Quotes about parents

Seth says how your being born makes your parents god. you owe them your life, and they can control you.

Your folks are like God because you want to know they're out there and you want them to approve of your life, still you only call them when you're in crisis and need something.

"First," Manus says, "your parents, they give you your life, but then they try to give you their life."

'Father, why is the sky blue?' - the child is not really interested in the sky as such; the real stake of the question is to expose father's impotence, his helplessness in the face of the hard fact, to present the whole chain of reasons leading to it. The blue of the sky thus becomes not only the father's problem, but in a way even his fault. The sky is blue, and you're just staring at it like an idiot incapable of doing anything about it!

The beggarly question of parentage — what is it, after all? What does it matter, when you come to think of it, whether a child is yours by blood or not? All the little ones of our time are collectively the children of us adults of the time, and entitled to our general care. That excessive regard of parents for their own children, and their dislike of other people’s, is, like class-feeling, patriotism, save-your-own-soul-ism, and other virtues, a mean exclusiveness at bottom.

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 rarely let go of their children, so children let go of them. They move on. 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.

A man knows when he is growing old because he begins to look like his father.

Male mastery in marriage is a social illusion, nurtured by women exhorting their creations to play and walk. At the emotional heart of every marriage is a pietà of mother and son.

Every man harbors an inner female territory ruled by his mother, from whom he can never entirely break free.

Jon was surprised. “You don’t believe that military discipline can be a good experience?”

“Experience is what you make it,” the officer said. “That’s real profound, huh? Boys into men? Look at the guys who like the army, or even do well there. Guys who hate the random inconsistency of their parents so much they are willing to give up love to get a father who hands out his orders by a book of rules you can run and check in the library, even if the rule is go out and die. You’ll do a lot better if you come to terms with the father you already have than by running off to the state substitute.”

Despite drunkenness, the man was maintaining logic, so Jon went on, “but doesn’t the army give you a fairly rigorous microcosm to work out certain problems of…well, honour and morality, at least for yourself—”

“Sure,” drawled the officer, “a microcosm totally safe, completely unreal, free of women and children, where God is the general and the Devil is death, and you’re playing for keeps—the excuse for conducting everything with high seriousness. It was all set up to make the most destructive and illogical human actions appear as controlled and non-random as possible.

“Do you think he wants him to die?” whispered Mary.

“No, but he wishes he’d never been born. Mother she says that’s th’ worst thing on earth for a child. Them as is not wanted scarce ever thrives.”