Quotes About Parents

This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature. Look at our parents—were they the stuff of Literature? At best, they might aspire to the condition of onlookers and bystanders, part of a social backdrop against which real, true, important things could happen.

We live as if nature and nurture were equal parents when the evidence suggests that nature has both the whip hand and the whip.

There was nothing to distract us from our human and filial duty, which was to study, pass exams, use those qualifications to find a job, and then put together a way of life unthreateningly fuller than that of our parents, who would approve, while privately comparing it to their own earlier lives, which had been simpler, and therefore superior. None of this, of course, was ever stated: the genteel social Darwinism of the English middle classes always remained implicit.

Duty done, only child safely seen to the temporary harbour of marriage. Now all you have to do is not get Alzheimer's and remember to leave her such money as you have. And you could try to do better than your parents by dying when the money will actually be of use to her. That'd be a start.

My parents' marriage, to my unforgiving nineteen-year-old eye, was a car crash of cliché. Though I would have to admit, as the one making the judgement, that a 'car crash of of cliché' is itself a cliché.

I wish I could tell my parents, If you want to help me, help me die.

It wasn't anywhere he could afford to live on his salary. From among the several properties that his parents owned, he'd simply chosen the one here due to its proximity to his workplace.

IN MOST FAMILIES, there is a favorite child. Parents deny it and maybe they truly don't see it, but it's obvious to the children. Unfairness bothers children greatly. It's hard to always come in second.

There are moments when history and memory seem like a mist, as if what really happened matters less than what should have happened. The mist lifts and suddenly there we are, my good parents and their good children, their grateful children who phone for no reason but to talk, say their good-nights with a kiss, and look forward to home on the holidays. I see how, in a family like mine, love doesn't have to be earned and it can't be lost.

Our parents met at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona at a high school summer science camp. I'd come to see the heavens, our father always said. But the stars were in her eyes, a line that used to please and embarrass me in equal measure. Young geeks in love.

When we'd gone to Disneyland, the tree house had been my favorite thing in the whole park. If only I'd had no parents watching my every move, if only I'd been a happy, carefree orphan, I'd have hidden under the player piano until everything closed, and then taken up residence there.

That was how it was with abusive parents. They only remembered the good times and you only remembered the bad.

It wasn't fair, he thought peevishly. Who said life was fair? his father had said to him a hundred times. He had said the same himself to his own daughter. (It's not fair, Daddy.) Parents were miserable buggers. It SHOULD be fair. It should be paradise.

That was the one thing June had been terrified of having - a standard life, an ordinary life, a life like her parents' - living in a pink sandstone semi-detached villa in the suburbs with a neat garden and an en-suite master bedroom with fitted wardrobes

As a man, I've been representative of the values I hold dear. And the values I hold dear are carryovers from the lives of my parents.

Start a program for gifted children, and every parent demands that his child be enrolled.

You know my parents, man, they're just the most loving, encouraging... They're like those people who define themselves through their role as parents before people in their own rights.

Whatever a man might do, whatever misery or heartache your children might give you - and they give you a lot - however much your parents irritate you - it doesn't matter because you love them.

As a younger person I think I thought of myself as a Tony [from The Best Man], struggling with the legacy of my famous parents.

I'm interested in youth culture - when your parents are running your life, but you think you're the big man - but I'm not trying to make a statement.

In various European countries, it is increasingly common for young men to live with their parents into their 30s and even longer. Why not? In the welfare state, there is no shame in doing so.

Freud, Sigmund: A man so dissatisfied with his own mother and father that he devoted his life to convincing everyone who would listen — or better still, talk — that their parents were just as bad.

We need to recognize the incredible challenges that so many parents face, especially working moms. We need to join the rest of the advanced world.

You need your mom and dad to protect you. It means they love you so much. It was awesome she was backing me up and defending me.