes skeptical, or infidels, or agnostics, or atheists.

~ William Jennings Bryan

It dawned on him—as it hadn’t before; he was dense, he was slow—that his parents were five hundred miles away. They could make him come home, they could refuse to pay the portion of his tuition they’d agreed to pay, but they couldn’t see his jeans. “Understood,” he said.

~ Chad Harbach

When we are very young, our parents inadvertently program us to be what we eventually become.

~ Peggy Toney Horton

I don't think it matters how many parents you've got, as long as those who are around make their presence a good one.

~ Elizabeth Wurtzel

There is nothing so difficult to arrive at as the nature and personality of one's parents. Death, about which so much mystery is made,is perhaps no mystery at all. But the history of one's parents has to be pieced together from fragments, their motives and characters guessed at, and the truth about them remains deeply buried, like a boulder that projects one small surface above the level of smooth lawn, and when you come to dig around it, it proves to be too large ever to move, though each year's frost forces it up a little higher.

~ William Maxwell

My mother is the antithesis of a typical Jewish mother, she is very soft-spoken and takes more naps that a cat. As a result, I've always longed for someone to really annoy the shit out of me.

~ Chelsea Handler

When her mother combed Harriet's hair, she said that the woods were disgustingly muddy and mosquito-ridden. During her history unit on pioneers, her father bashfully admitted that he couldn't pitch a tent, barbeque, or fight off bears in a forest. They both agreed that such a place was unsafe. Hotels were better.

~ Kimberly Karalius

Becky -- he begins, and there's a tiny intake of breath around the churchyard. Will you-- Yes! Yeee-esssss! I hear the joyful sound ripping through the churchyard before I even realize I've opened my mouth. I'm so charged up with emotion, my voice doesn't even sound like mine. In fact, it sounds more like...Mum.I don't believe it.

~ Sophie Kinsella

I don't think it matters how many parents you've got, so long as the ones who are around make their presence in a long way.

~ Elizabeth Wurtzel

Nothing worse... nothing worse that to be stuck somewhere with some married a-hole and have to listen to him tell you about his f***in' kids... Let me tell ya something, folks... nobody cares about your children, okay? Nobody cares about your children. I speak for everyone. I've been appointed by the rest of the group to inform you we don't care about your children – that's why they're your children, so you can care about them and we don't have to bother.

~ George Carlin

Aw, man. I’d just shot an angel in the face.I made my way into the foyer and sat down on the stairs. I glanced up at the big old grandfather clock. It was going on ten. My folks would be home soon.“How was your evening, honey?”“Killed an angel.”“Well, isn’t that nice.”That wasn’t happening. Daddy never liked guns in the first place, Mother just pretended to. I was so grounded.

~ Adrienne Kress

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

This is what I know about my parents. They spent the next several years trying to forget each other, and me.

~ Raquel Cepeda

I never wanted to find my birth parents - if one set of parents felt like a misfortune, two sets would be self-destructive...I had no idea that you could like your parents or that they could love you enough to let you be yourself.

~ Jeanette Winterson

After I lie there for a while, I realize that Dad isn't every going to do anything but be there to drive us home from the airport. And cook. And if I want something bigger to change, it's up to me. I'm scared shitless, yes. I'm doubtful, yes. But I'm angry. Angry that I am doing this because Dad can't. But then I sniff breakfast, and I know that Dad is doing what he can.

~ A.s. King

Both my parents are therapists, which means that I am really goddamned well adjusted.

~ John Green

Every home is a university and the parents are the teachers.

~ Mahatma Gandhi

First, I'm not getting married, so you can forget the wife. Second, if I was insane enough to get married, I wouldn't have kids. Third, if I was insane enough to get married and have kids, it would be a cold day in hell I'd let you babysit.

~ Jennifer Crusie

The problem with parents is that they're adults.

~ Benjamin Alire Sáenz

It's quite sad that so many children go through life unsure whether their parents love them or not.

~ Wayne Gerard Trotman

Some of the things I hated my parents for when I was younger are the same things I love my parents for now that I'm older.

~ Steve Maraboli

Above all, staring at my old bedroom ceiling, I feel safe. Cocooned from the world; wrapped up in cotton wool. No one can get me here. No one even knows I'm here. I won't get any nasty letters and I won't get any nasty phone calls and I won't get any nasty visitors. It's like a sanctuary. I feel as if I'm fifteen again, with nothing to worry about but my Homework. (And I haven't even got any of that.)

~ Sophie Kinsella

I couldn't make myself imagine Dad holding some creamy-faced baby, cooing at it, telling it he loved it. Taking it to baseball games. Living some life he'd probably consider his 'real life,' the one he deserved rather than the one he got.

~ Jennifer Brown

Half of teachers leave the profession within their first four years, and kids with behaviour challenges and their parents are cited as one of the major reasons.

~ Ross W. Greene

Damn! - I'd rather walk into something of my own accord than to be frogmarched into it.So it says here in the file. James Mowry, twenty-six, restless and pigheaded. Can be trusted to do anything at all - provided the alternative is worse.You sound like my father. Did he tell you that?The Service does not reveal its sources of information.

~ Eric Frank Russell

[E]verywhere I'm looking at kids, adults mostly don't seem to like them, not even the parents do. They call the kids gorgeous and so cute, they make the kids do the thing all over again so they can take a photo, but they don't want to actually play with them, they'd rather drink coffee talking to other adults. Sometimes there's a small kid crying and the Ma of it doesn't even hear.

~ Emma Donoghue

I am most anxious to give my own children enough love and understanding so that they won't grow up with an aching void in them--like you and I and Harold and Martha. That can never be filled, and one goes around all one's life trying, trying to make up for what one didn't get that was one's birthright, asking the wrong people for it.

~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh

exemplar, n.It's always something we have to negotiate- the face that my parents are happy, and yours have never been. I have something to live up to, and if I fail, I still have a family to welcome me home. You have a storyline to rewrite, and a lack of faith that it can ever be done.You love my parents, I know. But you never get too close. You never truly believe there aren't bad secrets underneath.

~ David Levithan

My parents are great listenersWhich is why I never tell them anything

~ Sonya Sones

She hated being a nobody and like all children, adopted or not, I have had to live out some of her unlived life. We do that for our parents - we don't really have any choice.

~ Jeanette Winterson

It’s a bit burned,” my mother would say apologetically at every meal, presenting you with a piece of meat that looked like something — a much-loved pet perhaps — salvaged from a tragic house fire. “But I think I scraped off most of the burned part,” she would add, overlooking that this included every bit of it that had once been flesh. Happily, all this suited my father. His palate only responded to two tastes - burned and ice cream — so everything suited him so long as it was sufficiently dark and not too startlingly flavorful. Theirs truly was a marriage made in heaven, for no one could burn food like my mother or eat it like my dad.

~ Bill Bryson

There is only room in the lifeboat of your life for one, and you always choose yourself, and turn your parents into whatever it takes to keep you afloat.

~ Anna Quindlen

It would seem that something which means poverty, disorder, and violence every single day should be avoided entirely, but the desire to beget children is a natural urge.

~ Phyllis Diller