Quotes about parenting

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“I always wanted to be a juvenile delinquent but my parents wouldn't let me.”

“Oh, what a tangled web do parents weave
When they think that their children are naive.”

“People want to believe they know other people. Parents want to believe they know their kids. Wives want to believe they know their husbands.”

“We tend to think human knowledge as progressive; because we know more and more, our parents and grandparents are back numbers. But a contrary theory is possible - that we simply recognize different things at different times and in different ways.”

“I am a thornbush, bristling from the overattention of my parents, and he is a man of a million little fatherly stab wounds, and my thorns fit perfectly into them.”

“Unlike the male codfish which, suddenly finding itself the parent of three million five hundred thousand little codfish, cheerfully resolves to love them all, the British aristocracy is apt to look with a somewhat jaundiced eye on its younger sons.”

“Isabelle snorted, "All the boysgay. In this truck, anyway. Well, not you, Simon."
"You noticed," said Simon.
"I think of myself as a freewheeling bisexual," added Magnus.
"Please never say those words in front of my parents," said Alec.”

“When you grow up and have children of your own, do please remember something important: A stodgy parent is not fun at all! What a child wants - and DESERVES - is a parent who is SPARKY!”

“I've learned that the worst thing a parent can do is ignore their children”

“If I gave my mother a knitted scarf she'd be worried I was wasting my time doing stupid stuff like knitting instead of school work. Presenting a homemade knitted object to my parents was actually like handing them a detailed backlog of my idleness.”

“Your being born makes your parents God. You owe them your life, and they can control you. Then puberty makes you Satan, just because you want something better.”

“I could tell that my parents hated me. My bath toys were a toaster and a radio.”

“We are not our parents, Gabriel. We do not have to carry the burden of their choices or their sins.”

“Shapeshifter parenting motto—if your kid slits somebody's throat, always have a backup plan to make the body disappear.”

“If you want to have a more pleasant, cooperative teenager, be a more understanding, emphatic, consistent, loving parent.”

“Which is why we have spouses and children and parents and colleagues and friends, because someone has to know us better than we know ourselves. We need them to tell us. We need them to say, "I know you, Al. You are not the kind of man who.”

“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.”

“Of course they didn't give us this much, Sage. But I had to make sure I nailed my first assignment. 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.”

“I hoped I wasn't actually dead. That would make finding our parents and saving the world really hard.”

“… I'd been raised by my parents to believe barfing your feelings on other people was the height of impoliteness…”

“There are two facts that all children need to disprove sooner or later; mother and father. If you go on believing in the fiction of your own parents, it is difficult to construct any narrative of your own.”

“Parents, teachers, government - they all teach you how to live the dreary, deadening life of a slave, but nobody teaches you how to live normally.”

“As Oscar Wilde once said, "To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose both looks like carelessness.”

“God is even in a single parent household.”

“There was something I wanted, something I envisioned, loving parents, a happy home with everyone smiling at me. A home that no one would ever want to leave, a warm place, a warm person. It exists, I know it does”

“down with hell and heaven and all the religious fuss
infinity pleased our parents
one inch looks good to us”

“Dr. Martinez: "I take it you don't want me to call your parent?"
Max: "Uh, no." Hello, lab? May I speak to the test tube please?”

“I’ve never heard of a man being so eager to confess to the parent of a girl he’s just ruined”

“It was sad, the imbalance of it all. Why do kids assume so much from one parent and hold the other to a lower, looser standard?”

“But she wasn’t around, and that’s the thing when your parents die, you feel like instead of going in to every fight with backup, you are going into every fight alone.”

“This letter is written on the skin of one of the water sprites who drowned your parents.'
'Ick!' I cried, and dropped the letter on the kitchen table.”

“Parents. Honestly. Sometimes they really do think the world revolves around them.”

“anybody can be a princess. all you have todo is have the right parents. it's no harder than being born Paris Hilton, for God's sake.

at least you remember to put on underwear in the morning, i'm assuming”

“I was very strict on that point. No devouring classmates." Jeremy rolled his eyes. "Other parents warn their kids not to talk to strangers. I had to warn mine not to eat them.”

“It's especially hard to admit that you made a mistake to your parents, because, of course, you know so much more than they do.”

“Our parents were a test tube and a turkey baster.”

“Your birth was no mistake or mishap, and your life is no fluke of nature. Your parents may not have planned you, but God did. He was not at all surprised by your birth. In fact, he expected it.”

“All I can think of is the emaciated bodies of children on our kitchen table as my mother prescribes what the parent's can't give. More food.”

“The images I had were of people being driven mad by living in the city. Images of parents who were so hungry and unfulfilled that they ate their own children.”

“The job of every generation is to discover the flaws of the one that came before it. That's part of growing up, figuring out all the ways your parents and their friends are broken.”

“A parent is inexcusable who does not personally teach her child to think.”

“Write as if your parents are dead.”

“I'm not prepared for Rue's family. Her parents, whose faces are still fresh with sorrow. Her fiver younger siblings, who resemble her so closely. The slight builds, the luminous brown eyes. They form a flock of small dark birds.”

“When I say to a parent, "read to a child", I don't want it to sound like medicine. I want it to sound like chocolate.”

“First your parents, they give you your life, but then they try to give you their life.”

“He scarcely saw his parents. When Christopher was small, he was terrified that he would meet Papa out walking in the Park one day and not recognize him.”

“From biscuit to brides, if there is anything their children really want, parents have a problem.”

“Selective ignorance, a cornerstone of child rearing. You don't put kids under surveillance: it might frighten you. Parents should sit tall in the saddle and look upon their troops with a noble and benevolent and extremely nearsighted gaze.”

“I believe that one defines oneself by reinvention. To not be like your parents. To not be like your friends. To be yourself. To cut yourself out of stone.”

“So you interrupted my date to make fun of me for still living with my parents. Couldn't you have done that on a night I didn't have a date? That's most nights, in case you're curious.”

“We are the people our parents warned us about.”

“Everyone else we knew growing up is the same: image of their parents, no matter how loud they told themselves they'd be different”

“I'd been upstaged, demoted from protagonist in my own drama to comic relief in my parents' tragedy”

“In an ideal world, we would have been orphans. We felt like orphans and we felt deserving of the pity that orphans get, but embarrassingly enough, we had parents.”

“The thing about lying to your parents is, you have to do it to protect them.
It’s for their own good.”

“Siblings: children of the same parents, each of whom is perfectly normal until they get together.”

“When you lose your parents, the sadness doesn't go away. It just changes. It hits you sideways sometimes instead of head-on. Like now.”

“parenting isn't a noun but a verb--an ongoing process instead of an accomplishment. And that no matter how many years you put into the job, the learning curve is, well, fairly flat.”

“Parents are always more knowledgeable than their children, and children are always smarter than their parents.”

“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.”

“Ignorance is the parent of fear.”

“Parents always make their worst mistakes with their oldest children. That's when parents know the least and care the most, so they're more likely to be wrong and also more likely to insist that they're right.”

“My parents are going to kill me!"
"That seems rather harsh…”

“Your parents could always hurt you, no matter how old you were.”

“An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do.”

“Little League baseball is a very good thing because it keeps the parents off the streets.”

“I just wish that God or my parents or Sam or my sister or someone would just tell me what's wrong with me. Just tell me how to be different in a way that makes sense. To make this all go away.”

“From your parents you learn love and laughter and how to put one foot before the other. But when books are opened you discover that you have wings.”

“How is it possible that our parents lied to us?"

"Lets see: Santa, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter bunny, um, God. You're the prettiest kid in school. This wont hurt a bit. Your face will freeze like that…"

"Everythings going to be alright.”

“An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents.”

“It's not only children who grow. Parents do too. As much as we watch to see what our children do with their lives, they are watching us to see what we do with ours. I can't tell my children to reach for the sun. All I can do is reach for it, myself.”

“Sadie," he said forlornly, "when you become a parent, you may understand this. One of my hardest jobs as a father, one of my greatest duties, was to realize that my own dreams, my own goals and wishes, are secondary to my children's.”

“I thought there were moments to complain about your parents and moments to be grateful, and it was a shame to mix those moments up.”

“we are the women our parents warned us against, and we are proud”

“I would have made a terrible parent. The first time my child didn't do what I wanted, I'd kill him.”

“To grow up is to stop putting blame on parents”

“It is paradoxical that many educators and parents still differentiate between a time for learning and a time for play without seeing the vital connection between them.”

“The truth is that all examples of child protection and parental care, and all associated bodily organs … are examples of the working in nature of the kin-selection principle.”

“We are all, I suppose, beholden to our parents - the question is, how much?”

“If you look deeply into the palm of your hand, you will see your parents and all generations of your ancestors. All of them are alive in this moment. Each is present in your body. You are the continuation of each of these people.”

“But it was my parents I longed for mostly. I wanted to be a little girl again and cuddle into them, wriggling in between them like I'd done in their bed when I was three or four, snug and warm in the safest place in the world.

Instead I had Hell.”

“He looked like the sort of boy who'd come over to your house to pick you up for a date and be polite to your parents and nice to your pets. Jace, on the other hand, looked like the sort of boy who'd come over to your house and burn it down for kicks.”

“In the midst of friends, home, and kind parents, she was alone.”

“I seriously think I could have sat in the middle of the kitchen floor rubbing two sticks together over a pile of dynamite blocks and gasoline cans, and my parents would be oblivious, as long as I was keeping myself occupied.”

“In the English language there are orphans and widows, but there is no word for the parents who lose a child.”

“I was born to poor because of honest parents.”

“I’m not smarter than you, I’m more knowledgeable than you, and that’s only because I’m older than you. Parents are always more knowledgeable than their children, and children are always smarter than their parents.”

“And if your parents have you for a reason, then that reason better exist. Because once it's gone, so are you.”

“I looked at Lucas with the pang that a parent feels when he knows his child will be hurt and that it's no one's fault and that to try to preempt the rites of passage is an act of contempt for the child's courage.”

“Nothing is ever quite right, is it, after a parent dies? No matter how well things go, something always feels slightly off…”

“You can't cling to the side your whole life, that one lesson every parent needs to teach a child is "If you don't want to sink, you better figure out how to swim”

“Tape record your parents' laughter”

“Alec's trying to get Magnus to take him seriously, but he's never told our parents about Magnus, or even that he likes, you know -" "Warlocks?" Simon said.”

“You, what are you? The brat of lucky parents who were related to a childless king. There is no such thing as royal blood. I believe we are what we make ourselves, and as such, you, Crown Princess, are nothing.”

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

“I’ve met plenty of embarrassing parents, but Kronos, the evil Titan Lord who wanted to destroy Western Civilization? Not the kind of dad you invited to
school for Career Day.”

“Whenever someone refers to me as someone "who happens to be black," I wonder if they realize that both my parents are black. If I had turned out to be Scandinavian or Chinese, people would have wondered what was going on.”

“Parents were the only ones obligated to love you; from the rest of the world you had to earn it.”

“Having the freedom to read and the freedom to choose is one of the best gifts my parents ever gave me.”