“I started this book to forgive my parents and ended it by becoming a parent. Understanding backward liberated me to live forward.”

Source: Far from the Tree, Ch. 12 Father, p. 677.

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Andrew Solomon33

American journalist 1963

Alice Miller (1923–2010) Swiss psychologist

Breaking Down the Wall of Silence (Abbruch der Schweigemauer) (1990)

“Life is like that. You live it forward but understand it backward.”

Abraham Verghese book Cutting for Stone

Variant: You live it forward, but understand it backward.
Source: Cutting for Stone

“My friends are appeased to stay in Odessa for their entire lives. They are appeased to age like their parents, and become parents like their parents. They do not desire anything more than everything they have known.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Everything Is Illuminated (2002)

“At times it seems to me that I am living my life backwards, and that at the approach of old age my real youth will begin. My soul was born covered with wrinkles—wrinkles my ancestors and parents most assiduously put there and that I had the greatest trouble removing.”

André Gide (1869–1951) French novelist and essayist

“An Unprejudiced Mind,” pp. 319-320
Pretexts: Reflections on Literature and Morality (1964)

“I don't think my parents liked me. They put a live teddy bear in my crib.”

Woody Allen (1935) American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, playwright, and musician

“It's funny, I grew up in a happy family with loving parents, but I've killed off a lot of parents in these books. The orphan in children's literature, allows the child protagonist to move the story forward themselves. I think that, however happy a family, every intelligent child thinks: 'How did I come to be born to these parents?”

Brian Selznick (1966) American children's illustrator and writer

it is about finding your place in the world. <br class="br">Source: Brian Selznick: how Scorsese's Hugo drew inspiration from his magical book https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/feb/11/brian-selznick-hugo-martin-scorsese (February 11, 2012)