Quotes about parents

How many girls pay for the tantrums, jealousies or vexations of their mothers, who act without any justifying motive, only because they need to blow off steam and they can’t do it in front of their husbands.

If a woman is not instructed and educated will she be able to educate, counsel, and guide her children suitably? No. And this is an important matter that should interest women, the home being the first and most necessary of schools. Whatever the child sees the mother do or say is what the child will observe and learn.

There are many women who think that being a mother means contradicting a child, and later they beat them, and order them about for the sake of giving orders, to see herself obeyed, ordering the child not to run, not to jump, not to yell, in sum, a whole bunch of ignorant things, the truth is, to prohibit a child from doing all this is to prohibit them from being healthy. They act like this with girls precisely because they are girls, as if a girl's organism did not have to develop, so that they can grow up beautiful and strong, and not scrawny and pale, nor become mothers full of pains and ailments. They think that being a mother authorizes them to mistreat and order the children at whim, and oblige them to do things against their will, that is an error.

You children, you forget that no matter how high the okra tree grows, it's never mightier than the hand that planted it.

A parent never apologises, even if he regrets his actions. It is the child who should apologise.

“I have a complicated relationship with my parents. It’s a good relationship, but…”

“You hardly ever see them!”

“Yes, that’s why it’s a good relationship.”

“Maybe it’s like being a parent,” she said, bringing up a Library map. “You never really see your children as adults.”

“You’re exaggerating,” Kai said, with the easy confidence of someone who hadn’t tested the issue yet.

He lay in the dark thinking of all the things he did not know about his father and he realised that the father he knew was all the father he would ever know.

“Your father,” I said. “What does he really want?”

“What any father wants,” said Oxley. “The respect of his children.”

I nearly said that not all fathers were worthy of respect, but I managed to keep my gob shut and anyway not everyone had a dad like mine.

Don't blame anyone for what has happened to your father. Things have changed drastically since the days of his own youth,but he has refused to see the changes...The fact is that parents get only reflected glory from their children nowadays,whereas your father has invested in all of you, just as his father invested in him so that he could help on the farm. Your father forgot that he himself left the family farm to come to this place.

To a parent, your child wasn't just a person: your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all at the same time. You could see it every time you looked at her: layered in her face was the baby she'd been and the child she'd become and the adult she would grow up to be, and you saw them all simultaneously, like a 3-D image. It made your head spin. It was a place you could take refuge, if you knew how to get in. And each time you left it, each time your child passed out of your sight, you feared you might never be able to return to that place again. (Chapter 9, p122)

Before we can leave our parents, they stuff our heads like the suitcases which they jam-pack with homemade underwear. (p87)