Quotes about parenting

page 3

“… In its original Latin form, sacrifice means to make sacred or to make holy. I wholeheartedly believe that when we are fully engaged in parenting, regardless of how imperfect, vulnerable, and messy it is, we are creating something sacred.”

“The world is crazy. You need a license to drive a car and go fishing. You don't need a license to start a family. Two people have sex and BAM! Perfectly innocent kid is born whose life will be screwed up by her parents forever.”

“Children don’t heed the life experiences of their parents, and nations ignore history. Bad lessons always have to be learned anew.”

“You always think that a bolt of lightning is going to strike and your parents will magically change into the people you wish they were, or back into the people they used to be.”

“Hold dear to your parents for it is a scary and confusing world without them.”

“So let that be a lesson, kids who get an F in math. Ellen says you’re doing the right thing. You’re welcome, parents.”

“You try as a parent. You love beyond reason. You fight beyond endurance. You hope beyond despair.
You never think, until the very last moment, that it still might not be enough.”

“I… understand how a parent might hit a child- it's because you can look into their eyes and see a reflection of yourself that you wish you hadn't.”

“We should try to be the parents of our future rather than the offspring of our past.”

“It was a bitter moment for us. We weren't two mature parents. We were just two kids playing grown-up. We still needed Mommy and Daddy's permission, blessings, and money to survive.”

“A lot of parents tell their children that if they want to be an actor, that's fine, but they should do something else first, so they've got something to fall back on. It doesn't work like that, as far as I'm concerned.”

“At that moment, she cannot think of a more reckless, irrational thing than choosing to become a parent.”

“We are not our parents”

“Salt is born of the purest parents: the sun and the sea.”

“What it's like to be a parent: It's one of the hardest things you'll ever do but in exchange it teaches you the meaning of unconditional love.”

“There are books… which rank in our life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences.”

“I know this is insane, but I somehow wish I had been in Auschwitz with my parents so I could really know what they lived through! I guess it's some kind of guilt about having had an easier life than they did.”

“There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else (parents in the case of children, God in the case of adults) has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point.”

“No matter how far we come, our parents are always in us.”

“In any event, parents never underestimated the abilities of their own children. Quite the reverse. Sometimes it was well nigh impossible for a teacher to convince the proud father or mother that their beloved offspring was a complete nitwit.”

“I just want ambitious teenagers to know it is totally fine to be quite, observant kids. Besides being a delight to your parents, you will find you have plenty of time later to catch up.”

“Everything a baby does strikes a parent as the most magical thing he/she has ever seen.”

“Takes a lot of tries before you hit perfection." He paused to reconsider that. "Well, except for my parents. They got it on the first try." (Adrian)”

“Being young is an 18 year prison sentence for a crime your parents committed. But you do get time off for good behavior.”

“You don't understand,' she said, and there was a puzzling trace of resentment in her voice. 'Children never do. The love a parent has for a child, there's nothing else like it. No other love so consuming.”

“This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most.”

“Even if I'm following the path my parents set, I need to take my own dreams and beliefs with me.”

“Parenting is really just a matter of tracking, of hoping your kids do not get so far ahead you can no longer see their next moves.”

“I think we make our own luck. Our parents give us life, but what we do with that life is our own responsibility.”

“She wondered if this was true of every parent: if, prior to having children, they all used to be someone else.”

“I want to know about my mom. And other stuff. I want to know the whole story, good or bad.”
“Me, too,” said Gazzy. “I want to find my parents so I can tell’m what total scuzzes they are. Like, ‘Hi, mom and dad, you’re such scum!”

“Don't let what your parents do disappoint you.”

“It's hard to imagine her ever having felt lost, but it's impossible to know the people your parents were before they were your parents.”

“Someone's parents have been singing entirely the wrong sort of songs.”

“She felt as if she bled her regret and loneliness from her very pores, and yet she could not shape those feelings into any sentiment she could imagine her parents could bear reading.”

“I never, even for a moment, doubted what they’d told me. This is why it is that adults and even parents can, unwittingly, be cruel: they cannot imagine doubt’s complete absence. They have forgotten.”

“So now I'm thinking about it. I'm imagining sitting down with my parents and actually saying, "I'm gay." And you know what? It makes me a little mad. I mean, straight guys don't have to sit their parents down and tell them they like girls.”

“Baby, we have no choice of what color we're born or who our parents are or whether we're rich or poor. What we do have is some choice over what we make of our lives once we're here.”

“Best friends are always together, always whispering and laughing and running, always at each other's house, having dinner, sleeping over. They are practically adopted by each other's parents. You can't pry them apart.”

“You grow up to become living proof of your parents' limitations. Their less-than masterpiece.”

“Would you stop thinking about what everyone wants. Stop thinking
about what I want, what he wants, what your parents want. What do you want?”

“Don’t simply settle for what your parents had. You can go further than that. You can do more, have more, be more.”

“Walk out of this with your parents, the stones, and Darroc dead, Ms. Lane, and I‘ll give you the bloody thing.”

“Emma is a mattress who got thrown off the truck when her parents split up. It's not like you can blame a mattress when people don't tie it down tight enough.”

“College is the best time of your life. When else are your parents going to spend several thousand dollars a year just for you to go to a strange town and get drunk every night?”

“My school and my tribe are so poor and sad that we have to study from the same dang books our parents studied from. That is absolutely the saddest thing in the world.”

“We're taught to expect unconditional love from our parents, but I think it is more the gift our children give us. It's they who love us helplessly, no matter what or who we are.”

“Parents who discipline their child by discussing the consequences of their actions produce children who have better moral development, compared to children whose parents use authoritarian methods and punishment.”

“I think of myself as a freewheeling bisexual," added Magnus.
"Please never say those words in front of my parents," said Alec.”

“You're born, you know, the wrong names, wrong parents. I mean, that happens. You call yourself what you want to call yourself. This is the land of the free.”

“i remembered the myth about Andromeda and how she had been chained to a rock by her own parents as a sacrifice to a sea monster. Maybe she'd gotten too many F's on her report card or something.”

“… I would have let him go one finger at a time, until, without his realizing, he'd be floating without me. And then I thought, perhaps that is what it means to be a [parent] - to teach your child to live without you.”

“It feels like I'm babysitting in the Twilight Zone. I keep waiting for the parents to show up because we are out of chips and diet cokes.”

“At long last he was unencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of his parents and peers, a world of abstraction and security and material excess, a world in which he felt grievously cut off from the raw throb of existence.”

“We're [parents]) always bluffing, pretending we know best, when most of the time we're just praying we won't screw up too badly.”

“If you raise your children to feel that they can accomplish any goal or task they decide upon, you will have succeeded as a parent and you will have given your children the greatest of all blessings.”

“Magnus glared at him out of gold-green eyes. “If I wanted to lie on a couch and
complain to someone about my parents, I’d hire a psychiatrist.”
“Ah,” said Jace. “But my services are free.”
“I heard that about you.”

“When anybody, no matter how old they are, loses a parent, I think it hurts the same as if you were only five years old, you know? I think all of us are always five years old in the presence and absence of our parents.”

“She took out a shiny folded pamphlet, the kind they kept stacked in clear plastic stands in hospital waiting rooms. "How to Come Out to Your Parents," she read out loud. "LUKE. Don't be ridiculous. Simon's not gay, he's a vampire.”

“It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.”

“That's the thing about being the product of happily marries parents, You grow up thinking the fairy tale is real, and more than that, you think you're entitled to live it. So far, though, it wasn't working out as planned.”

“I can pick a lock. How do you think I got into my parents' liquor cabinet in middle school?”

“You’re seventeen. You’re supposed to be dealing with school and hormones and dim-witted parents. You’re supposed to be finding out who you are as a person.”
“But I already know who I am,” Valkyrie said. “I’m a world-breaker.”

“My parents meant well, but the road to Hell is paved with publicity stunts.”

“How can such scary looking parents create something so cute?”

“It's a strange thing to discover and to believe that you are loved when you know that there is nothing in you for anybody but a parent or a God to love.”

“Education spending will be most effective if it relies on parental choice & private initiative -- the building blocks of success throughout our society.”

“After our mom died, her parents (our grandparents) had this big court battle with dad. After six lawyers, two fistfights, and a near fatal attack with a spatula (don't ask), they won the right to keep Sadie with them in England.”

“I have that hypocrisy of a parent in that I'm like,'Come on, you've got to toughen up at the same time let me take care of that for you.”

“There's no winning arguments with your parents”

“Isabelle and Sebastian? Hardly. Sebastian’s a nice guy – Isabelle only likes dating thoroughly inappropriate boys our parents will hate. Mundanes, Downworlders, petty crooks…”
“Thanks,” Simon said. “I’m glad to be classed with the criminal element.”

“I have heard people say that they felt closer to their parents after they have died. Maybe if I treat people as if they were dead, I could get along with them better”

“She wants you to be a god," I told him.
"I know." His face twisted with embarrassment, and in spite of itself my heart lightened. It was such a boyish response. And so human. Parents, everywhere.”

“Parents were invented to make children happy by giving them something to ignore.”

“Sun is bad for you. Everything our parents said was good is bad. Sun, milk, red meat… college”

“Some parents let their young kids win at games, but mine never did.

I don't think it was because they were particularly competitive, they just wanted to teach me a valuable lesson.

Life is mostly just learning how to lose.”

“It was always the view of my parents… that hot weather encouraged loose morals among young people.”

“All the times I have suddenly realized that my parents are dead, even now, it still surprises me, to exist in the world while that which made me has ceased to exist.”

“… I do not tell you often enough, dear Mother, how very grateful I am that I am yours. It is a rare parent
who would offer a child such latitude and understanding. It is an even rarer one who calls a daughter
friend. I do love you, dear Mama.”

“Parents aren’t the people you come from. They’re the people you want to be, when you grow up.”

“When I was kidnapped, my parents snapped into action. They rented out my room.”

“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.”

“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.”

“It’s tempting to wish for the perfect boss, the perfect parent, or the perfect outfit. But maybe the best any of us can do is not to quit, play the hand we’ve been dealt, and accessorize what we’ve got.”

“… one of the worst things about being a parent, for me, is the self-discovery, the being face to face with one's secret insanity and brokenness and rage.”

“Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.”

“Parents are the barometers of emotions for children and it has a domino effect.”

“Now, Max, I think we both know your parents aren't missionaries."
I opened my eyes wide. "No? Well, for God's sake, don't tell them. They'd be crushed. Thinking they're doing the
Lord's work and all.”

“Tom has a theory that homosexuals and single women in their thirties have natural bonding: both being accustomed to disappointing their parents and being treated as freaks by society.”

“Someone asked us later, "Didn't you wonder why no one came across you sooner?"
Did I wonder?
When you see your parents zipped up in black body bags on the Jellicoe Road like they're some kind of garbage, don't you know?
Wonder dies.”

“Spending time with you just feels… right, somehow. Easy, like the way it's supposed to be. Like it is with my parents. They're just comfortable together, and I remember growing up thinking that one day I wanted to have that, too.”

“Percy," my father said, "what exactly do you mean?" "Kronos couldn't have risen if it hadn't been for a lot of demigods who felt abandoned by their parents," I said. "They felt angry, resentful, and unloved, and they had a good reason.”

“Tradionally, parents made decisions for a child, because presumably they are looking out for his or her best interests. But if they are blinded, instead, by the best interests of another one of their children, the system breaks down.”

“Artistic talent is far more common than the talent toartistic talent. Any parent with a hard hand can crush it, but to nurture it is much more difficult.”

“Let children read whatever they want and then talk about it with them. If parents and kids can talk together, we won't have as much censorship because we won't have as much fear.”

“Sunday school: A prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.”

“The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you.”

“It didn't take a trauma to make you wear a mask. It didn't take your parents getting shot… or cosmic rays or a power ring… Just the perfect combination of loneliness and despair.”

“Just as our parents quieted us when we were noisy by putting us in front of the television set, maybe we're now learning to quiet our own adult noise with Prozac.”