"To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness."
— Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest)

"Parents are like God because you wanna know they're out there, and you want them to think well of you, but you really only call when you need something."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"Love can change a person the way a parent can change a baby- awkwardly, and often with a great deal of mess."
— Lemony Snicket (Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid)

"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."
— Mitch Albom (The Five People You Meet in Heaven)

"Don't be ridiculous, Charlie, people love the parents who beat their kids in department stores. It's the ones who just let their kids wreak havoc that everybody hates."
— Christopher Moore (A Dirty Job)

"Parents are not interested in justice, they're interested in peace and quiet."
— Bill Cosby

"My parents are going to kill me!"
"That seems rather harsh..."
— Garth Nix (Sir Thursday)

"When I was a kid my parents moved a lot, but I always found them."
— Rodney Dangerfield

"My daughter is seven, and some of the other second-grade parents complain that their children don't read for pleasure. When I visit their homes, the children's rooms are crammed with expensive books, but the parent's rooms are empty. Those children do not see their parents reading, as I did every day of my childhood. By contrast, when I walk into an apartment with books on the shelves, books on the bedside tables, books on the floor, and books on the toilet tank, then I know what I would see if I opened the door that says 'PRIVATE--GROWNUPS KEEP OUT': a child sprawled on the bed, reading."
— Anne Fadiman (Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader)

"The first half of our lives is ruined by our parents, the second half by our children."
— Clarence Darrow

"It’s a secondhand world we’re born into. What is novel to us is only so because we’re newborn, and what we cannot see, that has come before- what our parents have seen and been and done- are the hand-me-downs we begin to wear as swaddling clothes, even as we ourselves are naked. The flaw runs through us, implicating us in its imperfection even as it separates us, delivers us onto opposite sides of a chasm. It is both terribly beautiful and terribly sad, but it is, finally, the fault in the universe that gives birth to us all."
— Katherine Min (Secondhand World)

"I think part of being a parent is trying to kill your kids."
— Stephen King (Christine)

"Of course, everyone's parents are embarrassing. It goes with the territory. The nature of parents is to embarrass merely by existing, just as it is the nature of children of a certain age to cringe with embarrassment, shame, and mortification should their parents so much as speak to them on the street. "
— Neil Gaiman (Anansi Boys)

"I think all of us are always five years old in the presence and absence of our parents."
— Sherman Alexie (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian)

"I also believe that parents, if they love you, will hold you up safely, above their swirling waters, and sometimes that means you'll never know what they endured, and you may treat them unkindly, in a way you otherwise wouldn't."
— Mitch Albom (For One More Day)

"I would have given anything to keep her little. They outgrow us so much faster than we outgrow them.


Brian Fitzgerald, talking about our children."
— Jodi Picoult (My Sister's Keeper)

"First your parents, they give you your life, but then they try to give you their life"
— Chuck Palahniuk

"We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the version of the world they really believed in..."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)

"I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the
wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips black in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don't do it--she's the wrong woman,
he's the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don't do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it"
— Sharon Olds

"Isn't a kid alive who doesn't dream about rewarding her folks, or punishing them."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Snuff)

"If you surround yourself with the good and righteous, they can only raise you up. If you surround yourself with the others, they will drag you down into the doldrums of mediocrity, and they will keep you there, but only as long as you permit it.""
— Mark Glamack

"It's amazing--my parents call everything a discussion. If I were standing across the street, firing a bazooka at my mother, while my father was launching mortar back at me, and Jeffery was charging down the driveway with a grenade in his teeth, my parents would say we should stop having this public "discussion"."
— Jordan Sonnenblick (Drums, Girls, And Dangerous Pie)

"It was as if something snapped in two deep inside me. My parents-- the people I’d loved the most in the world, the ones I’d always told all my secrets to, the ones I’d wanted to hide with far away from the rest of the world. They had lied, and I couldn’t imagine why. It couldn’t possibly matter why.

"
— Claudia Gray (Stargazer)

"“I’m going, and don’t you dare try to stop me.”
I ran through the door, willing myself to make it downstairs before I started to cry."
— Claudia Gray (Stargazer)

"I never asked my mother where babies came from but I remember clearly the day she volunteered the information....my mother called me to set the table for dinner. She sat me down in the kitchen, and under the classic caveat of 'loving each other very, very much,' explained that when a man and a woman hug tightly, the man plants a seed in the woman. The seed grows into a baby. Then she sent me to the pantry to get placemats. As a direct result of this conversation, I wouldn't hug my father for two months."
— Sloane Crosley (I Was Told There'd Be Cake)

"“Tell me why.” My voice shook. “Tell me right now.”

"
— Claudia Gray (Stargazer)

"When a child first catches adults out -- when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentiments just -- his world falls into panic desolation. the gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure things about the fall of the gods: they do not fall 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 (East of Eden)

"You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations."
— Alice Munro (Open Secrets: Stories)

"No, Miss Wright didn't want to meet her kid. To her, that relationship was just as important, just as ideal and impossible as it would be to the child. She'd expect that young man to be perfect, smart, and talented, everything to compensate for all the mistakes that she'd made. The whole wasted, unhappy mess of her life."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"Eventually, I manage to cheer Mum up by allowing her to go through my wardrobe and criticize all my clothes..."
— Helen Fielding

"In peace, children inter their parents; war violates the order of nature and causes parents to inter their children."
— Herodotus

"My brother and I were able to fantasize far more extravagantly about our parents' tastes and desires, their aspirations and their vices, by scanning their bookcases than by snooping in their closest. Their selves were on their shelves."
— Anne Fadiman (Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader)

"Athletes are born winners, there not born loosers, and the sooner you understand this, the faster you can take on a winning attitude and become sucessful in life."
— Charles R. Sledge Jr.

"If you surround yourself with the good and righteous, they can only raise you up. If you surround yourself with the others, they will drag you down into the doldrums of mediocrity, and they will keep you there, but only as long as you permit it."
— Mark Glamack

"Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let our bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable."
— Kahlil Gibrán

"Matthew knew that phrenology was nonsense, and yet, years later, he found himself making judgments similar to those made by his father; slippery people looked slippery; they really did. And how we become like our parents! How their scorned advice - based, we felt in our superiority, on prejudiced and muddled folk wisdom - how their opinions are subsequently borne out by our own discoveries and sense of the world, one after one. And as this happens, we realise with increasing horror that proposition which we would never have entertained before: our mothers were right!"
— Alexander McCall Smith (Love Over Scotland)

"We find these joys to be self evident: That all children are created whole, endowed with innate intelligence, with dignity and wonder, worthy of respect. The embodiment of life, liberty and happiness, children are original blessings, here to learn their own song. Every girl and boy is entitled to love, to dream and belong to a loving “village.” And to pursue a life of purpose.

We affirm our duty to nourish and nurture the young, to honour their caring ideals as the heart of being human. To recognize the early years as the foundation of life, and to cherish the contribution of young children to human evolution.

We commit ourselves to peaceful ways and vow to keep from harm or neglect these, our most vulnerable citizens. As guardians of their prosperity we honour the bountiful Earth whose diversity sustains us. Thus we pledge our love for generations to come. "
— Raffi

"His father was self-made, but his mother was constructed by others, and such edifices are notoriously fragile."
— Margaret Atwood

"Who are these people sharing the street with me? What is going on in their worlds, inside their heads? Are they in love? If so, is it the kind that Mum and Dad have? Based on having things in common, like raspberry picking and a love of dogs, and Shakespeare, and long country walks? Or is it the knock-you-out, eat-you-up, set-you-on-fire kind of love that I have longed for-and avoided-all my life?"
— Alison Larkin (The English American: A Novel)

"He seriously thought that there is less harm in killing a man than producing a child: in the first case you are relieving someone of life, not his whole life but a half or a quarter or a hundredth part of that existence that is going to finish, that would finish without you; but as for the second, he would say, are you not responsible to him for all the tears he will shed, from the cradle to the grave? Without you he would never have been born, and why is he born? For your amusement, not for his, that’s for sure; to carry your name, the name of a fool, I’ll be bound – you may as well write that name on some wall; why do you need a man to bear the burden of three or four letters?"
— Gustave Flaubert (November: Fragments in a Nondescript Style)

"They were talking more distantly than if they were strangers who had just met, for if they had been he would have been interested in her just because of that, and curious, but their common past was a wall of indifference between them. Kitty knew too well that she had done nothing to beget her father's affection, he had never counted in the house and had been taken for granted, the bread-winner who was a little despised because he could provide no more luxuriously for his family; but she had taken for granted that he loved her just because he was her father, and it was a shock to discover that his heart was empty of feeling for her. She had known that they were all bored by him, but it had never occurred to her that he was equally bored by them. He was as ever kind and subdued, but the sad perspicacity which she had learnt in suffering suggested to her that, though he probably never acknowledged it to himself and never would, in his heart he disliked her."
— W. Somerset Maugham (The Painted Veil)

"When we sat down to eat I took inventory of the people in the room, and the remnants of my good mood evaporated when I realized how very little I had in common with them – the career dads, the responsible and diligent moms – and I was soon filled with dread and loneliness. I locked in on the smug feeling of superiority that married couples give off and that permeated the air – the shared assumptions, the sweet and contented apathy, it all lingered everywhere – despite the absence in the room of anyone single at which to aim this."
— Bret Easton Ellis (Lunar Park)

"Not willingly," admitted the tiger. "But here is the alternative; either you transform yourself into an eye for our child, or I and my dear wife will tear you into shreds."
— L. Frank Baum

"Kinder lieben ihre Eltern zuerst. Nach einer Weile beurteilen sie sie. Selten, wenn je, verzeihen sie ihnen."
— Oscar Wilde (A Woman of No Importance)

"“A criança ao nascer já traz um determinado potencial; são os pais, no entanto, que podem torná-la capaz de realizar esse potencial”"
— Carlos Messa (O Poder dos Pais no desenvolvimento emocional e cognitivo dos filhos)

"As we maneuver to avoid the wrath of punishers and the aggresive way they manipulate us, we may find ourselves doing things that amaze us- lying, keeping secrets, sneaking around- to maintain the illusion of obeying them."
— Susan Forward with Donna Frazier